Florida’s Nova Southeastern University is Playing Dumb with Serious Questions about the Campus Presence of Swim Coach Abuser Alex Pussieldi

Alex Pussieldi is the subject of Chapter 9 of UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.

by Irvin Muchnick

For four months, Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Florida — whose campus hosts a USA Swimming age-group competitive swimming program — has alternately stonewalled and bobbed-and-weaved in response to Concussion Inc.’s queries regarding credible evidence of continued sightings there of Alex Pussieldi, the disgraced yet still internationally well-connected Brazilian-Floridian coach.

At this point, it’s fair to conclude that the stonewalling and the bobbing and weaving are indistinguishable aspects of the same communications strategy. Nova Southeastern has decided to cover its institutional ears and eyes against all noise and visual evidence regarding its connection to one of the worst bad guys in swimming. This requires the university’s mouthpieces, on the rare occasions when we actually converse, to pretend that our questions, presented in plain English, are complex or puzzling or downright incomprehensible.

Moving forward, the best guess is that whatever Nova Southeastern might have to answer for in its Pussieldi associations must await scrutiny by a media player with more circulation than this site’s. Either that, or the emergence of an abuse victim on the record.

To review: Pussieldi ran his Nadadores swim team out of Nova until 2013, winning multiple accolades along the way from the American Swimming Coaches Association. That’s when we began reporting on Pussieldi’s human trafficking of swimmers from his native country and other points south. The reporting included publication of a suppressed USA Swimming investigator’s report on the coach’s Peeping Tom video system at his house in Fort Lauderdale, where he put up some of his swimmer “wards.”

The USA Swimming investigation included the story of a whistleblowing Mexican swimmer who, for his trouble, got physically assaulted on the deck of the International Swimming Hall of Fame complex in Fort Lauderdale, where Pussieldi was then a coach under the late Jack Nelson. Pussieldi resigned from Nelson’s club, was advised by a “journalist” for Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel newspaper to lie low, and soon landed other positions — among them, head coach of the Kuwaiti national swim team and of the team at the Archdiocese of Miami’s St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

Later, his Nadadores “sort of came apart,” in the sharp analysis of the sport news site SwimSwam (which to this day has never gone further nor offered any specifics). This followed complaints of Pussieldi’s fraudulent meet entries of imported ringer swimmers, causing Florida Gold Coast Swimming, the regional affiliate of USA Swimming, to fine and suspend him. Pussieldi retreated back to Brazil (though, according to Florida sources,  only part-time) and became a renowned elder statesman of the swimming establishment there. He stages lucrative clinics and has a meet named in his honor, and is a top official of the South American swimming governance body.

Pussieldi is also still seen at swimming meets in Florida, and has been cited regularly on the Nova Southeastern campus itself. Recently, according to one of my sources, he was seated in the VIP section of the Rick Case Arena at an event in which swimmers were honored. Generally, another source said, Pussieldi was on deck at practices of Azura Aquatics, the USA Swimming club that succeeded the Nadadores.

In February, the university’s media spokesperson, Irvin Harrell, failed to respond to my several emails. I escalated them to the Nova president, Harry K. Moon, and when he also ignored them, to members of the board of trustees.

On February 16, Pashen Black emailed to inform me that she was the university’s new director of public relations. On May 14, she scheduled a telephone conversation, which took place on May 21. In the conversation, Black claimed not to understand what I was asking. I reiterated the questions and the known, published heinous information about Pussieldi, and I forwarded to her the book chapter of Underwater, which had already been sent to President Moon but which Black said she’d not seen.

Here’s Black’s most recent, and perhaps last, word (on June 2):

“Thanks for your patience and apologies for the delay in responding. Please allow me a few more days. I will follow up shortly.”