Ireland secures extradition of notorious youth coach George Gibney who fled to Colorado in the 1990s
In a story with important ties to Colorado, an infamous youth sports coach who is accused of serial sexual abuse and has lived in the United States for 30 years, was arrested July 1 by federal marshals in Florida on an extradition request from his native Ireland.
George Gibney, head coach of the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swimming teams, is a green card holder whose residency in at least three states began with an interlude in Colorado from 1995 until at least 2000.
Gibney, now 77, came to Colorado seemingly intent on resuming a coaching career that was derailed in Ireland after his 1993 indictment on 27 counts of indecent carnal knowledge of underage swimmers in his charge.
That prosecution was abandoned the next year in the wake of a controversial decision by the Irish Supreme Court, which ruled that the passage of time since the alleged crimes, beginning in the late 1960s, made it impossible for him to receive a fair trial.
In more recent years, Irish legal doctrine has evolved in a way more favorable to accusers of historical abuse.
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Gibney moved first to a coaching post in Scotland, but as knowledge of his Irish past spread, causing consternation among his swimmers’ parents, that job ended within months.
His stint with the North Jeffco Hurricanes, a USA Swimming program in Arvada, proved equally brief for the same reason.
Gibney has not been accused of any crimes while he was with USA Swimming, but he was never placed on the organization’s list of coaches banned for sexual abuse, which became public in 2012 and now runs to more than 200 names.
Questions have since been raised about why USA Swimming ever hired him and why he was able to obtain a visa and legally stay in the United States despite his background.
After his coaching days ended, Gibney worked in Colorado for at least five years in corporate human resources positions, before moving to California and eventually Florida. Along the way, there were multiple iterations of a campaign on behalf of Irish victims of his alleged abuse, none of which came to fruition.
These survivors, along with supporting politicians and activists, wanted him returned for a new trial.
American attorney Jonathan Little, who has represented many victims of abuse by coaches who worked for Colorado Springs-based USA Swimming and other Olympic sports governing bodies, called Gibney’s arrest this month the most significant positive development for the cause in his nearly 20 years in the field.
Little said the scope of Gibney’s alleged crimes exceeded even that of the more publicized Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who was convicted of molesting scores of athletes in that sport. Nassar’s various cases resulted in half a billion dollars in civil lawsuit settlements by USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, where he was a faculty member. In addition, gold medalist Simone Biles and other celebrity gymnasts are among the plaintiffs in a $1 billion lawsuit against the FBI, which they claim botched investigation of the doctor.
George Gibney’s path to Colorado was steeped in mystery. Documents from his immigration file, publicly released in 2016-17 as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, include a letter, with the author’s name and affiliation redacted, offering Gibney a U.S. coaching job.
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His visa, awarded just prior to his arrest in Ireland under a diversity program of that period favoring immigration from Ireland, was attained by lottery.
In 1992, the year before his arrest — but at a time when accusers were already speaking out in Irish news media — the FOIA files show that the Garda, the Irish national police, supplied a “certificate of character” to support Gibney’s visa application. The document certified that he had no criminal record.
The 1994 Irish Supreme Court ruling effectively halting Gibney’s original prosecution was made by a panel of justices that included Susan Denham, later the chief justice.
Denham’s brother, Patrick Gageby, was Gibney’s lawyer. This connection was reported and questioned inside Ireland only by an alternative news website, Broadsheet, which stopped publishing in 2022. In 2019, the Irish judiciary adopted new ethical guidelines calling for judges to recuse themselves in cases involving relatives.
Former Irish legislator, Maureen O’Sullivan, has campaigned to have former Irish national swim team coach George Gibney extradited from the U.S. to face renewed sex abuse allegations.
Anti-abuse activists have said they believe the swimming coaches trade group, the American Swimming Coaches Association, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., engineered the U.S. job offer letter. ASCA’s advertised services for members include troubleshooting visas.
Moreover, a top ASCA official at the time of Gibney’s first round of legal difficulties and his pursuit of a visa was Peter Banks, his former assistant coach at the swimming team out of Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, County Dublin.
Banks went on to a coaching career in both Ireland and the U.S., and to U.S. citizenship and positions on the Olympic coaching staffs of both countries — one of them the top job at Swim Ireland for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
A 2020 British Broadcasting Company podcast series — “Where Is George Gibney?”— produced and narrated by Mark Horgan, has been cited by Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin and others as the key to the breakthrough of the Irish government’s decision to seek Gibney’s extradition. According to court filings, Gibney is wanted on 78 counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted rape, all dating back to the 70s and 80s.
These are based on complaints sworn out by four Irish women who came forward following the BBC podcasts. They are also entirely new allegations, not attempts to retry elements of the 1993 indictment. Gibney, who is being represented by a public defender, agreed to extradition.
Interviewed on the podcast, Irish-American coach Banks acknowledged consulting with Gibney on his visa paperwork.
Similar questions of involvement with Gibney have been raised with respect to USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport of swimming in the United States.
