After George Gibney FOIA Win, Justice in the Many Criminal Cases of the Rapist Irish Olympic Swim Coach Now Rests Primarily With Action by the Americans

by Irvin Muchnick

On Thursday the U.S. government released to me the additional production of George Gibney immigration records provided for in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals settlement of my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Muchnick v. Department of Homeland Security.

Last night we rushed up the first major-media hit from this new information. Appropriately, it comes from Justine McCarthy of the Sunday Times of London, formerly with the Irish Independent. I say appropriately because McCarthy wrote the definitive book on widespread sex abuse in Irish swimming, which now looks so much like widespread sex abuse in American swimming … like sex abuse in many youth sports programs, in the U.S. and around the world. In his decision in my favor in the FOIA case last year, Judge Charles Breyer even footnoted the Amazon link to Deep Deception: Ireland’s Swimming Scandals (https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Deception-Irelands-Swimming-Scandals/dp/1847172040).

McCarthy’s initial interpretation of the new Gibney documents is that they date-stamp the 1992 manipulations of the hyper-creep coach, who realized that his Irish days were numbered — and had even submitted his U.S. visa papers — before he publicly unloaded on Gary O’Toole, the country’s top male swimming hope at that year’s Barcelona Olympics.

O’Toole had already made it clear that he was about to blow the whistle on Gibney’s generation of sexual abuse of his athletes, after Chalkie White had confided to O’Toole his abuse under Gibney, beginning as an 11-year-old in 1967, and O’Toole went on to organize the stories and criminal allegations of others.

In the coming week, Concussion Inc. will roll out the uploading of new FOIA documents, and talk about them from an American perspective.

When this latest iteration of the campaign to bring justice to Gibney’s victims (plus accountability to swimming officials on two continents) began in 2015, Ireland’s Maureen O’Sullivan, speaking on the floor of the national assembly, said she thought that when new information came to light, “it would leave this country, this government very vulnerable.”

Now such information is indeed coming to light, via the FOIA case, and it actually puts under the microscope the actions of two governments.

I began this project with confidence that it would expose the lax youth athlete safety standards and the global cover-up proclivities of USA Swimming and the American Swimming Coaches Association. But thanks to Judge Breyer, the spotlight is on the U.S. immigration system, too. Why did nothing happen with Gibney after, in an apparent panic over his latest outing in Florida in 2010, he applied for citizenship and was denied — specifically for materially lying on it about his 27-count criminal indictment in his native land?

“We are not a haven for pedophiles,” Breyer said at the federal courthouse in San Francisco on October 28, 2017. He was right.

O’Sullivan already has secured the qualified support of Ireland’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Simon Coveney, who last week said — again on the floor of the Dáil — that the government there is prepared to act appropriately on the new material entering the public domain.

So the ball is in the court of American officials, who must be pressured by the politicians most closely associated with addressing the sports coach abuse problem and the general issues surrounding sexual assault and sexual harassment.

These figures owe the advocates of the quarter-century-old Gibney agony two things:

1. Support of the exploration of potential efforts to extradite Gibney.
2. Facilitating communications between American prosecutors and the Irish police. In 1991 — a year before he acquired a U.S. visa and three years before he moved here — Gibney is credibly accused of committing a heinous crime in Tampa: the rape of a 17-year-old swimmer during a training trip. The girl (whom Ireland’s 1998 Murphy Report corroborates was previously molested by Gibney in Holland) was whisked to England by an Irish swimming official for a secret abortion. The victim’s affidavit about this incident exists in the files of the Ireland’s An Garda Síochána. This affidavit must be placed in the hands of the state attorney of Hillsborough County, Florida, without delay.

Complete headline links to our series, which began January 27, 2015, under the headline “Why Is George Gibney – No. 1 At-Large Pedophile in Global Sports – Living in Florida? And Who Sponsored His Green Card?”: https://concussioninc.net/?p=10942