Former Irish Olympic coach Ger Doyle has been released from prison after serving four years in prison on sexual assault charges, and this week, he claimed his victims “ruined [his] life.”
The Sunday World talked to Doyle this week, after the former swim coach was released from prison, and Doyle didn’t appear ready to apologize.
“Why should I apologise?” he says in the Sunday World story here. “I did nothing wrong. They [the victims] ruined my life.”
Doyle was convicted of 34 counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual assault in 2010, but got a retrial after an appeal. The second trial also convicted him, and Doyle just got out of prison after serving four years of a six-and-a-half-year sentence, the Sunday World reports.
The assaults happened throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. He was convicted for incidents with five different boys from ages 10 and 15.
Doyle said the victims falsified their accusations in order to bring a civil suit against him.
“During the trial they were asked if they were taking a civil case and they said no,” Doyle says in the Sunday World piece. “After the case ended they launched it.”
Doyle also said that during his time in prison, he met multiple other convicted sex offenders who he claims were not guilty as well: “When you’re inside you know from talking to people who are guilty and who are not guilty. A lot of people inside are not guilty – at least not of what they’ve been convicted of,” he said.
The Sunday World piece goes into more detail about the specifics of Doyle’s conduct with his victims, and you can read those details by following this link.
Nearly a decade after the abuses for which he’d eventually be convicted, Doyle would become a national team coach for Ireland, earning a role as an Olympic team coach in 2000. An illness kept him from actually coaching at the Sydney Olympics, but he got his chance four years later at the 2004 Athens Games.
it is of primary importance of all adults (no matter what their role) to prevent abuse of this nature. i don’t believe him.
“Everyone in here is innocent” says Morgan Freeman’s character Red, a convicted murderer, in The Shawshank Redemption
And the beat goes on…
It sounds like he’s either in denial or genuinely believes he has done nothing wrong. If either is correct, he may still be a threat to society and shouldn’t be free. Scary.