No longer silent Harrowing story of swim coach abuse victim
In a raw, emotional and deeply harrowing interview, Karen Leach tells Mark Gallagher how it is her life’s mission to campaign for the protection of children in sport following the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of disgraced swimming coach Derry O’Rourke
WHEN Karen Leach first read the story of Choi Suk-hyeon, the young South Korean triathlete who took her own life in June, it stopped her in her tracks. After her death, Choi’s family released secret recordings that documented the years of physical and psychological abuse she had suffered at the hands of her coach and senior team-mates.
Choi had reported what had happened, but to no avail.
‘I lit a candle and said prayers for her,’ says Leach. ‘It impacted me because, 22 years ago, I walked into a Garda station in Tallaght to report what happened to me at around the same time that girl was born.’
It’s for that reason, and others, that Karen Leach refuses to be silent. She is determined to keep speaking up to ensure that sport is as safe as it can be for children. And nobody has to suffer in silence or end up with the life she had.
This past week, she has been speaking to the Lawn Tennis Association in the UK over safety measures. She sits on the advisory panel for Sport England. She has consulted with authorities in Norway, Iceland and Canada, Germany and Spain. She has forged a reputation as a leading international voice against sexual abuse and harassment in sport. Yet, in her own country, she feels like she’s whistling in the wind. She has met a wall of silence as if nobody wants to know.
At one time, Leach was a promising young swimmer with a dream of representing Ireland at the Olympics. Good results in the Community Games as a 10-year-old brought her to the attention of Derry O’Rourke, then-national coach.
Leach was happy in the Sea-Spray club on the Navan Road, but O’Rourke was persistent – ringing her parents in their Leixlip home, telling them he was the best coach in Ireland and would set their daughter on a path towards the Olympics.
‘He kept calling, telling mam and dad the potential I had and with the correct training and right coach – and he said he was the best coach in
Ireland – he would get me there,’ Leach recalls. ‘It’s not often the national coach rings your home and says your daughter had the potential to get to the Olympics.’
Eventually, she joined O’Rourke’s club in Palmerstown.
‘The day I went to King’s Hospital, I walked in a very happy little girl with a very proud mam and dad and a dream to go to the Olympics. Seven years later, when I left, I was dead. He had killed me, killed everything about me. Closest thing to murder and being left alive.’
We’re sitting in the cafe of Glenroyal Hotel in Maynooth on a busy Tuesday morning.
Leach, 51, still has good days and bad days but is energised by her campaigning work to make sport safe for children, like her own 13-year-son whom she adores.
The recent release of Where is George Gibney?, the superb podcast series produced by Mark Horgan and Ciarán Cassidy, has swirled up plenty of memories and she feels it’s important that it reaches as wide an audience as possible, that swimmers get their voices heard and get justice. It’s why she relates her own experience, so people never forget and so they understand how easy it can be to abuse a child in sport.
‘My dream was to swim at the Olympics and I paid a very high price for it. I lost everything,’ she says softly. ‘I might have never got there, but that’s not the point. The point is I had a dream and did everything I could to achieve it.
‘He [O’Rourke] took every single thing that was important to me. It has taken me 40 years to be well, I still have up days and down days, but I can’t stop speaking out.
‘I was silenced as a little girl by what he did, silenced by being sick with anxiety, serious mental health problems, eating disorders and suicide attempts. I found my voice now and can’t stay silent.
‘I have to do everything I possibly can to ensure the safety of children and young people in sport.’
Leach can’t pinpoint when the abuse started but says she doesn’t remember a time when it didn’t happen, when she wasn’t in fear of O’Rourke and his presence.
‘There was never a time when nothing happened. People think abuse is just sexual, Derry O’Rourke abused me sexually, mentally, physically and emotionally. He had total control over my life. Over my swimming, my body. Everything.
‘Control over mam and dad, my family. What he said went. He was the boss, God. He was in charge, he was the best coach in Ireland. He told us that every day.
