“Drowning in abuse” — Full Text of Recent Sunday Perspective Feature in the Colorado Springs Gazette
August 25, 2024Table of Contents of ‘UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe’
August 29, 2024by Irvin Muchnick
In my recent piece for the Colorado Springs Gazette, I wrote: “In swimming’s corporate culture, its many abuse lawsuits are treated as nothing more urgent than an insurance headache and a cost of business — not a moral clarion call to clean up its act.”
This is brought to mind again by a new report at SwimSwam, the swimming news site, that USA Swimming is on the verge of suing the U.S. Center for SafeSport over which entity has responsibility for damages by a litigant in a SafeSport matter. See https://swimswam.com/usa-swimming-taking-u-s-center-for-safesport-to-court-over-damages-dispute/.
The details and merits of the underlying case are of secondary importance for purposes of our report here. All episodes of alleged abuse, of course, are very important for the parties involved. But I’d like to focus on the bottomless legal maneuverings over such matters as jurisdiction and locus of liability – the kinds of things that keep swimming’s and all youth sports programs’ lawyers in the pink.
As my new book UNDERWATER recounts in detail, the disgraced former U.S. Olympic Committee CEO, Scott Blackmun – who would resign in the wake of the massive USA Gymnastics abuse scandal – thought swimming’s SafeSport program was the perfect model for the entire Olympic movement, and spearheaded the corresponding effort to set up the sports-wide SafeSport agency in 2017-18. But the new development in the SwimSwam story highlights what is always the real goal here, which is to minimize financial exposure and perpetuate the game of musical chairs for those seeking redress for sexual abuse.
The same dynamic was behind the establishment of the various Olympic sports’ Catholic Church-style creation of entire new entities to mitigate insurance costs. USA Swimming’s, until 2014, was called the United States Sports Insurance Company, which despite the name got incorporated offshore, in the Caribbean island nation of Barbados. For the required annual meetings under local law, swimming executives and board members flocked to the white sands of Bridgetown for all-expenses-paid beach party.
These reinsurance maneuvers and other gimmicks – such as a “wasting provision” that took USA Swimming’s defense costs off the top of recovery settlements for abuse victims – were the focus of a federal grand jury investigation directed by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. News of the federal probe got a little bit of attention in a few major newspapers five years ago, until it didn’t.
The official publication for UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe is September 10. Links for ordering from many online outlets are here.
Irvin Muchnick will be appearing at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Aspen Grove-Littleton on Friday, September 13, and at Barnes & Noble in Briargate-Colorado Springs on Sunday, September 15.
