At Anniversary of Latest George Gibney Extradition Speculation, Ireland’s Garda Refuses to Update Status of Child Sexual Assault Complaint

The full George Gibney story is told in two chapters of the new book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.

by Irvin Muchnick

Approaching the one-year mark since leaks from inside An Garda Síochána, the Irish national police, suggested that an initiative to seek George Gibney’s extradition from the United States for a second prosecution was imminent, Garda has failed to answer the basic question of whether a complaint of a 1982 sex crime by Gibney against an 11-year-old girl at the swimming pool of the then Burlington Hotel in Dublin – first reported by this site in 2017 – remains open or has had a resolution.

“This is the busiest press office in Ireland,” executive officer Evan O’Leary emailed me last Thursday, by way of explaining why Garda has yet to respond in substance to my query on this matter.

Earlier and puzzlingly, O’Leary had said his office could not accept the Garda National Protective Services reference number, DVG.88606-15, provided to me four years ago by Jonathan Hayes, the detective sergeant who processed the complaint about the 1982 incident. It was filed on or around June 3, 2020, by the woman I identify only with the pseudonym “Julia.”

As part of the processing of my inquiry, O’Leary did, however, ask me to provide the name of the station where the complaint was made. Accordingly, I went back to Hayes, who now holds the Garda title of inspector. Hayes emailed back, “It was Garda National Protective Services Bureau, Organised & Serious Crime.” That sounds to me like the name of a department, not a station house, but I dutifully passed the information along to the press office.

A year ago this month, Irish news media erupted with reports that Garda – or maybe it was particular officers within, known as guards or gardaí – had recommended to the director of public prosecutions a new prosecution of Gibney, the former Irish Olympic swimming coach who has lived in the U.S. with a green card since shortly after a controversial 1994 Irish Supreme Court decision. That ruling, citing the long passage of time since the earliest allegations against Gibney, led to a lower court’s tossing of the original 27-count case against him.

In addition to reporting the Garda prosecution recommendation, last year’s Irish coverage noted that gardaí were confident an extradition request by the Irish government to the U.S. government would be successful.

I have no information on whether a new Gibney prosecution might include the “Julia” matter. Perhaps more intuitively, a prosecution 2.0 would be based mostly or entirely on newly risen allegations triggered by the 2020 podcast series Where Is George Gibney?, produced by the BBC in association with the Irish media company Second Captains.

At the time of last year’s reports, I went back to Inspector Hayes, who referred me to David B. Connally of the Sexual Crime Management Unit. Connally said flatly, “I cannot comment on any criminal investigations.”

This appeared to align with the common practice of American police departments, in my experience, in declining comment on pending investigations. By the same token, I’ve found that police often do acknowledge when investigations were closed.

Is Garda here deploying a different playbook? If so, why does that matter?

The main reason it matters involves the potential efficacy of basic journalistic persistence in enforcing accountability. After decades of dormancy, neither Irish nor American institutions can be expected to do anything about George Gibney – whom I call the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history – absent evidence that anyone out there cares. Apathy simply sends important legacy crimes down the memory hole, letting off the hook both the criminals and those tasked with bringing them to justice.

Unfortunately, the Irish speculation boomlet of late 2023 has fit the pattern of multiple previous spasms of interest: “one and done” news cycles that don’t hold public officials’ feet to the fire.

I’ve reported the same phenomenon with respect to swim world scandals in the American media, which are bolstered by the First Amendment, and thus presumed to be more aggressive and effective. Major newspapers in this country never followed through, for instance, on 2019 reports of a federal grand jury investigation of USA Swimming for insurance fraud and coach abuse cover-ups. And except for my own 2021 article in the Colorado Springs Gazette, no one has mentioned at all that Gibney was – for all we know, still is – under investigation by the Justice Department’s human trafficking finance specialist at its Money Laundering & Asset Recovery Section.

Of course, we’ll update this post with whatever further information or comment Ireland’s Garda might proceed to provide.

In any event, know this: Failure to comment on whether a criminal investigation is open or closed serves the interests of neither the public nor, in many cases, even the accused; it merely enables authorities to tip-toe away. In a New York Times essay last year, former prominent prosecutor Preet Bharara called this “the legal double standard that’s rarely discussed.”

Bharara wrote:

“It is generally only the famous and the powerful who get the courtesy of closure, who get the benefit of formal notice that the case against them is over. In too many cases and for no good reason, people never know when they are out of jeopardy.

Outside of the most high-profile cases, a prosecutor’s decision to close an investigation remains a secret — from the public, the victim, and even the target of the inquiry…. Many involved in perpetuating this purgatory — including the prosecutors themselves, as I know from my time as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York — understand it serves no real purpose. Yet routine nondisclosure continues unquestioned.”