Dustin Perry – Grotesque Swimming Coach Serial Abuser – Is Reported to be Back in Pocatello, Idaho. Police There Are Investigating.

by Irvin Muchnick

Dustin Perry, a heinous perpetrator of serial abuse across swimming programs in several regions of the United States and in Mexico, has reportedly returned to the scene of some of his crimes, Pocatello, Idaho – where he was fired in the midst of a delinquent USA Swimming investigation, a decade ago, culminating in his lifetime ban.

At the time, Concussion Inc. published extensive reports on a figure whose scenarios of manipulation and sexual predation of boys, while prototypical of a pattern throughout the sport in some respects, had certain uniquely grotesque features. These began with his own shambolic 300-plus-pound physique, which called into question where and how he had attained purported swimming expertise and American Swimming Coaches Association certification.

I was alerted to Perry’s presence in Pocatello just before the holidays by a local police detective who said he was investigating in the wake of having read the 2014 reports online by Tim Joyce and myself. Interested readers can check out the archival links at https://concussioninc.net/?page_id=15.

One of the alarming aspects of this update is that there is a LinkedIn registration for a Dustin Perry, https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustingperry/, characterizing him as a “Human Resources Generalist” for the city of Pocatello since 2023. However, the city’s public information officer, Marlise Irby-Facer, told us, “The City of Pocatello does not employ anyone by that name.”

The Pocatello police detective said he was shocked to discover that, despite the voluminous information online of Perry’s misdeeds in his community, there does not appear to be a single piece of official paper referencing him. The detective said he intended to seek from USA Swimming the records there resulting in Perry’s ban.

Last year I was contacted by a woman who said she lived in Pocatello and wanted to know if there was fresh information on Perry’s whereabouts or activities. In the email, she said in part: “I am beyond sickened as my family was a part of the swim team during that time. All we were told was that he was fired for embezzlement. None of your writings were ever published locally that I can find, and I’m reaching out to find out why?… I’m in disbelief that this was never published here where families need to know. This coach even worked with Family Services Alliance to prevent abuse in sports arena. Here it is 10 years later and I am just finding your articles exposing Perry. My heart is broken as I believe our family was directly affected by this man.”

In Underwater, I call Perry “the poor man’s Alex Pussieldi” – after the Brazilian coach who has hopped between his native country and Florida, trafficking male swimmers from throughout Latin America. As documented in a 2004 USA Swimming investigator’s report – part of a stash of thousands of pages of sealed court discovery that was subpoenaed by an FBI field office and obtained by Concussion Inc. – Pussieldi was accused by a swimmer from Mexico, whom the coach housed in Fort Lauderdale, of peeping on his athlete-wards through a clandestine bathroom video camera.

In 2024, I updated Pussieldi’s activities in Brazil in a series of nine articles that began at https://concussioninc.net/?p=15882.

Perry looms as yet another significant shoe from the swimming abuse universe poised to drop since the publication of Underwater. Last July, former Irish Olympic swimming coach George Gibney – a quasi-fugitive in the U.S. for 30 years and arguably the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history – was extradited back to Ireland for a new prosecution. 

And last fall USA Swimming settled, in Colorado court, the case of interstate abuse by coach Scott MacFarland, starting four decades ago, of teen swimmer Sarah Ehekircher. I called the multidimensional Ehekircher story “a saga of administrative and legal horror as emblematic of the underworld of American youth sports sexual abuse as any covered in this space.”

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The Dustin Perry story began in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he was a lifeguard at the YMCA swimming pool and coached a USA Swimming team. A survivor from that period, “John,” told us of how Perry psychologically manipulated him in his teens, facilitated his multiple attempts to run away from his parents’ home, and coaxed him into seeking emancipation from them — along the way inculcating in him the belief that their sexual relations were normal.

In 2003-04, Perry was suspended by USA Swimming for 18 months. This was based on an investigation of his orchestration of sexualized hazing at his Extreme Aquatics Club, whose underage members he also escorted on out-of-town trips marked by alcohol, and in the case of one to Las Vegas, gambling.

At the time of the USA Swimming findings, Perry was coaching at a program in Harrisonburg, Virginia. During his suspension, he got a coaching position in Mexico through an American Swimming Coaches Association job board.

After that, he landed with the Walla Walla Swim Club in Washington State, where he groomed and then putatively adopted a swimmer with special needs who remains attached to Perry to this day. That swimmer got a partial athletic scholarship at the Arizona State University swimming program, then under Michael Phelps’s famed coach Bob Bowman (now at the University of Texas), and eventually was arrested himself for trafficking in child pornography.

In Pocatello starting in 2009, Perry succeeded coach Bobby Goldhan at the Tiger Aquatic Club. Goldhan would move to Craig, Alaska, and commit suicide after charges surfaced of his child sexual abuse. Upon losing the Pocatello job, Perry applied for a coaching post in Craig himself and nearly landed the job, before officials there came across our reports and walked back their interest.

With the Pocatello Tigers, Perry finagled an auxiliary team site he called the “Tiger Den,” from which parents were barred. This was a windowless space in which the coach staged “movie nights.”

Complaints to USA Swimming and Snake River Aquatics, the regional affiliate, were unavailing until 2014. Organized swimming’s investigative consultant, retired FBI agent Paulette Brundage, didn’t even seem to know Perry had already departed Pocatello by the time she began interviewing witnesses there. Up until the moment of his ban – including in response to an inquiry from the swimming team in Alaska – USA Swimming’s disgraced director of safe sport, Susan Woessner, characterized Perry’s infractions as technical and minor, and said the organization did not intervene in local clubs’ hiring decisions.