As predator George Gibney is extradited: what really happened

Nailing the institutional culprits, ignored by Ireland’s deficient media

By Irvin Muchnick

The long-elusive goal of a second prosecution of at least some of George Gibney’s countless alleged sexual abuses of young swimmers now seems imminent.  The next stage is whether the media in Ireland deign to take the story deeper. Custom and practice suggest the prognosis is not promising.

Mark Horgan’s podcast Where Is George Gibney? did succeed in notching Gibney. Unfortunately, a lot of important stuff has been either left on the cutting-room floor or ignored entirely. Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s remarks that it was this series that got this over the top spiked decades of advocacy by, among others, swimming star Gary O’Toole and journalists Johnny Watterson and Justine McCarthy.

‘Prime Time’ had questioned Gibney in a California car-park as long ago as 2006

As a result of Horgan’s 2020 series, which was broadcast by the BBC and Second Captains, fresh faces came forward to gardaí, grounding an indictment drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions for 78 counts of sexual assault and one of attempted rape. In October of last year the Irish embassy in Washington, D.C., submitted an extradition request. And on 1 July this year,  the one-time Olympic swimming coach was fitted for handcuffs and return, more than 30 years after his first prosecution got scuttled by now-discredited statute-of-limitations case-law.

For the survivors of the newly alleged incidents, there is palpable relief. A trial will also be hygienic for the entire community of Gibney victims – some of them now dead, of whom at least one was by suicide.

As the grimly cynical maxim goes, no well-connected predator meets his match without the emergence of “a live boy or a dead girl.” One live boy, Chalkie White, was a root whistleblower whose testimony now reaches back to events more than a half century ago. Almost incredibly, and in an illustration of the depraved reach of the republic of Gibneystan, another accuser of serial molestation was White’s sister Loraine Kennedy – alleging abuse when she was nine years old. I had the privilege of dining with that grand lady, in Dublin months before her 2019 death from cancer.

Generally I prefer the term “predator” to “paedophile” which often gets appropriated by homophobes. But sometimes the shoe fits snugly. In my 2016-17 Freedom of Information Act case over whether Gibney’s privacy rights were outweighed by the public’s interest in cracking open his American immigration file, US federal judge Charles R Breyer delivered the defining analysis. “I have to assume”, Breyer said, “that if somebody has been charged with the types of offences that Mr Gibney has been charged with, the United States, absent other circumstances, would not grant a visa. We’re not a refuge for paedophiles”.

Breyer’s utterance from the bench, in combination with the most basic artificial intelligence mashup via Google, will probably tell you more about where the Gibney narrative needs to turn in 2026 than the entirety of the mainstream Irish coverage of scandalously delayed — and so justice-denying — court proceedings.

More than a decade ago, the headline over my first blog post on this sordid subject posed basic questions that remain not only unanswered but also unexplored, in both Ireland and the US. On the Irish side, this is sadly characteristic of the national style in the agonising space of historical abuse in high places. A victory lap by the Irish Times crowd always seems to replace the incommodious task of shining the klieg light of accountability on sports overseers, law enforcement and governments.

In Ireland’s public square, I now ask yet again: “Why [Was] George Gibney – No. 1 At-Large Paedophile in Global Sports – Living in Florida? And Who Sponsored His Green Card?”.

In the generous interpretation, the podcast’s confinement by the parameters of its brand of storytelling precluded such a deep dive. In the less generous interpretation, the terms of engagement for underwriter BBC – like those of the Irish Times, RTÉ and many other institutions with the resources to do better – annul contemplation of  how hard cases make for larger lessons. They squash offshoot stories by atomising and sentimentalising core narratives. They do not foster the investigative journalism that could render our takeaways less domesticated, more explicit and more challenging.

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To date, the defunct alternative site Broadsheet.ie (whose archives, happily, can still be accessed), starting in 2016, and Village, starting with my piece here in 2022, remain the only Irish outlets that have shared with news consumers certain relevant facts surrounding the determining official lapse in the Gibney saga. That would be the 1994 three-justice Supreme Court technical ruling which effectively scuttled Gibney’s 27-count indictment.

One of the judges was Susan Denham, later, of course, the Chief Justice. She is the sister of Patrick Gageby, who was Gibney’s barrister. Not until 2019 were Ireland’s judicial ethics guidelines reformed to say that judges should not consider cases involving close relatives.

To a foreign journalist, the principle is intuitive with a capital I. It is a gloss on a Latin formulation: nemo judex in causa sua, or “no one shall be a judge in their own cause”.

Yet a number of my Irish friends demur. They have tried to impress upon me that, in a country of only 5 million, where many members of the elite legal stratum inevitably know each other and some are even related, it is not so nefarious that this rule of thumb is, or until recently was, fungible. On that point, you can colour me sceptical. They further point to the protocol that barristers cannot  choose the clients on whose behalf they act, if the work is within their area of expertise.

In 2020, a prominent Irish journalist, speaking not for attribution, told me they “couldn’t recall any publication airing the apparent conflict of interest” in the Denham-Gageby nexus, and added:

“I did bring it up with editors in the past and it was too sensitive an issue to run with. The point is a lot of people knew about it so what were we going to say? Obviously the answer to that is there was a conflict of interest.

