How George Gibney's idyllic life in US was upturned by armed police

Times

a day ago

At his neat bungalow home in a quiet middle-class neighbourhood of an unremarkable Florida suburb, nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary to George Gibney as he set about his usual routine last Tuesday morning.
Hours later, federal law enforcement officers pulled up outside 882 Breakwater Drive in Altamonte Springs, drew out their guns, staked out the house, and yelled through a megaphone for the 77-year-old to come out with his hands up as shocked neighbours watched.
'George Gibney woke up thinking it was just another normal day and then the US Marshals Service came to his door,' said Evin Daly, founder and chief executive of One Child International, a US child protection agency, who has tracked the former Ireland national swimming coach since 2010 and maintained pressure on authorities to act on allegations of sexual abuse. 'Tuesday was a rude awakening for Gibney. His life is now changed.'
So too, allegedly, were the lives of four girls aged between eight and 15 whom Gibney is charged with indecently assaulting during his tenure as coach of Ireland's national and Olympic swimming teams in the 1970s and 1980s.
In June 2023, Dublin metropolitan district court issued warrants for his arrest on 78 assault charges, plus one of attempted rape.
Yet Gibney, who has lived in the US since 1995, convinced his housemate and landlord, Pedro Colon, 75, he was innocent. 'He has nothing to worry about … there's nothing to answer,' Colon insisted to The Sunday Times in November 2023.
It would be another two years before American prosecutors, acting on an extradition request from Ireland, dispatched marshals to the pair's home. At an 11-minute hearing in federal court in Orlando on Tuesday afternoon, the court held that Gibney was not to be released due to being a flight risk, pending his extradition to Ireland.
Court documents reveal that the operation came after days of planning in which a judge agreed to place the criminal complaint and all other legal documents under seal, preventing them from entering the public domain, to keep the pending arrest from leaking.
'Such disclosure could result in the fugitive being alerted to his criminal liability and cause him to take measures to flee or avoid capture,' Gregory Kehoe, US attorney for the Middle District of Florida, stated in a motion filed in federal court in Orlando on June 25. 'Concern for the need to apprehend the fugitive, and to do so in a manner consistent with officer safety, constitutes a legitimate prosecutorial reason, particularly in this case where the United States has a treaty obligation to apprehend and extradite the fugitive.'
Magistrate judge Daniel Irick granted the motion the same day, ordering that court documents including the motion and his order granting it could be released only once Gibney was taken into custody. He has a date to return in person on Friday for a detention hearing at the Orlando courthouse. There, the judge must consider whether there are grounds to keep him in custody. In extradition cases, release can be granted only under specific, and rarely met, criteria.
'The court should detain Gibney without bond,' Kehoe urged in a 21-page memorandum to the court. 'The government is unaware of any 'special circumstances' that would justify bail in this case.'
Extradition to Ireland could take weeks and will involve a further hearing at which the judge must determine the sufficiency of the charges for which Gibney's extradition is being sought. The US secretary of state, not the judge, makes the call as to whether to grant extradition.
There can be no witnesses called and the rights of the accused are 'severely constrained', Kehoe said, citing as an example the fact that there was no scope in law for a person to argue their innocence at an extradition hearing. 'It is not to determine the guilt or innocence of the fugitive. That determination is reserved for the foreign court,' Kehoe stated in court documents. 'An extradition hearing is not a criminal proceeding.'
Gibney's return to Ireland would bring to an end 30 years of residency in the US. He moved to Florida after avoiding prosecution in Ireland in 1994, which was prevented following judicial review proceedings on the basis of the length of time that had elapsed since the alleged incidents took place.
He initially lived in a rented apartment near Orlando but left after neighbours became aware that he had faced prosecution in the 1990s.
In latter years he has lived with Colon, having previously served with him as a member of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's fraternal service order dedicated to charitable works, but he no longer does so.
Gibney is said to have worked at some point for a hospice and to have volunteered for a time with Special Olympics, a sports organisation for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, which stopped after the allegations against him in Ireland came to light.
Key to maintaining pressure on the authorities to prosecute Gibney was a 2010 book by the Irish journalist Justine McCarthy, and a 2018 podcast by the broadcaster Mark Horgan, who also worked with the BBC on an investigative documentary series in 2020, Where is George Gibney?.
'This day was bound to come, thanks to the perseverance of people like Justine and Mark. Above all, it's a testament to the survivors who never, ever gave up,' Daly said. 'A huge thank you to the gardai for assembling this case. We are hopeful that Gibney will now finally face the courts in Dublin.'