Full Text of George Gibney Extradition Article in the Colorado Springs Gazette on July 14

This is a lightly edited version of the full text originally filed by me, on assignment, for the article that was published on the front page of the Colorado Springs Gazette on July 14 under the headline “Ireland secures extradition of notorious youth coach George Gibney who fled to Colorado in the 1990s.”

At this site I regularly reprint, with the “director’s cut,” articles of mine published at third-party news outlets. In doing so again, I’m not asserting that the Gazette editorial process was anything other than professional. Almost all the important unique elements of my George Gibney reporting were retained. Of course, the Gazette, in 2021, was also the home of my long-form piece on Gibney, the only previous such coverage in any American newspaper.

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by Irvin Muchnick

In a story with important ties to Colorado, a notorious youth sports coach who is accused of serial sexual abuse and has lived in the United States for 30 years, was arrested July 1 by federal marshals in Florida on an extradition request from his native Ireland.

George Gibney, head coach of the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swimming teams, is a diversity lottery visa recipient and green card holder whose residency in at least three states began with an interlude in Colorado from 1995 until at least 2000.

Gibney came to Colorado seemingly intent on resuming a coaching career that was derailed in Ireland after his 1993 indictment on 27 counts of indecent carnal knowledge of underage swimmers in his charge.

His coaching days ended, Gibney worked locally for at least five years in corporate human resources positions, before moves to California and eventually Florida. Along the way, there were multiple iterations of a campaign on behalf of Irish victims of his alleged abuse, none of which came to fruition. These survivors, along with supporting politicians and activists, wanted him returned for a new trial on either old allegations of abuse or newly emerging ones.

American attorney Jonathan Little, who has represented many victims of abuse by coaches in Colorado Springs-based USA Swimming and other Olympic sports governing bodies, called Gibney’s arrest this month the most significant positive development for the cause in his nearly 20 years in the field. Little said “over the years numerous federal agents have told me that, for reasons unknown to them, they couldn’t succeed in getting Gibney deported or arrested. I came to believe he was being protected by powerful friends.”

In a 2021 Gazette article about Gibney, Little said the scope of his alleged crimes exceeded even that of the more publicized Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who was convicted of molesting scores of athletes in that sport. Nassar’s various cases resulted in half a billion dollars in civil lawsuit settlements by USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, where he was on the faculty. In addition, gold medalist Simone Biles and other celebrity gymnasts were among the plaintiffs in a $1 billion lawsuit against the FBI, which they claim botched an investigation of the doctor.

George Gibney’s path to Colorado was steeped in mystery. Documents from his immigration file, publicly released in 2016-17 as a result of this reporter’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, included a letter, with the author’s name and affiliation redacted, offering Gibney a U.S. coaching job.

His visa, awarded just prior to his arrest in Ireland, under a diversity program of that period favoring immigration from Ireland, was attained by lottery. In 1992, the year before his arrest — but at a time when accusers were already speaking out in Irish news media — the FOIA files show that the Garda, the Irish national police, supplied a “certificate of character” to support Gibney’s visa application. The document certified that he had no criminal record.

The 1994 Irish Supreme Court ruling effectively halting Gibney’s original prosecution was made by a panel of justices that included Susan Denham, later the chief justice. Denham’s brother, Patrick Gageby, was Gibney’s lawyer. This connection was reported and questioned inside Ireland only by an alternative news website, Broadsheet, which stopped publishing in 2022. In 2019, the Irish judiciary adopted new ethical guidelines calling for judges to recuse themselves in cases involving relatives.

Prior to her 2020 retirement, Irish legislator Maureen O’Sullivan spearheaded a campaign for Gibney’s extradition.

Ruling that Gibney’s privacy rights were outweighed by the public interest in the FOIA case, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer expressed skepticism about the government’s efforts: “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.”

Many anti-abuse activists believe that the swimming coaches trade group, the American Swimming Coaches Association, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, engineered the U.S. swimming job offer. ASCA’s advertised services for members include troubleshooting visas. Moreover, a top ASCA official at the time of Gibney’s first round of legal difficulties and his pursuit of a U.S. visa was Peter Banks, his former assistant coach at the swimming team out of Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, County Dublin. Banks went on to a coaching career in both Ireland and the U.S., and to U.S. citizenship and positions on the Olympic coaching staffs of both countries – one of them the top job at Swim Ireland for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

A 2020 British Broadcasting Corporation podcast series, Where Is George Gibney?, produced and narrated by Mark Horgan, is largely credited for the recent breakthrough of the Irish government’s decision to seek Gibney’s extradition. According to court filings, Gibney is wanted on 78 counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted rape, dating back to the 70s and 80s. These are all based on complaints sworn out by four Irish women who came forward following the BBC podcasts. They are also entirely new allegations, not attempts to retry elements of the 1993 indictment.

(Gibney, who is being represented by a public defender, is being held without bail. At a hearing before a federal magistrate judge on July 11, he attested to not contesting the extradition.)

Interviewed in an episode of the podcast, Banks admitted consulting with Gibney on his visa paperwork. Banks did not definitively deny having any involvement in Gibney’s U.S. job offer letter.

The long-time executive director of ASCA, John Leonard, said in 2012: “We do not have an organization that deals directly with children, nor is that part of our purpose in any way, shape or form, according to our formative documents from 1958 and thereafter.”

Leonard retired in 2020. In response to a query for this article, the current CEO of ASCA, Jennifer LaMont, said: “To the best of my knowledge, ASCA, as an organization, has no record of ASCA involvement in any of the issues you raise related to George Gibney…. Our work is guided by a clear mission: to support a safe, athlete-centered sport led by educated and principled coaching professionals. We condemn any behavior that violates the safety of athletes.”

