George Gibney and the scandalously unprosecuted rape of ‘Stella’

July-August 2024 21

George Gibney

and the

scandalously

unprosecuted

rape of ‘Stella’

Conjoined Irish and US

failures to combat youth

coach sexual abuse

By Irvin Muchnik

NEWS

22 July-August 2024

national TV eight years later proved equally

challenging. What I thought would be

simple queries to RTÉ were unavailing. Late

in 2017, however, someone presumably

inside the network caused the anonymous

post to me of an envelope containing a

thumb drive with raw video of the Prime

Time segment.

We’re now more than half a year past the

latest of the periodic bursts of reports in

Irish media that gardaí have again

redoubled their Gibney investigation. This

time they are said to be conﬁdent they have

both the goods on some of his crimes and

the means to extradite him, and have

forwarded a recommendation to the Director

of Public Prosecutions.

Should the DPP ever break its familiar

template and actually indict and extradite

this time, the deep-past cases of Stella and

of others, documented by past media

reports and Justice Murphy, are unlikely to

ﬁgure. The basis would probably be fresh

testimony from entirely new cases, by other

Gibney survivors who were inspired to come

forward – to give full credit where it is due

– by the BBC podcast.

There is an ultimate outrage from the 30

years of American hospitality for George

Gibney – hospitality that has ranged from

the probable arrangement of a job oer by

the American Swimming Coaches

Association, to continued acceptance of an

application for a diversity lottery visa and a

green card, later shown to be fraudulent for

lying about his Irish past. Not to mention

that job itself in Colorado upon landing, a

position requiring certiﬁcation by USA

Swimming. The ultimate outrage is this: The

climactic Gibney crime had already occurred

several years earlier on American soil.

Schedule 13 of the Mutual Assistance Act

of 2008 outlines protocols for transnational

law enforcement cooperation under the legal

treaty between the European Union and the

US:

‘The Director of Public Prosecutions…

may, in accordance with the relevant

international instrument and without

receiving a request to that effect,

communicate information… for the purpose

of current criminal investigations or criminal

proceedings or of initiating either of them’.

In 2016-17, I was in contact with the oce

The most notorious at-large sex

criminal in sports history also raped

and impregnated a teenage swimmer in

Florida, in 1991, leading to an abortion

f the uncountable examples of

the unimaginable wholesale

molestations of young people

by George Gibney – coach of the

1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic

swimming teams, whom I call the most

notorious at-large sex criminal in sports

history – none resonates quite like his rape

and impregnation of a teenage swimmer

during a training trip in the United States

city of Tampa, Florida, in 1991. Let us call

this victim “Stella”. (I know only her ﬁrst

name and I’ve changed it.)

Stella’s case has been in and out of

historical news media coverage of periodic

eorts to bring about a second criminal

indictment of Gibney and his extradition

from the US, where he has been a resident

alien for nearly 30 years. The original Gibney

prosecution got scuttled in 1994 by an Irish

Supreme Court ruling, under a legal doctrine

that has withered in intervening years, that

Gibney’s 27 counts of indecent carnal

knowledge of minors, some of them

stretching back as far as the 1960s, were

too old for him to have a fair chance to

mount a defence.

In his popular 2020 BBC podcast series

Where Is George Gibney?, Mark Horgan of

Second Captains interviewed a member of

Stella’s family. Horgan didn’t get around to

informing listeners that Stella already had

testiﬁed to the Tampa incident, in her own

voice, to Clare Murphy of RTÉ television’s

Prime Time in 2006. One suspects such a

disclosure might have made Horgan’s

breathless audio package seem staler than

he wished to portray.

This opacity is part of an overall Irish

problem when it comes to institutional

memory. When I began reporting on all

things Gibney nearly a decade ago, I

assumed that the Murphy Report – a 1998

government inquiry, helmed by Justice

Roderick Murphy, on abuses in youth

swimming programmes – was a basic and

easily accessible public text, analogous to

America’s Warren Commission following the

JFK assassination. Instead, I was able to

track down the 160-page Murphy document

only with great eort. When I asked Irish

journalists and other friends about

acquiring a copy, they responded cagily. A

diligent clerk at the Oireachtas library

ﬁnally provided a link to a painstaking

download. (Where Is George Gibney?

likewise had no time for the surrounding

controversies of the dissatisfying Murphy

report – most especially the conﬂict of its

author, a member of the Glenalbyn

Swimming Club of the Leinster Branch of the

then Irish Amateur Swimming Association,

all three layers of which were investigative

foci.)

