BREAKING: U.S. Government Releases Revised Index of Withheld Information on Rapist Irish Swim Coach George Gibney — Now 99 New Pages of Redacted Records
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April 14, 2016
by Irvin Muchnick
George Gibney, the Irish Olympic swimming coach who fled from charges that he abused dozens of his underage female and male athletes across a period of decades, appears to have arrived in the United States thanks to a 1992 visa application to which he attached a letter offering him an American coaching job.
The mysterious letter, which the government labeled “Offer of employment” in a supplemental explanatory index, is part of a 142-page filing yesterday by the Department of Homeland Security in federal court in San Francisco in response to an order by Senior Judge Charles Breyer. The new round of Gibney papers is the upshot of the government’s failed attempt in February to have my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit dismissed. Our previous post today reports broadly on this new development.
We have uploaded a facsimile of the redacted letter to http://muchnick.net/gibneyjoboffer.pdf.
The rectangles in the letter image represent redacted material; this includes the name and organization of the sender, and almost all of the letter’s content. What is left is the salutation “Dear George,” followed below by “… would be very interested in your services as coach to there [sic] team.”
It is not known if the letter is from the American team itself, or from an American or Irishman who was trying to broker the deal. However, we do know that Gibney coached in the mid- and late 1990s for the North Jeffco Swim Club in suburban Denver — the first stop on a multi-state odyssey that now has him, approaching age 70, in Altamonte Springs, Florida, just north of Orlando.
From the placement of this document in the government’s federal court production, the letter offering employment clearly was part of Gibney’s 1992 American visa application. The court records block out which category of visa Gibney sought. Irish swimmer, coach, and journalist Chalkie White — an early Gibney abuse victim and later a leading whistleblower — last year told Justine McCarthy of London’s Sunday Times that Gibney had told him about a Donnelly Visa, a special program at the time to facilitate Irish emigration to America.
More from here shortly on findings of the new Gibney Papers, as well as new procedural developments in the FOIA case.