The Packet:
How Diana Nyad Attempted to Manipulate the International Swimming Hall of Fame and Failed

On March 4, 2019, Steven Munatones — creator and main administrator of Openwaterpedia, founder of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), and Diana Nyad’s most ardent defender in the marathon swimming community — visited a Huntington Beach post office and sent a packet of documents to Brent Rutemiller, the CEO of Fort Lauderdale’s International Swimming Hall of Fame. Munatones and Nyad wanted to convince Rutemiller that Diana would never lie, that her swim was legitimate, and that any cheating allegations were manufactured by an envious trio of haters. Nyad’s adoring public, her “honorable character,” and the “fair and noble way” she had pursued her career proved that she would never do anything to endanger the sanctity of her Cuba-Florida dream.

The timing of the packet’s arrival in Fort Lauderdale dovetails precisely with the early-2019 hacking of Openwaterpedia, “the Wikipedia for the open water swimming world” (according to its home page). What’s more, the hack and the packet have a common goal: exalt Diana Nyad. So, before we look at the documents, here’s an overview of how the Openwaterpedia saboteur cleared the runway before the packet touched down.

Note: I use “saboteur,” “hacker,” “vandal,” and their derivatives interchangeably to refer to the person (or possibly persons) who broke into Openwaterpedia and damaged entries. This individual is separate from the person who instigated the attack.

See this “Nyad-ISHOF Packet Timeline” for an illustrated summary of packet-related events, 2012–2019.

Raising Diana: The Openwaterpedia Hack

On February 15, 2019, a hacker began vandalizing Openwaterpedia pages. By the time the sabotage ended in April, the hacker had damaged over 3300 entries, mainly those of individual swimmers. Though Openwaterpedia administrators knew about the vandalism, repairs didn’t begin until October. For months, then, every vandalized entry contained false and misleading information that visitors would have assumed was accurate. The hacker must have figured that vandalizing over 3000 entries would be enough to hide the damage to their 15 primary targets: all of the greatest marathon swimmers of the 1970s (with two telling exceptions). However, the hacker left footprints, all of which point toward a lone instigator and a single purpose.

The early vandalism seemed random, a series of petty attacks that scrambled letters and numbers. Everything changed, however, at the beginning of March. On March 3, the vandal zeroed in on five of the greatest marathon swimmers of the ’70s and moved all of their 1970s achievements into the 1960s.

Those five athletes, every one of them an International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSOF) inductee, included Australian great Des Renford. His 1975–1979 reign as King of the Channel — the man who had completed more English Channel swims than any other — moved to ’65–’69. The five also included Canadian Cindy Nicholas. In 1977, she became the first woman to complete an English Channel two-way. That’s the honor Diana Nyad sought when she made three unsuccessful Channel attempts in 1976. When the vandal finished with Nicholas’s entry, Openwaterpedia showed her accomplishing her first EC double in 1966. She would have been nine years old.

To make those changes, the hacker uploaded and ran a bot — a small, autonomous program — that changed every “7” to a “6.” In doing so, the vandal, likely an anonymous contractor working from the Balkans,* effectively moved every 1970s achievement into the 1960s. When the hacker was done, the entries for the five Hall-of-Famers showed no ’70s swims.

*The hacker also substituted the Cyrillic letter “dze,” written “ѕ,” for the Latin “s” in thousands of URLs. The two letters appear identical in most fonts, so it was almost impossible to figure out why thousands of links stopped working. Only one language, Macedonian, retains the Cyrillic “ѕ” in its modern alphabet, hence my supposition about the hacker’s physical location. (See also CNN’s “The fake news machine: Inside a town gearing up for 2020,” about how citizens of Veles, a town in Macedonia, manufactured fake news for the 2020 U.S. presidential election.)

On March 4, the hacker made the same changes to the entries for nine more 1970s standouts (again, all IMSHOF inductees). These included Americans Sandra Bucha and John Kinsella, two pro swimmers who trounced Nyad every time they competed against her; and Britain’s Kevin Murphy, the current King of the Channel with 34 EC crossings.** The hacker left the 15th and final target, Saudi great Alawi Mohammed Makki Al-Ibrahim — who swam the Channel four times in the 1970s — until April 21. Three days later, the hacker closed up shop. By that time, only three candidates remained for greatest-of-the-1970s, Diana Nyad among them.

**Two people have completed more crossings: Australian Chloë McCardel with 39 (as of July 23, 2021) and Britain’s Alison Streeter, Queen of the Channel, with 43.

Munatones heard about the hack no later than April 16, 2019, the day he received an email from accomplished Scottish marathon swimmer Helen Beveridge. Having configured Openwaterpedia to alert her to changes in her data, Beveridge had just learned that someone vandalized her entry. “Why,” she asked Munatones, would “user Jolyn12 . . . want to make numerous malicious erroneous changes to the information on my Openwaterpedia page?”

Munatones apologized and blocked the Jolyn12 account, one of six the hacker ultimately used. On April 20, the vandal registered a new account under the name KCassidy and spent the next five days sabotaging another 2,813 pages.

Munatones shut down the KCassidy account on April 24, but three of the vandal’s aliases remain unblocked today. Munatones didn’t publicly acknowledge Openwaterpedia’s problems until July. That’s when, under pressure from the head of an organization dependant on Openwaterpedia for accurate information, he posted “Shameful, Simply And Sadly Shameful.” In the brief but overwrought piece, Munatones laments the vandalism and asks for assistance with uncovering the damage. Yet, he continued to let it stand. Up until September or October, anyone searching Openwaterpedia for the greatest swimmers of the 1970s would still just find Nyad, running a distant third, and two others.

The identities of those two provides solid evidence that Steven Munatones may have instigated or, at a minimum, abetted the vandalism.

Of all the entries for 1970s swimmers in the IMSHOF, the hacker left only two undisturbed: those of Penny Dean and Cindy Cleveland. Not coincidentally, Dean and Cleveland are the only two 1970s IMSHOF inductees with whom Munatones trained as a teen. Cleveland — with her 1977 Catalina double, 1978 Anacapa double (before anyone had ever done a single), and 1979 Catalina circumnavigation (another first) — may be the most unsung hero of 1970s marathon swimming. Dean’s 7:40 English Channel crossing in 1978 broke the overall record by more than an hour. That mark stood for 16 years, her women’s record for 28. And Dean has devoted much of her life to helping other swimmers. She coached Munatones to his win at the 1982 Windermere National Championships. She also trained Chad Hundeby, the swimmer who finally broke her English Channel record. Munatones once called Penny Dean his idol. Someone — most likely Steven — made sure no one messed with her and Cindy’s entries.

Undone

Openwaterpedia runs on the MediaWiki software platform, the same platform Wikipedia uses, as do Beachapedia, The Spaghetti Western Database, Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki), and many others. In theory, anyone can edit a wiki. And, since anyone can make mistakes or change their minds, Mediawiki offers a simple way to undo an edit: just click “undo,” and everything goes back to how it was before the most recent revision.

For example, the hacker hit Diana Nyad’s page on March 3 at 11:39 pm. Nine minutes later, the hacker clicked “undo.” In an instant, Nyad’s page reverted to its unvandalized state. Out of all the sabotaged entries, the hacker only undid the damage to eight. Of those eight, Nyad’s was the only one for a swimmer active in the ’70s.

Figure 1: The undoing of Diana Nyad’s Openwaterpedia entry. The leftmost box shows how a section of Nyad’s entry looked before the hacker struck. The middle box shows the same section immediately after the hacker vandalized (under the username “Jolyn12”). The rightmost box shows the same section just after the hacker clicked “undo.”

In other words, the hacker moved the accomplishments of 15 of the 17 greatest marathon swimmers of the 1970s — and Diana Nyad’s — from the ’70s into the ’60s. The hacker then returned Nyad’s to the ’70s, leaving all the rest in the previous decade. The purpose of the entire operation, then, seems clear: make Diana Nyad look like one of the best marathon swimmers of the 1970s while hiding that intent under a pile of chaff.

Of the eight pages the hacker repaired, they undid four almost immediately. Nyad’s was one. Another was Adam Moine’s, an entry the hacker used as a testing ground. The remaining two — the entries for Helen Beveridge and Caroline Block, the swimmer who last September became the first person to complete a Lake George double — are unique. Most importantly, their entries are the only two of the over 3300 sabotaged pages that follow this pattern:

1. Hacker vandalizes the entry.
2. Someone other than the hacker clicks “undo.” (Beveridge clicked it herself, Evan Morrison, one of the founders of the Marathon Swimmers Federation, clicked it for Block.)
3. Hacker vandalizes entry again (probably accidentally).
4. The hacker clicks “undo” within minutes as if trying fix a mistake before anyone notices.

Munatones keeps an eye on Openwaterpedia edits. So, he knew that Beveridge and Block monitored activity on their pages. Their vigilance threatened to bring unwanted attention to the hack. Munatones, however, needed Openwaterpedia to maintain Nyad’s best-of-the-’70s façade for as long as possible. So, he must have had some way of alerting his hired gun to the second round Beveridge-Block vandalism. Perhaps he configured Openwaterpedia the same way Beveridge did. The rapid fixes — three minutes for Block’s page, one for Beveridge’s — couldn’t have happened otherwise.

Razing Diana: The Packet

On March 4, 2019, the day the hacker hit the second batch of 1970s standouts, Munatones visited a post office in his home town of Huntington Beach. He carried a large manila envelope stuffed with 15 documents, 59 pages in all, relating to Diana Nyad’s as yet unratified Cuba-Florida crossing.

Two days and 2500 miles later, the packet arrived at the ISHOF. However, if Munatones and Nyad thought the packet’s intended recipient, CEO Brent Rutemiller, didn’t know about Nyad’s inclination to mangle the truth, they were wrong: he had known for close to a year if not longer. In May 2018, he had emailed Carl Williams of Fort Lauderdale’s Parks and Recreation department. The message helped block the installation of a Florida State Historical Marker honoring Nyad:

I’ve recently received copies of the material in the packet. Even if Rutemiller didn’t know about Nyad’s history of deceit, I can’t see him taking the packet seriously.

Thirteen of the fifteen documents were hand-me-downs from an earlier ratification request. “I humbly present to you this packet of materials,” Nyad writes to Munatones. In an October 8, 2018, cover letter, Nyad writes to Munatones:

Along with her unctuous solicitation, Nyad sent 10 letters of support from crew members. Nine were addressed to WOWSA and one to Nyad, presumably to pass on to WOWSA and Munatones. The similarity of the letters — the nearly verbatim recitation of Nyad’s ad hoc rules, the collective ignorance of actual marathon swimming standards, and a bizarre fixation on fins — shows that Nyad or Munatones helped the writers shape their responses. Some excerpts:

Unfortunately, the packet did not include “the book.” Instead, Nyad tossed in a 17-page history of her first four Cuba-Florida attempts; and an 11-page description of attempt number five, titled “Triumph,” in which she again hammers away at her adherence to the never-published rules. Nowhere is the hammering loudest than when Nyad stumbles toward Smathers Beach and the television cameras that will record her reverence for the rules. “All our crew had gotten to shore at this point,” she says of the finish,

Nyad admitted shortly after her crossing that crew members had touched her throughout the endeavor. So, the shouts of “don’t touch her until she’s out of the water” just added a layer of sonic misdirection to Nyad’s subterfuge.

The Rutemiller Letters

The packet’s remaining documents — two letters addressed directly to Rutemiller — ostensibly have separate authors: Diana Nyad and Bonnie Stoll, Nyad’s main handler and best friend. In style, substance, and typeface, however, the two letters match. For instance, the author uses specific words in the same idiosyncratic ways, words like “haters,” “esteemed,” and “truth” — as in “speak my truth” (from the Nyad letter) and “speak our own truth” (from the Stoll letter).

The author uses scare quotes in identical circumstances, as in, “I sincerely appreciate your having ‘listened’” (Nyad letter) and “Thank you for ‘listening,’ (Stoll letter).

The author begins the letters similarly: “Allow me to start by” (Nyad) and “Allow me to introduce myself.” The author ends both letters with “Respectfully submitted.”

For more examples, please see “Notes on Bonnie Stoll’s letter to Brent Rutemiller.”

Bonnie Stoll did not write to Rutemiller. She did, however, contribute one of the crew support letters. In that document, you will find no haters, no vitriol, no personal attacks. You will find a kind, thoughtful person who respects Diana Nyad and sometimes uses ALL CAPS. You won’t find all caps in either of the letters to Rutemiller.

No one but Nyad could have written those two letters. Having already devoted most of a six-page document to her grievances and knowing that further fulmination would appear unseemly, she submitted a second letter under another name. That gave her a longer lance on which to skewer her opponents. Note that Stoll didn’t sign the letter, so Nyad may have sent it without Stoll’s knowledge or approval. (I asked Stoll about this but have received no response.)

Curiously, nowhere in either of the letters does Nyad ask Rutemiller to help ratify her swim, though sending the packet can have no other intent. Nyad makes just one outright request of Rutemiller, who also serves as publisher of Swimming World magazine: “If you deemed it a worthwhile endeavor, I would like to write an open letter to my fellow marathon swimmers . . . for publication in Swimming World.”

So, would Steven Munatones sabotage his own website to clear the way for the packet, as I’m suggesting? Would he risk destroying his reputation on the off chance that Brent Rutemiller might know so little about marathon swimming that he’d rely on Openwaterpedia to verify Nyad’s claims?

Yes. In addition to all of the evidence pointing toward Munatones as the hack’s instigator, witness the following:

• his long-standing and breathless support of Nyad despite an ocean of evidence that she’s a compulsive liar at best. See, for instance, Munatones’s post “Lessons Learned From Diana Nyad,” in which he rhapsodizes about Nyad as she approaches the end of her 2013 crossing (while he is somewhere in Japan).
• his foot-dragging on the vandalism. Another Openwaterpedia administrator — the same one who pushed Munatones to publish his shameless “Shameful...” post — eventually fixed most of the damage. Munatones, however, never touched more than a handful of pages.
• his post, “Slosberg The Shrewd Sleuth,” an apparent attempt to flatter me into leaving well enough alone. “Daniel Slosberg,” he writes, “set about to identify and helped stop this hacking.” But I did not help stop the hacking. The vandalism ended in April, and I didn’t learn about it until September or October. Munatones may have feared that, if I continued investigating, I’d discover the connection between the hack and his ratification of Nyad’s swim.

Sabotaging Openwaterpedia for Nyad’s sake is only slightly more outlandish than what Munatones did next: send a stack of documents to the ISHOF, an organization that doesn’t ratify swims, in the hopes that, without being directly asked to ratify Diana Nyad’s swim, the organization’s director would ratify it anyway.

A final flurry of pixie dust must have convinced Nyad and Munatones that no one would bother reading the documents. Otherwise, how could they think that anyone, much less the publisher of the preeminent swimming magazine in the United States, would inspect them without concluding they prove their senders’ duplicity and nothing more.

Enter Cameron Bellamy

Finally, why did Munatones and Nyad wait six years to go to all this trouble to pursue a goal they had no chance of achieving? Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time Nyad rode out to vanquish a windmill. But I suspect that this quest had to do with Cameron Bellamy.

In June 2018, the South African athlete swam the Tsugaru Strait in Japan, making him the 11th person to complete the Oceans Seven, a set of solo marathon swims on four different continents. The Oceans Seven includes most of the major swims on the planet. Nyad hasn’t completed a single one.

A few months after Tsugaru, on November 13, Bellamy completed the first circumnavigation of Barbados, 90 kilometers in 40 hours and 46 minutes. Four days later, Kristina Evelyn, co-director of the Barbados Open Water Festival, wrote: “He had done it. He never let up, he maintained his focus all the way and history has been created.” She concluded with the first public announcement of the athlete’s next endeavor: “Cameron Bellamy’s next endurance adventure? Swimming from Cuba to Florida in September 2019” (via Barbados Open Water Swim Blog).