But Irish law is not the same as in the USA. We have for example no First Amendment. If there was any imputation of wrongdoing on the part of a Supreme Court judge there would have been legal consequences. I did bring it up but it didn’t get past the door.

[I spoke] to a number of legal eagles including a spokesman for the Bar Council. They agree that because of the size of the small population of Irish lawyers in the business, the collegiate nature of the law and the family connections, it was not that unusual. Gageby was regularly in the Supreme Court and the belief among legal people is that they are all above it.

I believe it is a staggeringly arrogant position to take and have trouble believing that there is no conflict of interest.

That said, yes it’s difficult to get anyone to run with it”.

Gibney was far from barrister Gageby’s only rodeo when it came to representing defendants in heinous historical abuse cases. Notwithstanding disclaimers, this tends to cement an outsider’s scepticism. At the same time it was busting Denham-Gageby, Broadsheet elucidated on this important sidebar:

“Following the Gibney judgment, a significant number of applications to stop prosecutions for sexual offences on the basis of delayed complaint were made through the courts.

Patrick Gageby made 16 of these applications, most of which were heard in the period 1994-1997.

Seven of his applicants were successful including a psychiatric nurse facing 32 counts of indecent assault against a patient between 1975 and 1979, a man charged with 63 sexual offences against his sister from the 1960s and 1970s, and two priests accused of sexual offences in the late 1980s.

One unsuccessful applicant was Dublin swimming coach Derry O’Rourke who was convicted in 1998 for 12 years on 59 sample charges of assaulting and raping 12 girls. In 2001, he was convicted of child rape and sentenced to seven years and, in 2005, he received another 10 years for a third set of convictions.

In 2003, the Irish Times reported Mr Gageby telling a conference that there was a ‘subversion of the presumption of innocence’ with historic sexual abuse cases.

“People asked why a person would ‘say such a thing’ if the offence had not happened”, he is reported as saying.

The paper reported:

‘[Mr Gageby] warned that cases up to 40 or 50 years old might be given a credence they did not deserve. Judges should give carefully worded warnings to juries when they were summing up old cases. Proper and full disclosure was vital, he said. The gardai were not there primarily to help the victim, but to assist in the administration of justice”.

In 2005, Mr Gageby told a prosecutors’ conference that there should be a limit on the time allowed to elapse between an alleged sex crime and the prosecution of a suspect.

It appears, facially, that Gageby’s representation of Gibney was not a one-off. Gageby was a proactive and highly public advocate in the whole category of “false memory syndrome”, which was in vogue at the time. But in a critique of the Irish media’s performance, the most salient thing is not local cultural nuances that might escape an American’s grasp. The most salient thing is the very taboo on even mentioning and parsing Denham-Gageby.

Patrick Gageby was asked for a comment on 19 July and we will include it if we obtain one.

In any event, in 1994 Gibney was off and running. He made it to America the next year with a diversity lottery visa, probably from the Donnelly or Morrison programmes of that period, according to documents in my FOIA case.

Reporting by Justine McCarthy, when she was with the Irish edition of the Times of London, established that the foundation of Gibney’s American residency went back to the late 1980s, years before abuse allegations against him began surfacing. The Horgan podcast went on to highlight ably how former Gibney assistant Peter Banks – an Irish, then American, then Irish-Olympic, then again-American coach – counselled his old boss on paperwork and procedures at the time the abuse stories were beginning to surface.

My own reporting has laid bare that Banks was a top official of the American Swimming Coaches Association, and that activists believe ASCA was behind the redacted US coaching job letter in the immigration file – or, more broadly, troubleshooting the visa application and, as Judge Breyer put it, “greasing the wheels for Gibney’s relocation”.

After Gibney’s coaching stint in Colorado wound up brief and bad, as had an earlier one in Scotland, his membership in USA Swimming, the national sport governing body under the Olympic Committee, permanently lapsed. USA Swimming will neither confirm nor deny that he is on their secret “flagged” list of coaches who are not allowed on pool decks but, with various technical explanations, not on the official public “banned” list.

In 1998, an Irish government commission under Justice Roderick Murphy, using cryptic rhetoric and without naming names, found that at least half a dozen Gibney survivors had been “vindicated” by the totality of Garda evidence against him. At the same time the Irish Amateur Swimming Association – also reeling from the parallel scandals of Derry O’Rourke and Frank McCann (both of whom, unlike Gibney so far, actually landed in prison) – rebranded as Swim Ireland.

Credit McCarthy, who began this beat at the Irish Independent and wrote a good book about it, ‘Deep Deception’, for observing that this amounted to rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

Gibney’s base of power, other than the 1984 and 1988 Olympic teams, was the Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, a Church of Ireland parochial school. In Village in 2017, Niall Meehan wrote of the way the Irish Times, bellwether of the media establishment, had been more vigilant over the years about abuse in Catholic institutions than in Protestant ones.

That is another potentially fruitful angle of Gibney coverage on the morning after.

