Times of London, Irish Edition, Is Also Missing in Action on What Happened to the Anticipated George Gibney Extradition
November 5, 2024The 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.
PREVIOUSLY:
“Irish Celebrity Designer: I Distinctly Remember George Gibney Coming into the Girls’ Changing Rooms at Newpark School,” November 3, https://concussioninc.net/?p=15916
“Times of London, Irish Edition, Is Also Missing in Action on What Happened to the Anticipated George Gibney Extradition,” November 5, https://concussioninc.net/?p=15928
by Irvin Muchnick
On April 18, 2022, I wrote a piece for this site headlined “Where Is ‘Where Is George Gibney?’,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=14994. An adapted version was published at the now defunct Irish alternative news site Broadsheet under the title “No there there,” https://www.broadsheet.ie/2022/04/19/irvin-muchnick-no-there-there/.
In that article, I argued that, while the popular ten-part 2020 BBC-Second Captains podcast series of that title had value in particular duly praised ways, it was in large part a gussied-up retread – a path to nowhere.
Specifically, there was no journalistic challenge to the authorities that had enabled Gibney to get away with it: the leadership of organized swimming in both Ireland and the U.S., or the law enforcement agencies of the two countries. Gibney the monster seemed to float in an ozone of outrage; his enablers were not identified, much less held to account.
My piece was published ahead of an event at the National Concert Hall in Dublin entitled “The Making of Where Is George Gibney?” I commented with asperity: “Have series creator Mark Horgan and crew told the story most centrally in the public interest – one of heinous official cronyism and corruption? Fully and in the round? Or have they just pulled off something flabbier and oh so postmodern – infotainment as a seemingly never-ending promotional feedback loop?”
Which brings us to an eleventh episode of the series, which dropped a year ago this month under the title “Case Update.” This newest bonus-bonus-bonus episode was triggered, understandably, by the reports at that time that Ireland’s Garda was recommending a fresh prosecution of Gibney, one that would need to be facilitated by extradition from the U.S. It can be heard here.
“As I record this podcast,” Horgan said on November 3, 2023, “a decision is expected very soon by the director of public prosecutions in Ireland on whether George Gibney should face trial.”
However, the meat of the new 56-minute audio was simply more self-congratulation: excerpts of the ’22 National Concert Hall event, a fundraiser for the Irish anti-abuse group One in Four.
In the ensuing 53 weeks, there appears to have been no progress on a decision that, Horgan told his BBC Sounds listeners, was “expected very soon.” Also, no evidence that anyone in the Irish media has pressed the DPP on the status of this again-lagging matter — latest in an historical cycle of hot-air balloons.
The Irish Independent, after managing to find space recently for boilerplate Gibney gossip, didn’t respond to my query along these lines. Nor did the Times of London, Irish edition, after last year enlisting me to help them track down Gibney at his lair in Altamonte Springs, Florida.
It’s only fair to pose this question to Mark Horgan, Second Captains, and the BBC, as well. In an email last week, I asked Horgan what efforts he’d made to update his cobwebbed “Case Update.” He hasn’t replied.
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Back in 2018, Irish Times sports columnist Johnny Watterson – the reporter who a quarter-century earlier, for the old Irish Tribune, had broken the story of Gibney’s decades-long sexual predations of youth athletes under his supervision – did a feature article headlined “No justice, no peace for the victims of George Gibney.”
Therein, victim Tric Kearney told Watterson, “I’ve resigned myself to the fact the ship has sailed. I will never receive justice in this country. I would have no faith in the system we have, to try Gibney, or find him guilty of any crime, if he was deported.”
Watterson additionally wrote that at the end of 2017, my Freedom of Information Act case Muchnick v. United States Department of Homeland Security “exhausted”efforts to get Gibney.
“[Muchnick] asked who had helped [Gibney] with employment, who had written letters of comfort, and why, given his past, he had been allowed to remain a long-time resident alien in the country.
Muchnick also sought information from Gibney’s original US visa application, his subsequent alien residency, and details of the citizenship application.
What he uncovered was that Gibney failed to secure US citizenship in 2010 after his application seemingly concealed how he had been previously charged in 1993 in Ireland with 27 counts of indecency and carnal knowledge of children.
It struck a note with [a federal judge in California,] Charles Breyer, who heard the case and questioned the US government’s rationale for having imposed no consequences on Gibney. However, Breyer was passing judgment on what documents should be released to Muchnick – not how Homeland Security should act.”
Calling my FOIA litigation an “exhaustion” of the campaign to bring Gibney to justice, when it was actually a successful journalistic tactic in service of same, was as inaccurate as it was defeatist. When so informed, Watterson emailed back, “My apologies for characterising your great work incorrectly.”
But this mistake would get swallowed and perpetuated in the Where Is George Gibney? hype two years later. In Britain’s Guardian, Barry Glendenning wrote, “An American reporter by the name of Irv Muchnick … tried doggedly but unsuccessfully to have [Gibney] deported from the United States.” When I pointed out to Glendenning that this was wrong, he, unlike Watterson, blew me off.
The Horgan hype was rich, since the podcast wound up cutting corners on almost every editorial choice of substance. Its only consistent purpose was offering a BBC platform to the voices of victims – some already known ones, others newly outspoken ones. (One of the latter was Tric Kearney.) As such, Where Is George Gibney? is good oral history.
The project whiffed on informing listeners that Colorado police, in 2000, did nothing about tracking down Gibney’s direction, via a local Catholic parish, of a children’s medical mission in Peru. Indeed, the Wheat Ridge Police Department detective who had investigated Gibney, after no-showing for a promised interview by me, granted one to Horgan – who, in turn, dutifully didn’t use a second of it or even mention that rather important thread of the George Gibney saga.
Should a bonus-bonus-bonus-bonus Episode 12 of Where Is George Gibney? ever be produced, perhaps it could reflect on all the ways their own project either did or didn’t try “doggedly but unsuccessfully to have Gibney deported.”
In any case — and in the continuing quest to locate a “there there” — what we mostly know at this point is that the podcast added mountains of redundancy to the seemingly bottomless Irish legacy of cover-ups of abuse in high places.