Bellamy would have begun researching the swim months before he went public, so some people would have known about it long before November. He would have contacted those who knew more about the crossing than anyone: Diana Nyad and Steven Munatones. So, they probably knew well before October, when Nyad’s crew began sending in their letters. (I emailed Nyad, Munatones, and Bellamy, and asked for comments on my Bellamy supposition and other matters. Only Munatones responded. I include excerpts in the “5 Questions” section below.)

Nyad knew Bellamy could complete the swim. That left her and her unratified crossing in a precarious position. If Bellamy succeeded under the auspices of a recognized organization, with published rules and experienced observers, he would become the first person to complete a sanctioned, legitimate Cuba-Florida swim without a shark cage. Nyad gets six-figure speaking fees based on her unproven Cuba swim. If someone else completed a legit Cuba-Florida crossing without a shark cage, Nyad would face questions and have to defend herself. And Diana Nyad does NOT like to defend herself.* She wants the public to think that everything’s settled, and she has nothing left to prove. Everyone can just chill, hand over the cash, and listen to her play the bugle.

*Sometimes, Nyad forgets herself, as she did in this series of Facebook posts, which she quickly deleted. Other times, she tacitly encourages others to do her dirty work. In a Facebook discussion after the announcement of Nyad, her eponymous biopic, Nyad crew member Don “Woodkayaker” McCumber called her skeptics “conspiracy theorists” and “losers.” Responding to one doubter, McCumber wrote: “I don’t look up dumbass websites for info to feed jealousy, unlike you.” Nyad later praised McCumber in a Facebook Live video: “Don, thank you so much for all your comments on Facebook. You’re always so darn positive.” (March 10, 2021, 28:03). See also McCumber’s responses in a 2013 discussion about Nyad’s crossing.

Meanwhile, Bellamy, unaware of the lengths to which Munatones would go to support Nyad, asked Munatones to help organize his attempt. In the conflict-of-interest to end all marathon swimming conflicts-of-interest, Munatones accepted. And WOWSA, his organization, would oversee the crossing.

As we’ve seen, in October 2018, Nyad asked Munatones and WOWSA to recognize her 2013 crossing. (Except for the undated “History of Attempts” and “Triumph,” all of the WOWSA submission documents have dates from the first half of October.) But Munatones must have balked. He knew that, given his history with Nyad, most experienced marathon swimmers wouldn’t accept a WOWSA ratification. What’s more, he had already told the Miami Herald that “no organization regulated [Nyad’s] swim.”

So, rather than ratify it himself, Munatones threw a Hail Mary pass across the continent. He prayed that Rutemiller would believe Nyad’s claim that three haters had done horrendous and unwarranted damage to Diana Nyad’s honor. Rutemiller would then decide, without being asked, that he must redress these wrongs. He would ratify Nyad’s swim, even though the ISHOF doesn’t ratify swims. He might even nominate Nyad for induction into the Hall of Fame. According to Munatones, ill treatment by the marathon swimming community has deprived Nyad of her rightful place in the ISHOF. Of course, Diana believes that too.

Munatones and Nyad settle in and wait to hear from Rutemiller. Spring becomes summer, but they receive no response. Bellamy’s waiting too — the U.S. State Department hasn’t issued the permit for his guide boat to enter Cuban waters.

By the beginning of August, Munatones still hasn’t heard from Rutemiller, nor has Bellamy heard from the U.S. government.

On August 10, I contact Munatones about a separate matter: a blog post in which he touted “The Swimmer,” Nyad’s Off-Broadway show. “By promoting her run,” I write, “and by including her videos and books in the post, WOWSA is implicitly endorsing Nyad’s lies and her debasement of other swimmers.”

Steven replies:

And that’s the first time Munatones tells me about the documents. So I start contacting people who might know more about them. On August 14, at 5:22 pm, Rutemiller verifies that he has the packet. “Called Diana to confirm,” he writes in an email to one of my contacts. “Not sure what they want us to do with it.”

Then, at 10:36 pm, Munatones edits Nyad’s Openwaterpedia entry and surreptitiously ratifies her crossing:

A week later, the U.S. State Department denies Cameron Bellamy his permit. His plans for a 2019 Cuba-Florida attempt disappear in a puff of bureaucratic smoke. Nyad issues no comment when she learns that Bellamy’s attempt ended before it began. We can assume, however, that she did a little happy dance.

5 Questions

Presumably, the packet’s 15 documents present the most forceful argument Nyad can muster in favor of the legitimacy of her crossing. Yet, they contain no new or helpful information. Nyad spends most of her time personally attacking her skeptics rather than countering their allegations. The implication is obvious: She can’t prove she swam from Cuba to Florida. Distracting Brent Rutemiller’s attention from that fact is the best she can hope for.

Below are five questions the packet raises.

Candace Hogan worships Diana Nyad. Many more of the 44 do too. The public idolizes her, as does most of the media. When Nyad trash-talks her detractors, you can feel the flames of her resentment. Having convinced so many people to exalt her, she will not tolerate three or 30 or 300 “perhaps jealous souls” — about whom she doesn’t “care a whit” and has “no regard for . . . whatsoever” — trying to push her off her pedestal of public credulity and veneration.

Lance Armstrong built his career on over a decade of doping in plain sight. Elizabeth Holmes grew a $9 billion company from a blood-testing machine that never worked. If Armstrong and Holmes could get away with their years-long frauds, then Diana Nyad and a few accomplices could make her 52-hour hustle appear genuine.

Munatones sent the packet with minimal hope of success and no control over what happened after his envelope left Huntington Beach. Nyad attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida with no hope of finishing but nearly complete control over what happened after she left Havana, acts of God notwithstanding. She stayed true to herself and turned her dream into a brilliant simulacrum of success.

Image credits: From left to right — MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images, 23 Jul 2015 (via Mercury News); Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Audible, 27 Sep 2019 (via Zimbio); Jeff Mitchell/Reuters, 4 Aug 2001 (via Aktuálně.cz)

Packet Documents

• WOWSA Submission cover letter, October 8, 2018
• Letter from “Bonnie Stoll” to Brent Rutemiller
• Letter from Diana Nyad to Brent Rutemiller
• Letters of support from crew members:
  • John Berry, operations chief
  • Pauline Berry, handler
  • Diane “Dee” Brady, owner and captain of Voyager, Nyad’s escort boat
  • Michael Devlin, kayaker
  • Janet Hinkle, observer
  • Candace Hogan, social media / transcription
  • Roger McVeigh, observer
  • Russell “Buco” Pantelis, kayak team chief
  • Bonnie Stoll, head handler
  • Dr. Angel Yanagihara, Nyad’s jellyfish expert
• “History of Attempts” — Nyad describes her first four Cuba-Florida attempts (17 pages)
• “Triumph” — Nyad describes her triumphant fifth attempt (11 pages)

Packet analysis

• “Major Issues in Diana Nyad’s ISHOF Submission” — in other words, why the packet fails.
• “Notes on Bonnie Stoll’s letter to Brent Rutemiller” — in other words, why Stoll obviously didn’t write it.
• “Nyad’s arguments condensed from her two letters to Brent Rutemiller” — a distillation of Nyad’s two letters into a list of premises upon which she wants Rutemiller to conclude that she completed a legitimate swim from Cuba to Florida.
  
  
• “Nyad-ISHOF Packet Timeline”

Related pages

• “51 Fabrications” — an annotated list of Nyad’s lies. Includes a section about the packet.
• “All About Steve” — further questions about the honesty of Nyad’s main man.
• “How a Hacker Made Diana Nyad the Best Marathon Swimmer of the 1970s”
• “Operation Hamburger Helper synopsis” — more details about the hack.
• “Response to ‘Slosberg The Shrewd Sleuth.’”