LaMont also noted that Leonard has had no affiliation with ASCA since his retirement.

Similar questions of involvement in covering up Gibney’s malfeasance have been raised with respect to USA Swimming. The organization has acknowledged that Gibney was a member when he coached in Arvada in 1995. He is not on the organization’s list of coaches banned for sexual abuse, which became public in 2012 and now runs to more than 200 names.

In 2010, USA Swimming’s CEO Chuck Wielgus, who died in 2017, was asked about Gibney in a deposition in a civil lawsuit by a victim of another coach’s abuse.

Wielgus replied that the name “does not ring a bell,” before adding: “Actually — sounds like a — sounds like an Irish — is he an Irish coach?. . . Yeah, I think I’ve heard the name.”

In 2021, a USA Swimming spokesperson told the Gazette that, prior to 2013, “USA Swimming’s rule prohibited sexual misconduct by a member. The rule was then changed in 2013 to sexual misconduct at any time – past or present. Unfortunately, given Mr. Gibney has not been a member since 1996, he has never been subject to the updated rule.”

Other abuse lawsuit testimony and discovery have confirmed that USA Swimming maintains, in addition to the banned list, a secret “flagged” list of individuals who are not allowed membership or association. David Berkoff, a Hall of Fame swimmer who served a term as an elected USA Swimming vice president, testified to the existence of the flagged list in a 2022 civil trial against USA Swimming for its alleged culpability in the abuses of a coach in North Carolina.

While on the board of directors, Berkoff also circulated a research memorandum with information about dozens of coaches, Gibney among them, who were not on the banned list but carried the baggage of serious allegations, yet eluded USA Swimming’s banned status for jurisdictional or other reasons. Berkoff’s list included Gibney.

USA Swimming did not respond to a request for comment for this story, including the question of whether Gibney is on the flagged list.

During his period in Colorado, after losing the coaching job in Arvada, Gibney’s questionable activities in other capacities with young people drew questions, but no action by police or immigration authorities. He was on the board of the Metropolitan State College Lab School at Lookout Mountain, a program focused on at-risk youth. And he was chairman of what his résumé called the International Peru Eye Clinic Foundation, a group that made one or more medical missionary trips to Peru, servicing young patients, through his Denver area Catholic parish.

Immigration experts said Gibney likely enabled Peruvian travel by using an Irish passport. Following the first reports of this aspect of this missionary work, in 2018, an investigation was undertaken by a human trafficking finance specialist at the Department of Justice’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), according to FBI agents speaking anonymously because the probe was not publicly announced. As part of it, agents were dispatched to Peru to find out more about the activities there from nearly 20 years earlier.

DOJ is silent on the question of whether the MLARS investigation, reported in the Gazette’s 2021 coverage of Gibney, factored into the decision by the U.S. government to execute the Irish extradition warrant. Spokesperson Nicole Navas said the department would have no comment beyond its news release containing the basic facts of Gibney’s arrest. The MLARS investigator, Jane Khodarkovsky, now in private practice, did not respond to a request for comment on the resolution of her probe.

Living in Florida in 2010, during a time when he faced a new eruption of Irish publicity in his community and the threat of the extradition campaign, Gibney applied for naturalized citizenship. Documents in the FOIA case show that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) bounced the application and invited him to resubmit it after first curing the failure to answer correctly the question of whether he had ever been arrested or charged with a crime. Evin Daly, an Irish-American who runs an advocacy group called One Child International, had alerted U.S. officials to the details of Gibney’s 1990s arrest and indictment. (In 1998, an Irish government report on widespread abuse in the country’s youth swimming programs had concluded that the evidence accumulated against him by police “vindicated” his many accusers.)

USCIS, a State Department agency, ultimately rejected Gibney’s citizenship application. The FOIA documents show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a Homeland Security Department agency, then was brought in to consult on whether Gibney’s withholding of key information on his citizenship application would bring other consequences. ICE determined that Gibney was “not removable” because he had never been convicted of a crime.

Immigration experts speculate that Gibney’s attempt to attain U.S. citizenship might have been motivated by a desire to inoculate himself from the campaign to bring him before Irish criminal courts for a second time. This month’s arrest marked the campaigners’long-sought victory.

A heinous dimension of the narrative was a 1991 incident when Gibney, then still coaching in Ireland, is alleged to have raped and impregnated a 17-year-old swimmer on a training trip in Tampa, Florida – his one known alleged crime on American soil. The woman recounted the incident, on camera with her face obscured, in 2006 on the Irish television program Prime Time.

In 2015, Justine McCarthy of the Irish edition of the Times of London — now a columnist for the Irish Times — reported that the woman “told gardai that a high-ranking official in the sport” gave her drugs that made her groggy, and traveled with her to a London abortion clinic to terminate the pregnancy. The report said both the woman and her parents gave written statements to the police regarding the alleged rape and aftermath.

The Garda and the state attorney in Hillsborough County, Florida, have never clarified whether the law enforcement assets of two countries were ever coordinated on Gibney investigations prior to the new extradition arrest.

American attorney Little said that, while the arrest was cause for celebration, especially for the four female complainants and the large population of Gibney abuse victims, some of them now dead, it could not substitute for a solution to the systematic problem of youth sports coach abuse.

“Justice is important, and that’s true even in very old cases like Gibney’s that carry the danger of ‘justice delayed, justice denied,’” Little said. “But for fixing the ongoing vulnerability of young athletes to the predation of authority figures, an even more important principle is institutional accountability. George Gibney and many others like him have been enabled for years, for decades, by sports governance bodies in every country, which care most about protecting themselves and bringing in more medals and more money.”

California-based journalist Irvin Muchnick is author of Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe, which was published last year.