by Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce
Former USA Swimming national team coach Mark Schubert has settled the wrongful termination lawsuit by his former assistant at the Golden West Swim Club in California, Dia Rianda. The case, which was filed in 2012, was scheduled to go to trial today. A search of Orange County Superior Court records reveals that a notice of settlement was filed November 13. The settlement terms are not disclosed.
Riandas action was one of the most far-reaching in the years-long saga of uncovering USA Swimming sexual abuse and cover-up. A full airing of it in open court would have been close to a trial of the century on this subject.
The reasons are many starting with the fact that Rianda is a wealthy, long-time benefactor of USA Swimming.
In addition, as a close confidante of Schuberts, she was privy to his and other top swimming officials roles in the three-decade cover-up of coach Rick Curls abuse of swimmer Kelley Davies. When the dam broke on that story in 2012, after being unofficially known as the sports worst-kept secret, Curl confessed, and was banned and prosecuted (he is now in Maryland prison), and Congressman George Miller helped set in motion the federal investigations we are reporting.
Schuberts ouster from the top coaching post in swimming, which preceded Riandas lawsuit and led to a six-figure termination package likely in return for his remaining hush-hush on Curl and others matters is also historically significant because his brief predecessor as national team chief, Everett Uchiyama, got secretly bounced himself after an old abuse victim of his came forward. And Pat Hogan, a top official under USA Swimming boss Chuck Wielgus, promptly engineered a new job for Uchiyama as aquatics director of the Country Club of Colorado at a facility just down the road from USA Swimming headquarters, and where the organization frequently held quarterly board meetings.
Rianda v. Schubert is important, finally, for tabloid-tease reasons. Discovery in the lawsuit exposed that Schubert was responsible for the leak to the Washington Post that caused a rival coach, Sean Hutchison, to lose his position of running swimmings disastrous professional training excellence center in Fullerton.
In May of 2013, we published the report, by a private investigator hired by Schubert, which included spy photos establishing a romantic relationship between Hutchison and one of his swimmers, world record holder Arianna Kukors. You can view the document at http://muchnick.net/schubertspyrecord.pdf.
At the time, we whited out the images of and references to Kukors, out of deference to an adult woman in a legitimate relationship with a man. (Subsequently, and in response to the issue of coach grooming of non-adult athletes prior to having relationships or getting married to them as adults, USA Swimming passed a rule banning all athlete-coach relationships.) We are not hesitant to publish Kukors name today, since she and Hutchison were featured together in a long article in the magazine of the American Swimming Coaches Association.
Here are complete links to Concussion Inc.s coverage of the Schubert lawsuit:
Published September 17th, 2012
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Published September 17th, 2012
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What Dia Rianda Says About Rapist Swim Coach Rick Curl in Her Lawsuit Against Mark Schubert
Published September 17th, 2012
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Published September 19th, 2012
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Published September 20th, 2012
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Housecleaning Notes on Olympic Swim Coach Mark Schubert, the Spy Who Hated Me
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Bill Jewell Out at Golden West Aquatics
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Published September 15th, 2014