The organization has acknowledged that Gibney was a member when he coached in Arvada in 1995.
In 2010, USA Swimming’s CEO Chuck Wielgus, who died in 2017, was asked about Gibney in a deposition in a civil lawsuit by a victim of another coach’s abuse.
Wielgus replied that the name “does not ring a bell,” before adding: “Actually — sounds like a — sounds like an Irish — is he an Irish coach? … Yeah, I think I’ve heard the name.”
In 2021, a USA Swimming spokesperson said that, prior to 2013, “USA Swimming’s rule prohibited sexual misconduct by a member.
The rule was then changed in 2013 to sexual misconduct at any time — past or present.
Unfortunately, given Gibney has not been a member since 1996, he has never been subject to the updated rule.”
Abuse lawsuit testimony and discovery have confirmed that USA Swimming maintains, in addition to the list of banned coaches, a secret “flagged” list of individuals who are not allowed membership or association. David Berkoff, a Hall of Fame swimmer who served a term as an elected USA Swimming vice president, testified to the existence of the flagged list in a 2022 civil trial against USA Swimming for its alleged culpability in the abuses of a coach in North Carolina.
While on the board of directors, Berkoff also circulated a research memorandum with information about dozens of coaches, Gibney among them, who were not on the banned list but carried the baggage of serious allegations, yet eluded USA Swimming’s banned status for jurisdictional or other reasons. Berkoff’s list included Gibney.
USA Swimming did not respond to a request for comment for this story, including a question as to whether Gibney is on the flagged list.
During his period in Colorado, after losing the coaching job in Arvada, Gibney’s activities with youth in other capacities drew questions, but no action by police or immigration authorities.
He was on the board of the Metropolitan State College Lab School at Lookout Mountain, a program focused on at-risk youth. And he chaired what his résumé called the International Peru Eye Clinic Foundation, a group believed to have made one or more medical missionary trips to Peru, serving young patients, through his Denver-area Catholic parish.
Following the first reports in 2018 of his missionary work, an investigation was undertaken by Jane Khodarkovsky, a human trafficking finance specialist at the Department of Justice’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), according to FBI agents speaking anonymously because the probe was not publicly announced.
As part of it, agents traveled to Peru to find out more about the activities there from nearly 20 years earlier.
As to whether the MLARS investigation factored into the decision by the U.S. government to execute the current Irish extradition warrant, DOJ spokesperson Nicole Navas said the department would have no comment beyond its news release containing the basic facts of Gibney’s arrest.
Khodarkovsky did not respond to a request for comment.
Living in Florida in 2010, during a time when he faced a new round of publicity of the Irish extradition campaign, Gibney applied for naturalized citizenship. Documents in the FOIA case show that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) bounced the application and invited him to resubmit it after first correcting the failure to answer correctly the question of whether he had ever been arrested or charged with a crime.
Evin Daly, an Irish-American who runs an advocacy group, One Child International, had alerted U.S. officials to the details of Gibney’s 1990s arrest and indictment. (In 1998, an Irish government report on widespread abuse in the country’s youth swimming programs had concluded that the evidence accumulated against him by police “vindicated” his many accusers.)
USCIS, a State Department agency, ultimately rejected Gibney’s citizenship application. The FOIA documents show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was brought in to consult on whether Gibney’s withholding of key information on his citizenship application would bring other consequences. According to a letter by an ICE official, the determination was made that Gibney was not “removable” because he had never been convicted of a crime.
This month’s arrest marked the anti-abuse campaign’s long-sought victory to bring him before Irish criminal courts for a second time. Until her retirement in 2020, a leader of the campaign was Irish legislator Maureen O’Sullivan.
One allegation against Gibney is that in 1991, while still coaching in Ireland, he is purported to have raped and impregnated a 17-year-old swimmer on a training trip in Tampa, Fla.
The woman recounted the incident, on camera with her face obscured, in 2006 on the Irish television program “Prime Time.”
In 2015, Justine McCarthy of the Irish edition of the Times of London — now a columnist for the Irish Times — reported that the woman told Garda, Ireland’s national police force, “that a high-ranking official in the sport” gave her drugs that made her groggy and traveled with her to a London abortion clinic to terminate the pregnancy.
The report said both the woman and her parents gave written statements to the police regarding the alleged rape and its aftermath.
U.S. attorney Little said that while the Gibney arrest was cause for celebration, especially for the four female complainants and for those who previously sought redress for abuse, some of them now dead, it could not substitute for a solution to the systematic problem of youth sports coach abuse.
“Justice is important, and that’s true even in very old cases like Gibney’s that carry the danger of ‘justice delayed, justice denied,’” Little said. “But for fixing the ongoing vulnerability of young athletes to the predation of authority figures, an even more important principle is institutional accountability.
“George Gibney and many others like him have been enabled for years, for decades, by sports governance bodies in every country, which care most about protecting themselves and bringing in more medals and more money.”
California-based journalist Irvin Muchnick is author of “Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe,” which was published last year.