Since any upcoming Gibney trial will be focused on the facts of the four newly risen accusers and the associated 79 counts, any satisfaction for others will have to be vicarious. One such victim has said, both to Prime Time and to McCarthy, that Gibney raped and impregnated her during a 1991 training trip in Tampa, Florida, and that a top Irish swimming official plied her with drugs and accompanied her to London for an abortion. There are attesting affidavits and statements to Garda. Neither Garda nor local American police departments or prosecutors have been pressed to clarify by anyone other than myself whether, before the recent extradition arrest, there was ever any coordination whatsoever between the law enforcement assets across the ocean that were bound by a cooperation treaty to that end.

Similarly, the federal Justice Department and its Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS) remain silent on what happened with an investigation of Gibney – the existence of which was relayed to me by anonymous FBI sources – by its human-trafficking finance specialist, in the wake of reports of Gibney’s activities with a children’s medical mission in Peru.  He organised these through his Denver area Catholic parish in 2000. 

The MLARS probe is not the only federal foray into abuses and financial corruption in the sport of swimming. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal and other leading American newspapers reported that there was a grand jury investigation of USA Swimming by the US attorney in the Southern District of New York, for insurance fraud and cover-ups. US media proceeded to drop the ball on this huge story as surely as their Irish counterparts have tip-toed around all the implications of Gibney that are affairs of state.

 Last year a long-awaited report on the future of the Olympic movement in my country – by a congressional commission whose members included iconic Olympians female and male – recommended that grassroots programmes in swimming and other sports be taken out of the control of Olympic bodies, which henceforth should oversee only true high-end Olympic aspirants. The commission also called for federal funding and true independent administration of the failing US Center for SafeSport, which adjudicates coach abuse claims. The New York Times did not even report the release of the commission report.

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A last area of commentary concerns the atmospherics of Gibney’s July 1 arrest itself in Altamonte Springs, Florida. This tableau vivant told us little about the real direct physical threat posed by the 77-year-old man taken into custody. It told us a lot, however, about the official government terrorism marking 2025 America – its backdrop hypocrisy and its over-the-top execution.

In 2010, Gibney flunked his application for naturalised US citizenship because at that point he could no longer do what pro forma re-upping of his green card had previously pulled off: hiding, with impunity, his 1993 Irish arrest and indictment.

While a State Department agency, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, denied Gibney’s application (after first inviting a do-over), a Homeland Security Department agency, the now notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was asked to weigh in on whether Gibney should be deported. ICE, which has grown into the modern American Gestapo – there soon may be more ICE agents than FBI agents – has become infamous for rounding up Central and South Americans on trumped-up petty violations such as driving slightly over the speed limit. Its speciality is then herding them into rickety gulags, and shipping them off without due process  back to their native countries or even randomly to third-party countries, such as the contract prison of the dictator of El Salvador. ICE agents, their faces covered by masks, have confronted on the street, zip-tied and hauled off advocates for Palestinian rights and critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza who hold student visas.

But in 2010, for a white guy from Ireland, ICE was more forgiving on the question of whether the alien resident was, as a letter by an agency official put it, “removable”. The answer: No, for he had never been convicted of a crime. Thus, George Gibney’s punishment for lying on his citizenship application would be…not getting citizenship. Tellingly, six years later, during the FOIA proceedings, Judge Breyer said he knew of instances in which citizens had had their passports confiscated for material misrepresentations to the government.

When the time came to execute the Gibney extradition warrant, it was a mission not for ICE but for the Justice Department’s US Marshals Service. Suffice to say that worthies there had picked up all of ICE’s au courant flourishes for projecting asymmetrical force and sending chills down the spines of Gibney’s neighbours and the citizenry at large. Though a knock on the door probably would have done the job, a swarm of deputies surrounded the house, multiple long rifles were aimed at the entrance and a bullhorn summoned him out.

The cheesy production techniques of the Horgan podcast had foreshadowed this theatrical overkill. The point being that they distract from the substance and the big picture far more than they embellish them.

Instead of simply confronting Gibney (as, by the way, Clare Murphy of RTÉ’s ‘Prime Time‘ already had done in 2006 in Calistoga, California), Horgan surveilled Gibney overnight from a parked car – drawing questions from a justifiably bewildered neighbour. Was this operation weeks long or a day or two? Where Is George Gibney? listeners had no way of knowing. The contrivance of splicing audio footage across ten episodes did not provide the answer, though it did finally deliver the big finishing trope of Gibney saying nothing while he was encountered out shopping.

I don’t know if Horgan’s palette of audio devices included deploying a ten-foot pole attached to a microphone in order to capture sounds of Gibney’s shoes scrunching on the driveway as he got into his car. I just know it’s a shame that Horgan and other Irish journalists are unwilling to touch, with the same ten-foot pole, more of what the foot-dragging arrest of the podcast’s easily despised villain means in the big picture: how widespread coach sexual abuse plagues kids, both in Ireland and the world over.  Most shocking to me has been that the country’s media have been equally unwilling to nail the people and agencies responsible for continuing to do little or nothing about it.

Irvin Muchnick is author of ‘Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe’