‘Unacceptable’ handling of sexual assault claims linked to Fulham Football Club raises more questions for police

Content warning: This story contains details about alleged sexual assault.

“It will come up at the most bizarre times. I smell the aftershave he used and it’s there.

“The last few years opened up a can of worms for me and I spent many nights laying there thinking about stuff, questioning things. I let it go and now I can sleep easy because I spoke my truth.”

Ronnie Gibbons is crying; uncontrollably sobbing, wiping her nose and apologising for the staccato nature of her words as the former captain of Fulham Ladies tells us how she was left feeling utterly isolated.

“Thank you for listening to me,” she says in a very quiet voice.

Ronnie, now 44, feels her voice hasn’t been heard for too long, but today, she is waiving her legal right to anonymity to talk publicly for the first time about allegations of sexual abuse during her time as a footballer that she feels have not been sufficiently investigated. She is not the only one. Nazir Afzal OBE, the former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, describes how the police appear to have handled the case as “unacceptable”.

Ronnie and three other former Fulham Ladies players spoke to the police at length in 2021 and 2022, detailing claims of sexual assaults when two of them were minors and of inappropriate and sometimes overlapping relationships with a number of young adult players. The man they accuse categorically denies their claims. The police decided to drop the investigation and take “no further action”, but reporting by The Athletic today raises concerns regarding the adequacy of that police investigation.

A criminal investigation into historic allegations of this nature is difficult. The claims are highly sensitive and there is often little objective evidence to prove definitively what happened. Nevertheless, the ability of the Metropolitan Police to investigate such allegations is currently under the spotlight after it emerged that the force took no action over complaints from 19 out of the 21 women who came forward to report abuse by the former Fulham owner Mohamed Al Fayed before his death aged 94 in 2023.

Ronnie’s allegations also did not reach the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the main public agency for prosecuting criminal cases in England and Wales, and two of the women who went to the police say they have not even been notified the case was closed. Ronnie requested a review of her case, but long after the deadline for completing the review had passed, she had still heard nothing from the police. So now she is speaking to The Athletic.

As reported by The Athletic last week, Ronnie said she was twice sexually assaulted by Al Fayed at his luxury London department store, Harrods, in 2000. She said she had stayed largely silent at the time for fear of costing her team-mates — part of the first professional women’s team in England — their jobs.

But it was not Al Fayed that Ronnie reported to the police in 2021. It was another man working at Fulham Football Club in the 1990s and 2000s. That man was Gary Mulcahey.

Mulcahey worked at Fulham from 1992 until 2008 and his main role was as their lead community officer and then their community development manager, but he also set up Fulham Ladies in 1993 and was their manager from then until 2000, picking the players and running the team. Mulcahey oversaw the team’s move into professionalism that year, serving as their general manager from 2000 to 2001. He then managed the women’s reserve team from 2001 until 2005.

He was a UEFA A-licensed coach who held other roles across the football setup and while he was not the coach of the girls’ teams, he was sometimes present at their training sessions and chatted to the ball girls and ball boys on a matchday at Fulham’s ground, Craven Cottage. Multiple people spoken to by The Athletic say he was a prominent and influential figure within the club.

Ronnie was one of four former Fulham Ladies players who made allegations to the police about Mulcahey, now 57, in 2021 or 2022. Three of them — Ronnie and her former team-mates Deena Greaves (nee Rahman) and Claire, who we will identify only by her first name — have decided to waive their anonymity to talk to The Athletic, separately, over a series of video calls, about the abuse they say they suffered and how they feel let down by the police not investigating their complaints thoroughly enough.

As well as Ronnie, Deena and Claire, The Athletic has spoken to numerous other Fulham players, staff and family members associated with the club from 1992 to 2005, who wish to remain anonymous to protect their current positions.

Mulcahey categorically denies the claims against him.

Deena says she “idolised” Mulcahey, while Ronnie describes him as a “football genius” who was admired within the game and was the person who initially asked her and Claire to join Fulham. “He was a fantastic coach,” she says. “He really knew what he was doing.”

Ronnie was the face and captain of the first professional women’s team in England and a Republic of Ireland international, yet the defender’s club football career ended in 2004 when she was only 24.

Deena, a midfielder, played for England Under-18s aged just 15, receiving a congratulatory fax message from the Fulham men’s manager at the time, Kevin Keegan. “Rahman thriving in Keegan’s world” read a 1998 headline to an article in British newspaper The Times explaining her prodigious talent and discussing her football dreams. Yet she too retired early from club football, calling it a day in 2005 at the age of 22, before later resuming her career overseas but never getting back to the same level.

Claire joined the club in 1993 aged 13 but had long left Fulham by the time the women turned professional in 2000, though it was she who was the first to report Mulcahey to the police in 2021. She says she realised he was still working in football with Crystal Palace’s Palace for Life Foundation, the Premier League club’s charity arm. That knowledge, along with seeing a TV documentary about the paedophile football coach Barry Bennell and her daughter approaching her teenage years, convinced her to do something she had long been considering and come forward to make a complaint.

Mulcahey was interviewed twice under caution, but police appear to have concentrated their inquiries solely on one allegation of sexual assault in a Putney flat, around the time Claire and Ronnie made their debuts for Fulham Ladies in September 1994 aged 14. Claire and Ronnie both say Mulcahey, their manager, gave them Southern Comfort to drink, kissed them and then groped Ronnie over her clothes in the bedroom. Claire grabbed Ronnie from the bedroom and they left. It was a day, Ronnie says 30 years on, that “changed my life massively”.

Mulcahey “categorically denies he has acted in any illegal or unlawful way” and is adamant this alleged incident never happened. “Mr Mulcahey did not even live in Putney in 1994,” his solicitor told The Athletic. The police decided to take no further action on the women’s complaints earlier this year, citing “insufficient evidence”.

Ronnie says she also told police that starting shortly after that, while she was still under the legal age of consent (16), her then-football manager would often give her a lift home from training or matches and would regularly stop in a car park, where they engaged in sex acts, including oral sex. But she says the police focused only on whether or not she had sexual intercourse with Gary before she turned 16, or whether he was forcing himself upon her aggressively, but it was not like that.

“He always said to me, ‘I’m going to be your first’,” says Ronnie. “We didn’t have sex until I was 16, but up until that point, pretty much everything else sexually happened,” she claims.

While not denying later having an adult sexual relationship with Ronnie, Mulcahey is strong in his denial of having had “any sexual relationships with minors”, adding that he categorically denies the “allegation that (he) indecently assaulted Ronnie Gibbons when she was a minor in (a) car, including the extremely serious allegation of oral sex with her as a minor”.

But Ronnie wonders if the police even asked him about her claims. The Metropolitan Police would not confirm the position to The Athletic when asked, but Ronnie strongly suspects they did not, as with her they only seemed to be interested in whether or not she was alleging that she had been raped. This is despite the sort of sexual activity she described with someone under 16 being a criminal offence.

As well as reporting this alleged criminality, the women also reported that Mulcahey had other legal but sometimes overlapping sexual relationships with his young adult players, three of them included. The women argue the relationships were still deeply inappropriate. The women claimed that Mulcahey had sexual relationships with five Fulham Ladies players over more than a decade and created a “web” of mistrust among team-mates, who say they were told to keep their experiences with their football manager quiet to avoid destroying his or their careers.

According to the women’s claims, during Fulham Ladies’ first season as professionals in 2000-01, Mulcahey — then the 33-year-old general manager of the team and one of the men involved in awarding them the first professional women’s contracts in English football — was sleeping with two of his star players, Ronnie and Deena, aged 17 and 20 respectively. It is now illegal for a coach to be involved sexually with a player under the age of 18, but back then, it wasn’t.

In 2004, it became illegal under UK law for anyone in a position of trust to engage in sexual activity with someone under 18 in their care. Sports coaches were only added to the list of roles covered by this legislation in 2022, but the English Football Association says it has always applied the principles of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which states: “It is an offence for a person aged 18 or over to involve a child under that age in sexual activity where he or she is in a specified position of trust in relation to that child. This includes those who care for, advise, supervise or train children and young people (Sexual Offences Act 2003).”

In other words, the FA has considered it a breach of their principles for someone in that role to have sexual contact with a player under 18 since 2004.

Deena reported behaviour to the police that was not illegal at the time because she was 17 in 2000, but which would be today and would have been in breach of FA rules any time from 2004. The women believe Deena’s claims should have been treated by the police as potentially corroborative of their stories and as something that should have been of more concern to them, but that they weren’t.

Deena feels she was effectively “groomed” by Mulcahey. Legally speaking, she wasn’t because their sexual relationship began when she was over the age of consent. But Deena is using the term in a more general sense, speaking of a “trusted member within the family network” who she had known since he joined Fulham when she was aged nine and who ultimately had a sexual relationship with her.

Deena remembers Mulcahey and his then-girlfriend, another Fulham player, babysitting for her and says the couple attended her mum’s wedding in 1995 when she was 12. He was her manager when she returned from a year at Arsenal to join the women’s team aged 14 in 1997. Deena says Mulcahey drove her and some of her team-mates to her first England trial at Bisham Abbey in Buckinghamshire aged 15.

There was nothing sexual about their relationship at that time, but things changed from 2000, when she was 17, and Mulcahey was the general manager of the professional women’s team in which Deena played. From that point, until she was about 24, she says she endured a controlling relationship with him, a man 16 years older than her. “It’s always eaten me up inside that it happened,” she says. Deena feels she was “honestly like his little go-between between people”. “That is how I feel now,” she says. “I feel like I was his puppet. Whenever he came back to me, he wanted this sexual relationship. I was just there.”

Although Deena acknowledged that she was over the age of consent at the time she and Mulcahey began a sexual relationship, she feels in retrospect that the relationship was morally wrong: “I don’t feel you can know someone from nine years old and then have a sexual relationship with them when you’re 17.”

Mulcahey did not deny Deena’s claims of a sexual relationship, but he was categoric that he has never abused any position of trust or controlled or groomed Deena or anyone.

Mr Mulcahey’s solicitor said he “did not coach or manage the Girls’ team at Fulham FC”, adding that “all his relationships were non-coercive and consensual and continued to be so”. They stressed that “Mr Mulcahey categorically denies that he has acted in any illegal or unlawful way against any of these girls. He did not groom them, nor did he commit any sexual assaults on them when they were minors as he understands has been alleged, or at any time”.

Deena says the police have not been in contact since her interview in December 2022 and it appears that her story and the potential for corroboration it could offer has not been investigated fully.

“I knew the police hadn’t asked him about me,” she said. “They (the police) were fixated on me being 17 and what happened then, nothing else.” Her suspicions were reinforced when Mulcahey messaged her to tell her the police had dropped the case against him. It was clear he hadn’t been told she spoke to the police: “I knew I was innocent of their lies,” he told her.

“He knew me as a child. He was a person in authority with my football. He was in a position of power,” she claims. “That’s what makes my blood boil.”

The Met police allocated Ronnie and Claire the same crime reference number for their respective complaints. It is almost as if their stories have been treated as one by the police. In Deena’s case, she appears to have been interviewed and then her claims dismissed because she was over 16 when the relationship became sexual, with the police seemingly failing to recognise the possibly corroborative nature of her claims and a potential pattern of behaviour. Put simply, even though there were grounds to investigate their allegations, the police do not appear to have independently and fully done so.

After being passed between case officers and being given very little information as to what the police were doing, Ronnie and Claire were finally told in July 2024 that the police would take no further action. Deena and another player who spoke to the police twice — once verbally and then a second time to sign a statement — say they have not been updated by the police since their interviews.

Ronnie has appealed against the decision to take no further action. “From what I’ve heard, potential witnesses weren’t even questioned, none of the staff at Fulham were questioned,” she says. She and Claire both say they provided names to the police of people who could potentially provide further evidence to corroborate their accounts, but understand that few, perhaps none, of the Fulham players or staff they mentioned to the police were contacted. “I genuinely believe the police have just shoved it under the carpet,” says Ronnie. “I don’t actually think they’ve investigated it in terms of talking to anybody at the club.”

“I wasn’t going to let it go and appealed the decision.”

Ronnie was unsurprised when the police’s own deadline for considering her review request came and went without her hearing from them.

They only got back to her after The Athletic first contacted the Met Police on October 11. An officer who said he was partly responsible for “managing child abuse investigations” messaged to apologise for the delay, saying her appeal had been “misfiled” and asked Ronnie to get in touch.

Despite being asked directly by The Athletic to do so, the Met Police did not specify which allegations it had investigated and which it had not. But it did say: “We recognise the courage it takes for someone to report a sexual offence to police and we are committed to ensuring those who take this step are properly supported and have their allegations thoroughly investigated.

“In August 2021, we received an allegation relating to the non-recent sexual assault of two women who were players at a London football club. The alleged assaults were carried out by a man who was also employed at the club.

“At the conclusion of this investigation in September (sic) this year, a decision was taken that no further action would be taken and those involved were informed.

“Any further information that is provided to police will be assessed and investigated where appropriate.

“We will also endeavour to contact the woman who made the allegations to ensure there are no outstanding aspects that could be investigated.

“Anyone who has been the victim of a sexual offence is urged to contact police at the earliest opportunity so you can be provided with support and your allegations investigated.”

The CPS said it had no record of these complaints being passed to it by the police for a review or a charging decision.

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It isn’t just the women who are unsatisfied. Afzal, the former chief prosecutor, is deeply critical of the police’s handling of the players’ claims.

“The bit I don’t understand is that the police have outstanding allegations involving the same alleged perpetrator and we have no idea whether there has been any progress,” he told The Athletic. “All we have is the NFA (no further action) in relation to two of the women.

“All four of them ought to have been dealt with separately and they should all have had some correspondence or communication as to what progress, if any, has been made.

“What you have described to me is unacceptable.”

Any failure by the police to investigate allegations such as these properly could also potentially lead to a safeguarding failure by the Football Association, the guardians of the game in England, or any relevant clubs. In this case, it is understood Crystal Palace and Fulham were advised to leave investigations to the police after Mulcahey first spoke to them in 2021.

And even where there is no apparent illegality, the complexity of player-coach relationships in football — made yet more difficult here by the players’ claims of overlapping sexual relationships between them and Mulcahey — makes them a particularly problematic issue for all professional football clubs, men’s and women’s alike.

Now, a sports coach is considered to be in a position of trust and sexual activity with an under-18 in their care is not allowed in the United Kingdom either by FA rules or the law. Those rules did not exist in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the moral maze was the same: when, if ever, is it acceptable for a football coach, a man in a position of power, to have relationships with players at the same club?

Through his solicitor, Mulcahey emphasised he was not their coach until they progressed from the junior to the senior team. The women say they played for the senior team from the age of 14.

Ronnie, Deena and Claire all talk about how Mulcahey combined his community role with helping out with girls’ football, managing the women’s team from 1994 to the early 2000s, then overseeing the professional operation and taking charge of the women’s reserves in 2001.

“Gary ran the community hub at Fulham,” says Claire. “I guess he was sort of the director of youth football. He seemed to be the boss of everything related to youth.”

“Gary was quite a big influence in that time,” says an unnamed player. “He was my manager, work-wise (in the community department) and playing-wise.

“We’d go to work events and I had more connection with him because he was not just my football manager. I was young, impressionable and I wanted to do well in work and play football.”

After Fulham Ladies returned to being semi-professional in 2003, Deena, who was then 20 and playing for the reserve team, worked in Fulham’s community office — with Mulcahey — near Motspur Park. She says Mulcahey had a flat a few doors down and they would sometimes go there at lunchtime and have sex.

“It was even more toxic then,” says Deena, “because I was even more surrounded in terms of the work and his living place.”

“There was no safeguarding lead or anything like that at Fulham at the time,” says Claire of the mid-1990s. “Gary was the person we would have told actually. I don’t know who else we would have told.”

“There was no one readily available to go and talk to,” adds Ronnie. “If there were ever any problems, the only person you would talk to was Gary. He was in charge of the women’s setup and he was in charge of the community department.”

In 2021, the Sheldon Report into historical child sex abuse in football found the FA “could and should have done more to keep children safe” between 1995 and May 2000, those working within football were not adequately trained on child protection matters, and “this was an institutional failing by the FA, for which there is no excuse”.

“The whole point of a proper safeguarding process is that somebody not involved or engaged in the organisation, independent of everybody, is the person to whom people can make complaints,” says Afzal. “If you have to make complaints to the person who (you claim) is offending against you or a mate of theirs, you’re not going to. The FA and everyone else really need to take this more seriously than they have.”

Mandatory safeguarding training for coaches was introduced in 2000-01, but even now, nearly a quarter of a century on, with far more robust measures in place to protect children and adults at football clubs, the FA’s current rules merit greater scrutiny.

For example, the FA does not publish details of individual safeguarding cases. In a case such as that of Mulcahey, it is not publicly known if he is suspended by English football’s governing body or if he is eligible to walk into a club today and apply for a job despite the concerns over the police’s handling of the case and Ronnie asking for a review of the decision to drop the investigation.

The Athletic has been told by numerous people familiar with the decision that he was suspended by the Palace for Life Foundation in October 2021 after Claire initially went to the police and his role as sport and wellbeing director — an office-based role — was terminated in August 2022. Mulcahey did not respond to a request for comment regarding his employment.

An FA spokesperson said: “We have robust safeguarding measures in place and all referrals to us are handled in line with our policies and procedures. We investigate and assess all allegations and concerns about individuals who may pose a risk of harm to children and adults at risk in football and, where applicable, can impose proportionate safeguarding measures in accordance with FA safeguarding regulations. We do not comment on individual cases.”

It is when the former players talk about how they believe Mulcahey “derailed” their football careers, to use Deena’s word, they become most upset. Mulcahey denies having this effect, but the harm they claim to have suffered underlines why it is so important for authorities to have effective measures in place.

“It had a huge negative impact on my football career,” says Deena, who says the emotional turmoil of the relationship she was “caught up in” was a “massive” part of the reason her career trailed off and contributed to her suffering a period of significant weight loss. “I remember being at England Under-18s and my corners weren’t even hitting the edge of the box, I was so weak,” she says. “When I should have been in my prime, at 18, I was dropped from that England squad.”

“He asked me once, ‘Did I ruin your football career?’ I said ‘yes’, but I didn’t want to talk about it, so I brushed it off. I have never confronted him about any of this. And I regret that.”

Ronnie says she suffered from disordered eating, which she links to the secrecy surrounding the relationship. She says she would not tell her mum about what she was eating or about Gary. She claims that what happened with Mulcahey ruined her relationships with other men for decades and she has long lived outside the United Kingdom partly to avoid the risk of bumping into Mulcahey on the street. Yet it is the football career she lost that almost seems to hurt the most.

When she was 17, Mulcahey made Ronnie captain of Fulham Ladies. At the time, she considered it a huge privilege, even if some older players raised eyebrows. She says she and Mulcahey were in a sexual relationship at the time. She sobs as she describes the pain of losing the captaincy four years later. Two years after that, she left Fulham completely.

Gary was the general manager at the end of the 2000-01 season, with others in the roles of coach and assistant coach. The team was adding more star players to the squad and things were changing. Ronnie recalls Gary was involved in her being asked to step down. “They made it seem like it was for my own good so I could concentrate on my football and someone more senior could take over,” she says. But she now wonders if it was “because I stood up and didn’t want to be abused any more”. The demotion came just months after she broke up with Gary and asked him to move out of her mum and stepdad’s house, where he was temporarily living with her.

Mulcahey’s lawyers again deny the women’s claims. They stress that “all his adult relationships were non-coercive and consensual and continued to be so” and that “far from … abusing his position, he actively supported the footballing careers of two of the women”.

Deena, who married a former Fulham men’s player at Craven Cottage; Claire, who still has a season ticket despite living abroad; and Ronnie, who is wearing a red Fulham top when we speak to her, are all largely ambivalent about Fulham’s role in allowing Mulcahey such power.

“Fulham was and is my club, so I (would have) felt a disservice to them if I’d have come out and said anything,” says Ronnie.

The Women’s Super League, the first professional women’s league competition in England, was not established for another 10 years after Fulham’s foray into professionalism in 2000. The players describe a chaotic whirlwind of photoshoots and PR opportunities, but it does not feel fun all these years on.

Fulham had not commented at the time of publication.

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Former chief prosecutor Afzal says groomers make their victims feel that “the consequences of speaking out are so much worse than the consequences of silence”.

The result, he says, is “it takes real courage to ask for help. Very often the victims are beset by feelings of shame, guilt and fear. They blame themselves because they’ve been told to”.

This, he says, has implications for how the police should approach such allegations.

“Importantly, they (complainants) should be able to have confidence that credible allegations will be adequately investigated and that they will be appropriately supported during that process,” he says.

It is unclear if the police who were asked to investigate the women’s claims were trained on how to interview such complainants effectively. But for Afzal, it is hard to understand how, if they’d listened to what the women had come to tell them, they could have come to any conclusion other than that what they were being told needed to be thoroughly investigated.

Ronnie thought she was the “special” one and says she was in a sexual relationship with Mulcahey from the age of 14 until shortly after her 21st birthday.

Initially, Mulcahey was still in a public relationship with another Fulham player, about eight years older than Ronnie. The woman ended it, it is claimed by multiple people at the club at the time, after being told a letter written by Ronnie to Mulcahey had been found, which suggested an inappropriate relationship between the teenager and her coach.

Ronnie says over time she got deeper into Mulcahey’s “web”. She says she was so “under his spell” as a young adult that she “couldn’t eat in front of him” and would sit, numb, as he devoured a McDonald’s breakfast in his Fulham tracksuit, ready to go to work for another day in the community department after a Friday night spent with her at a low-cost hotel.

“I felt small,” she says. “Then I’d see him in the community department and I’d have to pretend nothing was happening. I really struggled with that. My whole life was a complete secret.

“I could never talk to anyone about any of it. It all had to be a secret and kept under wraps. I felt very vulnerable. I was looking for a role model, I think, and he (Mulcahey) was that role model for me.

“I felt such enormous shame. And the fact was that I felt if I ever came out and told anyone, Gary would lose his job, I wouldn’t play for them again and no one would believe me anyway.”

The women feel Mulcahey established a pattern of behaviour at the club through his sometimes overlapping sexual relationships with five Fulham Ladies players over more than a decade. He later married a former women’s footballer.

“It was ‘toxic’ because we were all there at Fulham,” Deena says. “I was sneaking around with him and it was all this big, horrendous toxic thing going on.”

“It was kind of a web,” says Ronnie. “He would always say things like, ‘Oh, these girls are jealous’. I knew for quite a long time I wasn’t the only one, but I thought I was the special one, I suppose.” They went on holiday to Cuba and Canada where she met some of his family. He even helped her win a scholarship to go to college in the United States.

Ronnie now feels that “the reality was he was grooming me from a young age and I felt powerless in a way”. As we’ve heard, Mulcahey does not agree with her analysis.

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Deena was hesitant to come forward to the police initially because she had stayed in touch with Mulcahey — part of her “healing process with it”, she says, attending events such as his stag do with other former team-mates and meeting him for coffee but on her own terms now. “Then I had a chat with my husband and started to think about it more,” she adds. “And I was like, I don’t owe him anything…”

For Ronnie in particular, finally speaking out has helped her to break down the walls of isolation that have trapped her for the best part of 20 years.

“Girls need to be protected, so if I can make a difference and have some kind of impact on the change, then it’s worth it,” says Ronnie.

Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123. Click here to contact them from the U.S.

(Top photos: Deena Greaves, Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)