The Trib (24 page)

The abuse was a regular occurrence, becoming increasingly severe and rough. Once, when she was seven, she came home with scrapes and bruises and had to make excuses to her parents. When she was nine, her parents, worried about her psychological withdrawal, brought her to Temple Street Children's Hospital. It was supposed that her symptoms were a natural response to her mother's prolonged absence from home.

Her parents hired a private tutor to come to the house because she had fallen behind academically in school. All the while, the abuse continued, not stopping until she was eleven, when the other family moved away from the locality.

When a swimming pool opened in her neighbourhood and she went there for the first time, she discovered a means of escape. ‘It felt like I was flying,' she remembers. ‘Like I'd been freed. I put everything into it. I really focused. It happened so quickly. One year, I wasn't able to swim. Within a year, I was breaking Irish records. People were wondering who I was.'

One day, a swimming coach phoned her parents after seeing her swim and told them she had the potential to be a great champion. Trojans Swimming Club in Blackrock was recommended, the citation eulogising its founder, George Gibney, the Irish Amateur Swimming Association's national coach when she joined in 1990 and Olympic coach to the Irish team in Seoul two years earlier. In 1990, most of the club's most accomplished swimmers left Trojans, their puzzling departure barely whispered in swimming circles. (It has since emerged that, in 1990, a male swimmer informed a senior swimming official that George Gibney had raped him when he was eleven.) Even though the pool was eighteen miles from their home, she and her father rose from bed at four o'clock every morning to be at the pool by 5.15 a.m., as stipulated. While her father slept outside in the car, she was swimming her heart out inside.

‘I was so driven. All I wanted to do was to go to the Olympics at any cost. That was my dream.'

Gibney showered her with attention. Promised her he would make her a star. Gave her swimming togs and tracksuits and hats and goggles. Hugged her every time she swam well. That year, at the national championships, she streaked home first in the 50 m freestyle, the 100 m freestyle, the 100 m breaststroke and the 100 m butterfly. She was sixteen years old, perfectly poised to be selected for the next Olympic games in Barcelona in 1992.

Then the sun went in. She was competing in Holland with the club. After one of the swim meets, she returned to her hotel room to dress for a disco that was part of the swimmers' itinerary. ‘Gibney came to the room and started saying how bad I was and that I was never going to go anywhere. Suddenly, he jumped on me. He pushed me down on the bed and then left the room. After that he completely ignored me for a couple of weeks. I was wondering what did I do wrong. Back home, at training, he'd act as if I wasn't there. I felt all this guilt. I was swimming my hardest, training extra hard to get his attention.'

In 1991 Trojans organised a training camp in Tampa, Florida, to prepare for the National Championships in Belfast, where swimmers would be selected for the Olympics. The swimmers were assigned to host families, returning for a daily siesta to their houses after morning training and before the afternoon session. One day, her host family was away and she remained at the poolside with another girl after everyone dispersed.

‘Gibney appeared out of nowhere and said, “Come on, we'll go for breakfast.” The three of us went for breakfast. Then he drove us to a hotel that I didn't know. He brought me to a room and said, “You, get in there,” and he went off with the other girl. I don't know where he brought her.

‘He comes back and starts ranting and raving that I was so bad at swimming and how disappointed in me he was. I was sitting on a double bed. He jumped on me and raped me, there on the bed. He said if I told anybody, he would sue my family and nobody would believe me because he was George Gibney and he would bankrupt my family. Then he left.

‘When he was gone, I just sat on the floor in the room. I couldn't leave because I didn't know where I was. He came back about three hours later with his wife and loads of kids and said: “Come on you, we're going swimming now.”

‘People saw me crying but nobody came near me. None of the swimming managers who were there approached me. My host family asked me what was wrong and I said I was homesick. I rang home and I told my mother that Gibney locked me in a room but I didn't tell her he raped me.'

At the National Championships in Belfast that year, her legs shook so much standing on the starting block that she could not swim.

‘Even then, I kept crying all the time. I couldn't stop.'

Finally, in 1994, her trauma reached crisis point. She feigned an injury to get out of swimming in a competition and was referred to a doctor appointed by the Olympic Council of Ireland. The dam burst. She told the doctor about the prolonged abuse by the grandfather when she was a child and about being raped by Gibney.

She made a statement to gardaí about the first series of abuse. Two other females came forward and alleged that they had also been abused by the man. He fought the prosecution through the courts, seeking a judicial review but finally pleaded guilty in 1999. He was sentenced to five years' jail on conviction of seven charges of child sexual abuse of the three girls. The man is dead now. She heard he died in prison of natural causes. In passing sentence, the judge remarked that it was probably no coincidence that one of the girls was later abused by her swimming coach.

‘I felt I got a bit of justice,' she says. ‘It wasn't my imagination. It wasn't me going mad. It wasn't all in my head.'

That experience encouraged her to make a statement against Gibney. He had eluded seven rape charges on the technicality that they were too old to defend. Yet, most of the Gibney charges pertained to the same years (or post-dated them) as the charges against the convicted grandfather.