‘Everything you did, everywhere you went, he was there. While I was so frightened, I was also in this bubble. He was my coach and he told me I was going to the Olympics. The plan was in place. All the targets and times. The Europeans, the world championships, the Olympics. He had set it all out.’
Karen was at King’s Hospital a year when she was selected for her first international competition in England. Her father eager to go as support. Only for O’Rourke to intervene.
‘He told them “I will look after her, you don’t need to come”,’ she says, almost choking on the memory.
In her early years at the club, her potential shone despite the abuse. However, reflecting back now, she realises that she was swimming – and performing – out of fear.
‘You always felt his presence. His voice. You would be in an international meet, any competition, hundreds of people screaming, but in the pool, you’d just hear him. He’d shout “Go!” and when he did, I knew I better move or I would be in trouble when I got out.
‘I remember the relay finals of the British age groups in Leeds. I was still very young. Thousands of people there, a massive complex with a 50m pool when we didn’t have any in Ireland. He warned me that, before I dived in, I better look up.
‘The biggest race of my life, and as my friend was swimming into me, I had to look up at my coach. He had his rolled-up programme and he just lifted his hand. That was a warning. I swam for my life in that race…’ she says, trailing off.
‘Now, I realise I swam out of fear. I didn’t know it then. As far as I was concerned, this was the Olympic coach and he loved us. He was making us the best. Only now, looking back, I know that he was not the best coach. Neither was George Gibney or the others who abused swimmers. But I tell you who was the best, the swimmers. We put our heart and soul into it, got into the pool every morning.
‘That’s one of my messages to young athletes. Please remember who is doing this, who is getting up every morning to train in their chosen sport. No coach is the best, they can’t be, not without the young people who have dreams.
‘He had me convinced that I couldn’t achieve anything without him. But I was the one swimming. In the end, the young girl who walked into that pool as a good swimmer with potential and an Olympic dream left a useless swimmer. I was no good.’
Leach spent her life thinking her swimming talent was an illusion until a chance conversation at a Safe Sport conference in Spain a couple of years ago.
‘I believed my whole life I was not worthy of being called an athlete. It wasn’t until that conference when someone beside me said “Karen, you were an athlete” and I replied that I wasn’t an athlete, I just used to swim.
‘She looked at me and asked; ‘Has he stolen that from you, too?” I realised I denied my whole life
‘When he was finished, I would run out to the car, go home, have my breakfast, go to school – but I was a zombie’
I was silenced by what he did. I’ve found my voice. I have to do everything I can to ensure the safety of children in sport’
that I was a swimmer with ability and potential and an Olympic dream. I had to reclaim that because I was an athlete and I wasn’t a c**p swimmer.’
BY her mid-teens, Leach’s body was shutting down.
‘When I was 15, 16, I remember diving into the pool and just being in pain. I couldn’t go fast enough. Because of what he was doing to me, everything was shutting down.
‘When I wasn’t performing, he started to play a bigger game. I wasn’t making times so he was threatening to take me off the A team. He started playing games with me mentally and emotionally, as well as sexually abusing me.’
Leach recalls running out of the pool every morning, pleading for the other girls to wait. But they were running scared as well.
‘Of course, they couldn’t stay. They were trying to get away, too. I would hear the plastic door at the foot pool, the chair creaking, hear him walking through the shower, on the footmat and then hear the door, see the handle moving. I was rushing, trying to get my clothes on, and I would see his toe, then his foot… would see a knee.
‘Then I would see the belly, he would either have his usual jumper or speedo t-shirt and he would be standing there and he’d shut the door and that was me, trapped.
‘He’d tell me he was checking me for swimming and would do whatever he wanted to do to me until he told me I could go home.
‘When he decided he was finished, I would run out to my dad’s car. Go home, have my breakfast. And dad would take me to school – I went to school after that happened, but I was a zombie – and mam would bring me back to the pool after school. That was every day. Monday to Friday.’