Getting my hands on the Gibney piece on

Then

July-August 2024 23

of the county prosecutors in Florida. They

were unaware of the 1991 Tampa incident

but would endeavour to get up to speed via

study of the 2006 RTÉ broadcast, including

the interview of Stella, and other media

coverage.

They told me something else of more than

passing relevance: decades of distance

from the alleged crime didn’t necessarily

preclude prosecution. In general, “there are

statutes of limitations that apply to the

prosecution of sexual battery cases except

for capital oenses” but there were “also

exceptions and circumstances that can

extend the statute of limitations. The

circumstances of a speciﬁc case would need

to be analyzed to determine whether its

prosecution would be time barred”.

As to Ireland, a source inside Garda

declined to address whether there have

been communications with Florida

prosecutors, nor even to comment on the

theoretical mechanics of how Irish and

American law enforcement might compare

notes under the legal treaty. This source did

say that cooperation “only operates on the

basis of a charge, it is not possible on the

basis of inquiry. The passage of time may

be a factor too or the death of a complainant

by the High Court Taxing Master by two-

thirds. The Minister for Sport, Leo Varadkar,

had urgent meetings with the two sports

organisations about their heartless pursuit

of the girl for legal costs after the Olympic

Council’s lawyer, Giles J Kennedy, attacked

me on national radio nine months ago for

reporting the details of it”.

In 2015 in the Times, for which she was

then writing, McCarthy detailed Stella

having discovered, three months after the

1991 rape, that she was pregnant. Stella

told “a high-ranking ocial” in swimming,

“who is a professional person and knew

Gibney”. Stella added, according to

McCarthy, that “the ocial obtained air

travel tickets and accompanied her to

England. She believes she was taken to an

abortion clinic in London and remembers

the ocial giving her pills that made her

groggy during the trip”.

In our 2012 interview, McCarthy had said

that a key concern in the aftermath of the

Murphy report was that “swim ocials who

played secondary roles in the cover-up have

remained in positions of inﬂuence. I think

this was made possible by the restrictive

terms of reference for the Murphy inquiry,

which means nobody was named in the

report (not even Gibney, [Derry] O’Rourke,

et al). The eect was to add to the secrecy

and to allow individuals – such as Dr Moira

O’Brien, the swimming association’s

honorary doctor and a former president who

was personally told about abuse and did

nothing – to elude any accountability”.

Was Dr O’Brien the “high-ranking ocial”

who chaperoned Stella to her abortion in

England and drugged her along the way?

[O’Brien did not respond to our request for

comment.)]

With or without a legal treaty, the

international coordination of police-agency

information is professionally mandated.

The ways to ﬁght the scourge of youth coach

sexual abuse are two in number.

One way is to hound an individual villain

until he gets the just desserts of wearing bus-

tyre tread marks. The other way is to

understand the accountability of all the

enablers in his orbit, and to expose and change

the organisational dynamics that make abuse

something to hu about on cue but not to

eradicate by the most aggressive means.

George John Gibney is a unique ﬁgure

whose narrative connects the dots in a

manner making both paths possible. But

only if we have the will to connect them.

Irvin Muchnick’s book ‘Underwater: The

Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA

Swimming and Around the Globe’, which

includes two chapters on George Gibney in

Ireland and the US, will be published by ECW

Press shortly after the Paris Olympics.

Ways to combat youth coach sexual abuse

are to hound an individual villain or to

understand the accountability of all his

enablers in his orbit, and to change the

organisational dynamics

now

or withdrawal of a complaint”.

So what constitutes a ‘charge’ under this

construction? It’s known that Stella had at

one point provided a sworn adavit to

gardaí. Indeed, written armations were

required from all accusers by the publisher

of Johnny Watterson, the reporter who broke

the Gibney scandals in the early 1990s.

Over the years, the traumatised Stella has

moved in and out of lucidity and

hospitalisations. In a 2012 email interview,

another root Gibney scandal reporter,

Justine McCarthy (now, like Watterson, an

Irish Times columnist, and author of the

2008 book ‘Deep Deception: Ireland’s

Swimming Scandals’), told me:

“The girl who was raped by [Gibney] in

Florida in 1991 has repeatedly tried to kill

herself, once while on the phone to me. The

High Court civil case she took for damages

against Swim Ireland and the Irish Olympic

Council was struck out on the grounds that

the proceedings were too old. The court

awarded costs to the two organisations. The

girl made an undisclosed out-of-court

settlement with the insurers of her former

solicitor (lawyer) who failed to progress the

case. She appealed the size of the Olympic

Council’s legal bill and it was cut this year