Advance Praise for ‘Underwater’ from Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Nobody rakes the muck with a more relentless sense of purpose’
June 10, 2024Washington Post’s Ethical Woes a Reminder of How That Great Newspaper — and Others — Have Pandered to Team Swimming and Fallen Short on Critical Coach Abuse Coverage
June 23, 2024by Irvin Muchnick
Joe Bernal was a long-time head swimming coach at Harvard University, among other places. His list of accomplished swimmers includes Hall of Fame backstroker (and intermittent anti-abuse activist) David Berkoff.
Bernal was also one of the sport’s worst predators of underage athletes – a story told in my 2022 article for Salon shortly after his death. See https://www.salon.com/2022/10/15/how-a-legendary-harvard-swim-coach-became-an-international-fugitive/.
Now a new lawsuit in federal court in Boston lays on more detail. The Indianapolis Star has the full story under the headline “Coach’s sexual abuse was ‘open secret’ at USA Swimming.” Those of you blocked by the Star’s paywall can find the piece reprinted at Yahoo Sports.
As the Star reports, the suit by former swimmer Amanda Le of Bernal’s Gator Swim Club in Waltham, Massachusetts, tells of the coach’s sex with her from 2008 to 2010 in various hotel rooms across the country, when she was 15 to 17 years old. Later, the complaint says, Bernal – called a “known child rapist” enabled by USA Swimming’s inaction – impregnated her and paid for her abortion. Another member of the team, according to the Star story, “claims Bernal began molesting her in 1976, when she was 12 or 13.”
The Star does not report some aspects of the Bernal narrative revealed in Salon two years ago. These include that he had the name Hugo Bernard Calderon when he was born in Colombia, and got a passport under that name when, in late life, he fled to Colombia and the Cayman Islands for nearly a year following his lifetime ban by USA Swimming.
Bernal a.k.a. Calderon figures prominently in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.
Pre-orders of UNDERCOVER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe are available at these links. Official publication date is September 10, 2024, but copies are likely to start getting shipped from these outlets shortly after the late-July start of the Paris Olympics.