Leach was concerned by recent Covid-19 guidelines instructing parents to remain in the car during training.
‘Are you for real? Stay in the car? My dad was told to stay in his car and I was being abused, sexually, mentally and emotionally, on the other side of the wall. A parent has the right to go in and watch the child and make sure they are safe.’
In 1986, at 17, Karen escaped O’Rourke.
Her father was working in London at the time and the rest of the family had decided to visit him once the national championships were over.
‘Everything revolved around my swimming. Everything. I swam in the nationals, swam badly and I went to O’Rourke and told him I would not be returning next season. And he just stared at me, not blinking and said “You will be back”.’
Through a friend, she got a job in a hotel in England and told her parents that she was staying.
‘They were beside themselves, what about swimming, what about college? But I wasn’t going back.’
For years after that, she did her utmost to forget. But a call from a friend in Dublin in 1992 changed everything.
‘She told me he had been arrested and wondered what that was about. I said I didn’t know. But as soon as I put down the phone, my whole insides started somersaulting. My body knew, even if my mind refused to acknowledge it, because I had buried it deep inside.’
Karen came home, and suddenly, people were talking about O’Rourke (she highlights Bart Nolan Snr and his tireless campaigning on behalf of the swimmers).
But she still didn’t dare tell anyone what had happened, even after he was imprisoned for the first time, until she heard a familiar voice on the car radio chronicling the abuse she suffered. The girl who used to get changed beside her in King’s Hospital. She went into shock.
‘Even after I went to the Guards, I was still frightened by him. The day he walked in for the trial, I ran out of the court and locked myself in the toilet, I was that scared.’
Following her evidence, she spiralled into a life of self-destruction and depression. She spent 10 years in and out of St John of God Hospital as a psychiatric patient.
‘I have taken every tablet and antidepressant, sleeping tablets, valium, tablets to wake me up and tablets to put me to sleep, tablets to stop me shaking and tablets to help me live, because I didn’t want to live. All I wanted to do was to die.’
The worst impact was on her parents. After the case ended, her mother told her that she was sorry that she hadn’t kept her safe.
‘She told me that on the Thursday and on the Bank Holiday Monday, I got a call from the Guards, that they had pulled out mam’s body from the canal in Leixlip. I had to tell my dad and brothers that mam was dead,’ she recalls tearfully.
‘For years, I used to blame myself, that I shouldn’t have said anything. It has only been in the last couple of years that I realised it wasn’t my fault. The only person to blame was Derry O’Rourke. He might as well have stood at the side of the canal and pushed her in.’
When her father, who had been wracked with guilt for driving Karen to the pool, suffered a stroke a few years ago, she told him before he died he was the best father anyone could wish for. ‘That was important,’ she says.
The abuse suffered by Leach and countless others hurt many lives. And it is why she is determined that nothing like that should happen again. Having found her voice, she is keen that awareness is highlighted in all sports.
‘We need policies, procedures and vetting, but they must be implemented, followed, practised and communicated, not just a box-ticking exercise.
‘Communication is the most important thing, so young people know there are procedures in place for them to be safer and to be able to ask for help. It is every child’s, young person’s, athlete’s right to be kept safe in sport. It is every adult’s responsibility to keep them safe.
‘Anyone who is being sexually abused, pushed too far, mistreated emotionally, mentally, physically, not being included in their sport, excluded from teams, games, has a right to ask for help.
‘Please ask for help. If the first person doesn’t hear you, help you, please don’t give up, go to someone else until someone listens. This is very important to highlight from me. Part of my message is that nobody suffers on their own in silence any more.’
As Karen Leach explains, she is speaking out for a very important reason. ‘Abuse is real. It has not gone away. It is happening in Ireland and across the world today in 2020. I don’t want any child to end up with a life like mine.’