California Community College’s Farcical ‘Investigation’ of Swim Coaches Mark Schubert and Bill Jewell Is a Template for Every Whitewash Institutional Probe — Like the One Now at Utah

Scott Reid of the Orange County Register may be the only major newspaper reporter in the country with any kind of attention span when it comes to coverage of USA Swimming sex abuse. Reid wrote about now-banned coach Ad’m Dusenbury’s sexual predation at the Mission Viejo Nadadores, about the filing of philanthropist-coach Dia Rianda’s whistleblower lawsuit against former Olympic coach Mark Schubert and his Golden West Swim Club, and about Schubert and associate Bill Jewell’s hire of a private investigator to snoop on coach Sean Hutchison’s unprofessional relationship with his elite swimmer Ariana Kukors in Fullerton.

Reid also broke the recent resignation of Jewell from Schubert’s team following revelations, in the discovery of Rianda’s suit, of Jewell’s inappropriate interactions with swimmers at Golden West. Now a new document has emerged: the full report of the “outside investigator” commissioned by the club’s landlord, Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, which — surprise! surprise! — exonerated both Schubert and Jewell of misconduct charges.

You can read the report for yourself at http://muchnick.net/goldenwestinvestigation.pdf. I recommend supplementing your review of the Golden West gumshoe’s interviews of friendly character witnesses — combined with a studious blind eye to anyone who might have directly pertinent information — by also reading Reid’s new story, “Documents reveal brevity of investigation into swim coach,” http://www.ocregister.com/sports/jewell-500984-schubert-gwc.html.

The investigator did not interview the primary accuser “because of concerns it would lend credibility to her and her lawsuit against Schubert and the GWSC,” the Register reports: “Schubert, an eight-time U.S. Olympic team coach, and Jewell were interviewed for only four minutes each as part of a Norman A. Traub Associates investigation last year that on Nov 19 cleared Jewell of inappropriate behavior toward teenage female swimmers and Schubert of failing to deal with Jewell’s alleged misconduct in an appropriate manner….”

It adds up to a shocking waste of taxpayer money by a publicly funded institutional of higher education. It’s also page 2 of the corporate playbook — the template for what we’ve already seen happen at the University of Utah, with the campus Office of Equal Opportunity probe of complaints against abusive swim coach Greg Winslow, and are about to see further in a second volume scripted by outside investigators/”fixers” Michael Glazier and Alan Sullivan.

 
Irv Muchnick
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