USA Swimming’s Alex Pussieldi and Dustin Perry Post-2010 Cover-Ups Expose ‘Safe Sport’ Program As a Fraud
February 16, 2014USA SWIMMING OPENS INVESTIGATION OF ALEX PUSSIELDI IN RESPONSE TO CONCUSSION INC. REPORTS
February 22, 2014
In 2006, USA Swimming CEO Chuck Wielgus was told of an investigation of complaints of sexual misconduct against Chris Johnson, a coach inTennessee. Despite this – and despite the well-publicized 2012 arrest of Johnson for sexual solicitation of a minor – Johnson still is not on swimming’s 100-strong list of banned coaches.
OnMay 17, 2012, Concussion Inc. broke the story of Johnson’s arrest. See “BREAKING:USASwimming Youth Coach Sex Abuse Scandal Widens With New Cases inTennesseeandPennsylvania,”https://concussioninc.net/?p=5657. (The link within our article, to a story inNashville’sTennessean, is now dead.) See alsohttps://concussioninc.net/?p=5668.
OnMarch 23, 2006, Clark Hammond of Southeastern Swimming, the Local Swim Committee covering Tennessee, sent a memo to Wielgus outlining the allegations against Chris Johnson, swimming sources told us.Hammondwas acting on instructions of USA Swimming lawyer Wells O’Brien.
Hammondtold Wielgus that several years earlier – in 2000 or 2001 – Johnson, former coach of the River Oak Swim Club, had sexually assaulted a minor female.Hammond’s memo named the minor swimmer of the club Johnson was coaching at the time, Pilot Aquatics, and said there was a contemporaneous police report.Hammondalso forwarded hospital records of the 16-year-old girl’s visit to a local hospital emergency room.
The district attorney indicted Johnson,Hammondtold Wielgus. However, when the case came to trial three years later, the charges were dropped because the victim did not want to go through the ordeal of testifying in court.
Hammondalso said that he was advised that Johnson had lost his position with theOaklandHigh School swim team as a result of inappropriate behavior with female swimmers.
Hammond’s 2006 complaint was forwarded to USA Swimming’s National Board of Review. The investigation was conducted by a USA Swimming consultant at that time, Dirk Taitt, who also has done private investigative work for the National Football League and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
As we chronicled last week, Taitt also was the USA Swimming investigator who reported in 2005 that coach Alex Pussieldi – who, like Chris Johnson, remains unbanned to this day – had been accused of producing secret bathroom videotapes of swimmers whom he recruited from Mexico and Brazil, and housed in South Florida. It is not known if Taitt was also told of allegations that Pussieldi kept videotapes of his own sex acts with underage boys, and it is not known if he reported those allegations to USA Swimming.
The allegations of both secret bathroom videotaping of swimmers and sex with minor boys would become part of a 2007 investigation by the Florida state’s attorney of Pussieldi and his former boss at the Fort Lauderdale Swim Team, International Swimming Hall of Famer Jack Nelson, whom open water swimming legend Diana Nyad has publicly accused of molesting her at age 14.
USA Swimming investigator Taitt did not return our phone call last week, to his number in Olathe, Kansas, asking him about the Pussieldi investigation. Today we called again for the purpose of asking Taitt about the findings of 2006 Chris Johnson investigation, but the number had been disconnected. We then left a message for Taitt through the security office of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. In a 2011 deposition in a civil lawsuit against USA Swimming by an abuse victim, Taitt said he was then a security representative for the Chiefs.
As Congressman George Miller and federal agencies investigate USA Swimming, the evidence mounts of post-2010, or “Safe Sport era,” cover-ups of abuse allegations against coaches, and of the organization’s chief executive’s own participation in those cover-ups.
P.S. Dirk Taitt called us Tuesday evening and offered boilerplate: “Two things. First, those cases are so long ago that I probably couldn’t tell one from the other. Second, any comment on investigative information would have to come from USA Swimming.”