The Truth About Diana Nyad
Eleven years ago today, Diana Nyad walked ashore in Key West to complete the farce that launched a thousand speaking engagements, not to mention a memoir, a biopic, and boundless adulation for marathon swimming’s most successful liar.
Not only is today the eleventh anniversary of Diana Nyad’s Cuba-Florida crossing, it’s also the first anniversary (plus two days) of Evan Morrison’s announcement that he had changed his mind about Nyad’s “swim,” and it was “time to move on.” Continue reading →
In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Quinn Fitzgerald, director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), alleges that Steven Munatones breached the WOWSA Dissolution Agreement that he and Antonio Arguelles signed last May.
The complaint, which also names Arguelles and Gerry Rodrigues as defendants, alleges that Munatones never intended to follow the terms of the agreement. It further asserts that Munatones only signed so Fitzgerald would consent to the agreement’s stipulations, including a date-specific non-disclosure section that could be the entire reason Munatones wanted Fitzgerald’s signature.
(The complaint is publicly available for free on the San Francisco County Superior Court’s website., but I posted it here for easier access. The document includes The Dissolution Agreement as Exhibit A.)
In particular, the complaint alleges that, once the Dissolution Agreement took effect, Munatones and Rodrigues “orchestrated a scheme” to remove Fitzgerald as the Open Water Swimming Facebook group’s administrator — despite the agreement making Fitzgerald the group’s sole owner.
Munatones and Rodrigues succeeded in removing Fitzgerald and now administer the group.
Twenty years after journalist Rebecca Morris met Diana Nyad in Gertrude Ederle’s den, an anthology of writing about swimming put Morris and Nyad together once more, giving us a chance to celebrate Morris and expose more of Nyad’s lies.
Author/speechwriter/swimmer Rebecca G. Morris — not to be confused with journalist/editor/true crime writer Rebecca T. Morris or artist Rebecca no-middle-initial Morris — wrote a series of quirky features for the New York Sunday News in the 1970s.
For example, she surprised foodie friends with a meal of camping cuisine in “I freeze-dried my dinner party.” In “The Scuba Cops,” she documented a day she spent with the NYPD’s Underwater Recovery Team as they searched for cars, guns, and bodies. And in “The Challengers of the Channel,” Morris chronicled a meeting between Diana Nyad and Gertrude Ederle. (I’ve written previously about Nyad lying to Ederle during that meeting.) The Sunday News published “Challengers” on August 1, 1976, five days before the 50th anniversary of Ederle becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel.
Nyad would leave for England later that August to try to become the first woman to complete a two-way crossing.
Gertrude Ederle and Diana Nyad are both women swimmers with recent biopics. That’s where their similarities end.
“Before Diana Nyad, There Was Trudy Ederle”
—IndieWire headline
“‘Young Woman and the Sea’ claims its own lane alongside ‘Nyad’”
— Washington Post headline
When “Young Woman And The Sea” opened in theatres in May, reviewers and headline writers suggested that Nyad and Ederle share more than a gender, a sport, and a recent biopic. They were wrong.
“Young Woman and the Sea” begins streaming today, so it’s a good time to look at why Gertrude Ederle is one of the greatest swimmers of all time, and Diana Nyad is one of sports’ all-time greatest liars.
Next month, Diana Nyad will bring her memoir to East Hampton, New York, just up the road from where her mother spent much of her toddlerhood. In an interview with a Hamptons-based magazine, Nyad tells her usual tales. More tantalizing, though, are the tales she doesn’t tell.
On August 5, 1922, about 300 guests arrived at the Southampton summer home of George Warrington Curtis — an heir to the Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup patent medicine fortune — for what The New York Herald called a “fete Champetre,” a “party in the fields.”
Curtis had asked guests to arrive at his 100-acre Captains Neck Lane estate before ten p.m. Driving onto the grounds after that would be too dangerous; all lights would be on the night’s entertainment: The Marion Morgan Dancers.
Last month, the Fort Lauderdale City Commissioners approved a Florida State Historical Marker for Diana Nyad. A close analysis of the text shows how a Nyad Marker will taint the Marker program and its legitimate honorees by celebrating a serial liar.
When Equal Visibility Everywhere founder Dr. Lynette Long applied for a Nyad Marker in 2017, she intended it primarily to honor Diana Nyad’s 2013 Cuba-Florida crossing; the first two-thirds of the original marker text addressed the Cuba swim.
However, the Florida State Historical Marker Program has a regulation that states
No individual may be mentioned in a marker text until thirty years after the death of said person or thirty years after the significant event with which that person is associated . . .[1]
So, Dr. Long began changing the text to sidestep the 30-year rule. For example, the original text began: “On September 2, 2013, at the age of sixty four, Diana Nyad staggered onto Smathers Beach in Key West, Florida.” The text the Marker Council finally approved in 2018 begins: “As a child growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Diana Nyad was a champion pool swimmer.” Continue reading →
Oscar season may be over, but awards season refuses to die: Annette Bening’s latest nomination and other Nyad news.
Annette Bening has another chance to make Diana proud. The Irish Film and TV Academy (IFTA) nominated Bening for its Best International Actress award. She’ll face three of her Oscar foes — Lily Gladstone, Carey Mulligan, and Emma Stone — along with two actresses many critics thought the Oscars snubbed: Margot Robbie for Barbie and Greta Lee for Past Lives.
The IFTA will announce the winners in Dublin on April 20. Go n-éirí leat, Annette!
Continue reading →
Diana spoke at Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica on Thursday night. Nyad called herself charismatic and visionary. And, as usual, she lied.
Diana Nyad spoke with film producer Teddy Schwarzman last Thursday at his sister Zibby’s bookstore. Teddy founded and now presides over Black Bear Pictures, one of the production companies involved with NYAD. Teddy’s sister opened her bookshop a year ago in a high-end Santa Monica shopping district.
(Teddy and Zibby’s father, financier Stephen Schwarzman, is the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group. As of February 27, 2024, he’s worth 37.9 billion USD, up about 400 million since Diana spoke with his son.)
Here are a few of the absurdities and lies Diana served at Zibby’s bookshop last week.
The World Open Water Swimming Association’s 2022 report on Nyad’s crossing provided an extraordinary amount of new data that goes a long way toward proving, once and for all, that she did not complete the “swim” under her own power.
On a sweltering summer day in 1995, renowned close-up magician Ricky Jay sat opposite British journalist Suzie Makenzie in a Los Angeles restaurant. While they waited to order, Jay began telling a story about one of his mentors, Max Malini, in which Malini lifted his hat off a table to reveal a large chunk of ice.
Jay had been holding his menu upright in front of him. As he finished the story, he raised the menu off the table to reveal — yes, you guessed it — an enormous block of ice. The ice hadn’t melted at all, so it couldn’t have been there for more than a few seconds. Mackenzie tried to lift it off the table to check if it was real. When she realized it was, she burst into tears.
Continue reading “Diana Nyad Could Not Have Completed A Legitimate Crossing From Cuba To Florida, And Here’s Why”Kelly Bush Novak, founder of ID, the public relations firm representing Diana, once said that lying was the worst PR move she’d ever seen: “I’ve seen people do it. I’ve seen publicists do it on people’s behalf. It always catches up to you. You can’t get away with lying.”
Unless you’re Diana Nyad.
Nyad and her PR surrogates want us to think she hasn’t lied for decades:
“It makes me really sad that we are scrutinizing things that happened 30 years ago.”
— Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, NYAD co-director, Los Angeles Times, 30 Aug 2023
“‘She said some untrue things 40 years ago.'”
— Evan Morrison, Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder, via Facebook (archived)
“Some of those statements are 45 years old — there wasn’t even an internet then. . . . To me, it’s ancient history.”
— Diana Nyad, Los Angeles Times, 30 Aug 2023
Make that 48; here’s what Diana said almost half a century ago:
“It’s true I used to lie. . . . Only to impress myself. I would tell a cab driver a lie — anybody. I don’t have to do that anymore.”
— Diana Nyad, Village Voice, 1976
But she does. Below are some of the lies she told last month.
