BREAKING: GEORGE GIBNEY ARRESTED IN FLORIDA. Details shortly.
July 1, 2025More on the George Gibney Arrest
July 4, 2025by Irvin Muchnick
The most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history is at large no more.
George Gibney, head coach of the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swimming teams, and a resident alien of the United States for 30 years after his prosecution on dozens of sexual abuse charges got upended by a technical decision of the Irish Supreme Court, was arrested in Florida on Tuesday. Gibney faces an extradition request by the Irish government for his return for a trial on new charges.
The news broke on Irish media. Coverage by the Irish Times is at https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/07/01/george-gibney-arrested-in-us-on-foot-of-extradition-request/. Not clear at this point is whether Gibney’s arrest had any of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) trappings of the second Trump administration, or was a relatively drama-free event coordinated by Department of Justice agents. Gibney lives in Altamonte Springs, Florida, outside Orlando.
The swimming news site SwimSwam, at https://swimswam.com/george-gibney-former-irish-olympic-swimming-coach-arrested-on-sexual-abuse-charges/, notes my successful 2016-17 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, which daylighted key records from Gibney’s immigration file. SwimSwam also properly points out that the culminating catalyst of today’s news was the attention generated by a 2020 BBC podcast series produced and narrated by Mark Horgan of the Irish media company Second Captains.
The American press has given the Gibney story little to no coverage. In 2016, during the FOIA case, Tamara Holder, then a Fox News correspondent, interviewed me about it for her segment “Sports Court.” Later that year, the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on the FOIA focused on the dissatisfaction with the government’s case of the U.S. District Court judge, Charles R. Breyer.
Before ruling “mostly” in my favor, as he put it, Breyer said from the bench, “I have to assume that if somebody has been charged with the types of offenses that Mr. Gibney has been charged with, the United States, absent other circumstances, would not grant a visa. We’re not a refuge for pedophiles.”
The case’s document output included a redacted U.S. swimming coach job offer letter, perhaps engineered by the American Swimming Coaches Association, the trade group that, the judge said in his ruling, the litigating journalist suspected of having “greased the wheels for Gibney’s relocation.”
Upon settling its appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the government also released redacted documents showing, first, that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rejected Gibney’s 2010 application for naturalized citizenship after he concealed information about his arrest and indictment in Ireland, and second, that ICE quashed consideration of whether Gibney’s material lie on the citizenship application was grounds for deportation.
At the end of 2017, the FOIA outcome led to an exchange on the floor of Ireland’s Dáil Éireann between Maureen O’Sullivan, the legislator who was leading a campaign for Gibney’s extradition and second prosecution, and Simon Coveney, the deputy prime minister and foreign minister. There was no American coverage of the controversy, however, and the story died down. In 2021, the New York Times wrote about the popularity of the BBC podcast.
Later that year, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the newspaper in the hometown of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and USA Swimming, published the only longform article about Gibney so far in a major newspaper in this country. It is viewable at https://gazette.com/news/podcasts-stir-new-sex-abuse-allegations-against-former-irish-olympic-swim-coach-in-u-s/article_cb36afe6-7875-11eb-91dd-67e902c483a7.html. A lightly edited reprint at this site is at https://concussioninc.net/?p=15371.
From the start of our investigation of Gibney in 2012, Concussion Inc. has tagged him as a criminal, not an “alleged” one. My basis for this choice of words was the finding of a 1998 Irish government report, the Murphy Commission, which despite an equivocal approach and couched language throughout, said Gibney’s accusers had been “vindicated” by the cumulative evidence against him.
The Murphy report came four years after Gibney fled Ireland following a Supreme Court ruling that held he could not get a fair trial because of the passage of time since the earliest allegations against him.
The now defunct alternative Irish news site Broadsheet – which would go on to give great support to my work – was the only substantial outlet in either Ireland or the U.S. to report that Irish Supreme Court Justice (later Chief Justice) Susan Denham participated in the pivotal Gibney ruling despite the fact that her brother, Patrick Gageby, was Gibney’s lawyer.
The Gibney story takes up two chapters (Chapter 13, “George Gibney – Most Notorious At-Large Sex Criminal in Sports History,” and Chapter 14, “Gibney Slips Away Again”) of my book published last year, UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.