The explanation she was given for the DPP's decision not to seek Gibney's extradition on foot of the second investigation was that he was entitled to insist on having each of the four complainants' cases tried separately. Again, this had not arisen in the case of the grandfather or in the vast majority of sexual-abuse prosecutions.

‘The guards were absolutely brilliant. They couldn't have done enough,' she says.

She is pursuing a civil action for damages against the Irish Amateur Swimming Association, the Olympic Council of Ireland and George Gibney. (This journalist has seen the legal statement of claim lodged in court, despite a denial by Swim Ireland that any such legal action exists.) Meanwhile, she is left to cope with the devastation. She takes six pills for her mental well-being every night, attends a psychiatrist every week and a cognitive counsellor twice a week. She does not socialise and has never had a proper romantic relationship. She has suffered from anorexia, dropping to under five-and-a-half stone at one stage though she stands 5ft 10" tall, and has had surgery for the scars left by her self-mutilation.

She is too embarrassed by the cut marks on her skin (the most recent episode was last November) to ever swim again.

‘I'm sorry to say this,' says her mother, sitting beside her on the couch, holding her hand and looking searchingly into her daughter's empty eyes, ‘but, sometimes, she's like the living dead.'

They're behind you! The banks are behind you!

Will there be a fairytale resolution to the latest unfortunate twist in the Panto Queen's life?

21 February 2010

A
s the number of house repossessions rises, there are the ordinary folk out there finding some reassurance that the rich and famous are not immune from losing their homes either. Idrone House, a 300-year-old Georgian mansion in Knocklyon, South Dublin, fell under the public spotlight last week due to proceedings issued by Bank of Scotland (Ireland). The owner is the actor, comedian, veteran pantomime star, and recently turned ‘sugarcrafter', Adele King.

It's not the first time Twink, as King is better known, has faced a repossession order. Back in 1993, she nearly lost her former home in Rathfarnham due to what she claimed were debts accrued from her dealings with jailed solicitor Elio Malocco. In 2006, the fifty-eight-year-old and her former husband David Agnew (forty-eight) had to pay a joint court judgement for €19,000 after being sued by a firm of builders for unpaid debts. One of the alterations to Idrone House in recent years is the creation of what King has described as her ‘sugarcraft loft for big little girls'. The room was originally her ex-husband's office, and is now a confection in pink in every sense. This is where she now crafts her ‘edible art'. But she long ago gave up trying to ice over the cracks in her marriage.

King's personal as well as professional life have been played out on the public stage practically since she became a ‘Gaiety Kiddie' at the age of five. But expletive-laden lines delivered to Agnew's answering machine after their twenty-one-year marriage broke down in 2004 have typecast her in a new role – that of wronged, and very fearsome, wife – ever since.

The tirade allegedly resulted from the failure of Mr Twink, or, as she dubbed him in that infamous message, the ‘fat, bald, middle-aged dickhead', to attend the birthday party of their eldest daughter Chloe (20). The message spread like wildfire via email, and went around the world and back again as a YouTube hit.

Undoubtedly she is what might politely be called ‘high octane'. Someone who has met her professionally over the years describes King as ‘draining. That said, I really like her. She's our Cher, the kind of star you rarely see in this country. Once you can get beyond the fact that she always seems to be ‘on', she's a very bright, well-read, informed and talented woman.'

She looks after herself, too. And you won't find her eating any of that cake she ices – she hates the stuff. Sweets, likewise. One gym member recalls seeing the formidable panto queen in action.

‘She really doesn't do things by halves and would go at the gym equipment like a woman possessed. Definitely not the sort of person you want to have a row with.'

In interviews, she invariably comes across as a resolute self-promoter. Who doesn't know that Twink wanted to be a doctor, can write and direct panto, do serious acting (
The Vagina Monologues, Menopause the Musical
), impersonates everyone she refers to, and ices cakes like a sculptor? Then there's the collecting passion, from dolls' houses to dogs. Among her many adored ‘mutts' is one ‘Bertie Ahern' who she found abandoned and tied to a lamppost under an election poster.

Shouldn't the star herself be deserving of some public sympathy just now?

‘I don't think we like people who are that ‘full on' in this country,' says a former showbusiness colleague. ‘And some people will secretly be pleased she's having financial problems. She doesn't deserve that.'

The woman herself doesn't harbour delusions about the fickleness of public affection. ‘I know people think that I'm brash, arrogant, full of meself,' she has said. ‘But that's only one side of things, and most entertainers are terrible cowards underneath it all, terribly shy, insecure people.'

She views motherhood as her most important role; she frequently refers in interviews to daughters Chloe and Naomi (15). Her relationship with her eldest, a successful singer in her own right, is like that of ‘an auld married couple'. King has said they were both very protective of the younger girl when news broke of Agnew's relationship with clarinetist Ruth Hickey (32), and the impending arrival of their child. Naomi was ‘very crushed, terribly hurt, particularly by the news of the new arrival. And they both felt he did not understand that he wasn't just cheating on me, he was cheating on them.'

But she recently revealed that on the day their divorce was finalised, both she and Agnew exchanged sympathetic looks. ‘We both started crying, and he wrote me a lovely card.'