Reviewing the Fort Lauderdale Police Special Victims Unit File on Alex Pussieldi – Evidence Is Devastating, and More Reticent Local Witnesses Are Being Smoked Out

by Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce

Everyone has a right to fair prosecution and a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard at criminal trial. But no one has a constitutional right to remain indefinitely in intimate contact with non-adults as a swim coach.

That is the stark lesson of the generation-long scandal of USA Swimming sexual abuse and cover-up. Nowhere is there more chilling evidence of the failures of club swim culture and the administrators of athlete safety than in the files of the Fort Lauderdale city government and national swimming overseers, in their joint (if willfully uncoordinated) lookaway pass for coach Alex Pussieldi – a Peeping Tom and probably much worse.

As noted in the previous post, we are waiting for the Fort Lauderdale police to provide us the verbatim statements given to Special Victims Unit investigators by Pussieldi and by his former teen swimmer-ward, who accused the coach-landlord-legal guardian of doing perverse things.

While we wait, let’s review the five pages of third-person detective composition so far produced (http://muchnick.net/lauderdalespecialvictims.pdf).

The first two pages are an incident report form generated by an Officer Rhodes, “routed to” the Special Victims Unit and “assigned to” Sergeant Richard Herbert. Later, as our other municipal government public records findings show, Herbert would be in the email chain with the city manager and elected officials explaining why the whole Pussieldi thing was moot and, as he and Detective Jeff Jennings put it, “unfounded.” That was a thoroughly skewed characterization of the upshot of the investigation. The truth was that the core victim-complainant, disgusted and scared by the lack of responsiveness of both law enforcement and program administrators, walked away before he got sucked into the further re-vicitimizing process of attempting to press charges.

In a passage on the form, which we didn’t quote in previous posts, an anonymous witness said:

“[REDACTED] told [REDACTED] that during the time he lived at Pussieldi’s house with Pussieldi and several other international swimmers ages 15 to 18 … [REDACTED] told [REDACTED] Pussieldi was having sex with several of the underage male swimmers & videotaping the sex. Pussieldi also had child pornography on his computer. [REDACTED] said [REDACTED] found a hidden camera in the A/C vent in the bathroom at Pussieldi’s house….”

In a footnote, the report adds, “Additional info – [REDACTED] adv the head coach Jack Nelson was made aware in the past of Pussieldi.” 

The next three pages contain the longer typed narrative of interviews with the alleged victim, Pussieldi, and others, which we quoted extensively in our post two days ago, at https://concussioninc.net/?p=8960.

One of those interviews was with a “girlfriend’s parent” whose name is given inaccurately in the police report. We are holding off for now on the actual name of this person (who like his daughter still lives and works in the area), as we redouble efforts to get them to talk with us.

One of the most important passages is the Mexican’s swimmer’s statement that this father – father, that is, of the girlfriend of one of the Mexican’s teammates and foreign housemates – “confronted Pussieldi, and Pussieldi admitted everything to them.” Independent sources in Florida confirm this account.

Complete links to our Alex Pussieldi investigation are at https://concussioninc.net/?p=8652.

Here are headline links to articles on the specific topic of Pussieldi and the Fort Lauderdale police: