The George Gibney Victory Lap — And Beyond

PREVIOUSLY ON THE GIBNEY TRIAL

“Ireland’s, and the Sports World’s, Latest Abuse Trial of the Century Has Started. Here’s Everything You Need to Know (Part 1),” June 23, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16648

“Why the Current Reckoning in an Irish Courtroom Should Be So Much More Than the Latest Abuse Trial of the Century,” June 23, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16653

“Chief Defense Counsel for the ’79-Year-Old Former Sports Coach’ on Trial in Dublin Remains – 32 Years Later – Well-Connected Legal Honcho Patrick Gageby,” June 24, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16667

“More from the Trial: ‘Woman alleges sports coach (79) attempted to rape her during a summer camp’,” June 25, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16675

“Prosecution Rests in Dublin Trial,” June 29, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16682

“Dublin Trial of Coach Goes to the Jury,” July 1, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16686

“No Verdict Yet in Dublin — Coach Abuse Trial Jury Will Reconvene Monday,” July 2, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16691

by Irvin Muchnick

An observer of the George Gibney trial in Dublin, from a spatial distance of 5,000 miles and a cultural gap arguably even less manageable, is wise to be cautious in interpreting how Monday’s guilty verdict lands – with the instant four complainants of his serial abuse; with the larger community of dozens, scores, or even hundreds of survivors, some now dead, whose stories weren’t represented in the proceedings; and with the Irish public at large.

I strongly suspect, however, that the output will be processed, along with the expected relief, with the usual excruciating ambiguity and frustration over this justice delayed and carefully confined. And that the need for an outsider to weigh in and sketch a bigger picture has not receded.

For 30 years the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history, Gibney – coach of the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swim teams – was found guilty of sexually assaulting four complainants between 55 and 45 years ago, and of the attempted rape of one of them. This followed an 11-day trial and seven hours of deliberation by the jury of six men and six women.

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In my interview today with Shane Coleman of The Hard Shoulder on Ireland’s Newstalk radio, I tried to begin putting some meat on the bones of a victory lap that started last year with Gibney’s belated extradition from Florida. I was also there to suggest ways that this should be considered not a victory lap at all, but rather a launching pad for further scrutiny of abuse in youth sports, abuse in Ireland, and the failures of the Irish legal and social systems to take full measure of their painfully familiar brands of this persistent human scourge.

While Gibney has been nailed at  long last, he was the prototype of a cluster of – depending on exactly how you categorize and count – some 40 to 60 cases involving historical abuse whose well-connected defendants wriggled off the hook thanks to a controversial 1994 statute-of-limitations ruling by the Irish Supreme Court.

And that decision was arrived at by a court panel including Susan Denham, later the chief justice — who failed to recuse herself even though Gibney’s barrister then and now, Patrick Gageby, is her brother. In 2019, Ireland’s peculiarly cramped judicial ethics code was reformed to discourage judges from any longer hearing cases in which close relatives had significant involvement.

Other bullets of continuing scrutiny include:

• How in the world did Gibney engineer securing a diversity lottery visa enabling his move to the U.S., even as the first set of criminal charges was bearing down on him in the early 1990s?
• Why did the American Swimming Coaches Association – in the words of Judge Charles R. Breyer, presiding over my Freedom of Information Act case against the Department of Homeland Security for public access to Gibney’s immigration records – “grease the wheels for Gibney’s relocation,” possibly extending to ASCA’s part in Gibney’s brief, disastrous, and last coaching job in Colorado in 1995?
• What’s the story with the 30 years of coddling of Gibney by American governments under administrations of both political parties? In 2010, Gibney flunked his application for naturalized citizenship because he tried to conceal his past criminal indictment in his native country. Yet not even materially lying to the government, in the estimation of Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was enough to trigger revocation of his green card.
• Finally, what of the evident lack of coordination between Ireland’s Garda and American law enforcement agencies over Gibney’s one known crime on American soil, prior to his residency: his rape and impregnation of a teen swimmer during a 1991 training trip in Tampa, Florida?

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Now it can be told

I earlier promised Concussion Inc. readers an explanation for why I muzzled myself on naming Gibney during the pendency of the trial. Here it is.

The gag was illogical, unnecessary, and thoroughly Irish in its misguidedness and indirection. Yet ultimately, I concluded, that was not the hill I should choose to die on.

On the eve of the trial, I received an urgent voicemail and follow-up emails from a friend in Ireland.  I reserve the right to name the friend down the road, but I don’t think that’s the point right now. He’s a good guy, an important whistleblower and victims’ advocate, and a key player in exposure of the crimes of the old Irish Amateur Swimming Association (now Swim Ireland) and of the bungled or corrupt (choose your own adjective) earlier Gibney prosecution.

The friend wrote in part: “He Absolutely cannot be named. Nobody can be allowed [to] know until after the case. [T]he post could jeopardize the trial. Please delete immediately.”

In my responses, both email and a return phone call, I informed the friend of my regrettable decision not to grant this request. We debated respectfully. The friend didn’t argue with the absurdity of Irish law on this score. Nor did he challenge my perception of my role as a journalist, my invocation of First Amendment rights (a foreign concept in Ireland, in both senses of the word “foreign”), or my suggestion that the trial judge had the capacity and even the duty to sequester the jurors to shield them from potentially prejudicial chatter. The friend merely said that a Gibney victim had seen my mentions and alerted him, and she and he were shattered by the prospect of a second prosecution, after more than 30 years, running aground on such a technicality.

A short time after our conversation, I reflected that, after all, I should indeed delete the posts that had mentioned the impending start of the “George Gibney trial,” and thereafter adopt the Irish style (“79-year-old coach,” “77-year-old coach” – both were seen at different points of the coverage) for the next couple of weeks. I so informed my friend and told him this move had been made in personal deference to him.

But perhaps it was a bit more than that. George Gibney, and the whole national system of legal, media, and obfuscated communication and misplaced values, which in my view still has not brought him and the abuse problem to full account, don’t deserve to get let off the hook so easily.