Diana Nyad is one of the greatest swimmers America ever produced. Just ask her, or see Nyad, the mythmaking, Oscar-nominated biopic built around her 2013 Cuba-to-Florida swim.
But lots of folks in the open-water swimming realm prefer to see her as one of this sportsworld's biggest frauds, and, as a 1979 Sports Ilustrated story described Nyad, "a very mediocre swimmer with a very good publicist." A new lawsuit favors the negative characterizations. The suit accuses Steven Munatones, a swimming influencer and a significant architect of the flattering side of Nyad's public image—he served as a consultant on the feature film glorifying her greatest/most fraudulent swim—with going to great and unethical lengths to enhance her athletic legacy. Among the allegations against him: Munatones faked the existence of a sanctioning organization to lend credibility to Nyad's controversial Cuba-to-Florida swim, and digitally defiled a marathon swimming database in a brazen attempt to rewrite the sport’s history in Nyad's favor.
Munatones is a co-founder of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), a group whose mission is to promote marathon swimming and chronicle the sport’s history. The suit, filed on Aug. 16 in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco by his WOWSA co-founder Quinn Fitzgerald, is essentially a breach of contract claim and evidence of an ugly breakup of former business partners. In the complaint, Fitzgerald says problems arose within the organization when Munatones started using WOWSA to support his own causes in ways that damaged its credibility. Making Nyad and her Cuba swim look better than they really were are among his alleged aims.
First there’s the claim that Munatones “fabricated the existence of an organization for the sake of certifying certain open water swimming endeavor(s).” That refers to claims made by Munatones in the years after her 2013 trek of the Florida Straits—the event that inspired the movie—that Nyad had conformed to rules promulgated by an organization called the "Florida Straits Open Water Swimming Association." However, a report published in 2022 after an extensive investigation into Nyad’s most famous trip concluded that such a group “did not formally exist at the time of the swim.” The report said Nyad submitted documents containing guidelines for such a swim to investigators that she said were from the Florida Straits group and showed a 2011 copyright date. Investigators determined that a Florida Straits sanctioning body had first been proposed in 2012, but that organization never actually formed. The investigation report said the paperwork suggested "potential backdating and falsification by Nyad."
Fitzgerald's complaint also says Munatones falsely claimed in 2019 that Nyad's swim had been "certified" by WOWSA. To date, no notable swimming organization has certified Nyad’s Cuba swim as legitimate. According to the lawsuit, Munatones was responsible for getting her swim an entry with Guinness World Records for a time, but the Guinness folks removed their Nyad page after reviewing concerns about how the swim was swum. Fitzgerald asserts that Munatones's repeated assertions that Nyad's effort has been certified have been “harmful to the brand” of WOWSA.
The most bizarre portion of the suit comes with the allegation that Munatones "acted surreptitiously to alter" thousands of swimming records in an online database to artificially bolster Nyad’s place in open-water swimming history. That site, openwaterpedia.com, was owned and operated by WOWSA and billed itself as "the Wikipedia for the open water swimming world," and was a clearinghouse of marathon swimming results.
The records alterations that are alleged in the lawsuit were discovered by Daniel Slosberg, a former marathon swimmer who in recent years has catalogued Nyad’s dishonesty with absolute ruthlessness. Among the Nyad falsehoods that Slosberg has researched and written about on his website, nyadfactcheck.com: She waxed emotionally about giving her all at the 1968 Olympic trials (she never swam in any Olympic trial); she wrote in an autobiography that she was the first woman to swim around Manhattan (she was the seventh); and, ahem, in motivational speeches she talked about befriending a woman who as a 3-year-old had served as a sex slave to Nazi officers during the Holocaust (complete hogwash, according to a death camp scholar Slosberg sent the tale to). Slosberg recently told Defector he discovered that the openwaterpedia.com database had been debased after going to watch Nyad give a speech in Los Angeles in 2019 and hearing her make a claim about her own greatest-ness: “I became, in the 1970s, the best ocean swimmer in the world,” Nyad said. “I held every major record on planet earth, out in the open sea.”
Slosberg, who was an accomplished marathoner of his own in the '70s, knew that Nyad not only had never held "every major record," she wasn't regarded by him or anybody in the sport as being anywhere near that decade's best swimmer. For all her notoriety, Slosberg told Defector, Nyad doesn't rate a spot in the top 10.
So he set out to come up with his own list of the decade's best. But Slosberg had trouble finding the athletes he regarded as the actual top swimmers from '70s. Swimmers who'd outswum Nyad in their day—Lynne Cox, Tina Bischoff, and Sandra Bucha to name three International Marathon Swimming Hall of Famers—were no longer showing up as her contemporaries. Bucha's page, for example, showed her having won a 10-mile race in Chicago in 1964, which he knew was impossible. "Sandra Bucha would have been 10 years old in 1964," Slosberg says.
None of Bucha's marathon swims in the database showed up as having taken place in the 1970s. (Here's a before/after shot of Bucha's page in the Wiki.) Slosberg eventually detected a simple pattern to the wrongness: “Somebody got all the 7s, and changed them to 6s,” he says, “and so all of a sudden all the 1970s swims became 1960s swims.”
Slosberg then noted that Nyad's page in the Wiki was not backdated. So he figured a Nyad backer could well be behind the edits.
“One of the telling parts that this was intended to benefit Nyad was there were a few swimmers that the vandal changed back, and one of those was Nyad,” Slosberg told Defector. “It’s really vandalism more than hacking. This didn’t require coding or anything to do this. But it took these great marathon swimmers and essentially eliminated them. It was ingenious, really.”
He wrote a post for nyadfactcheck.com about his discovery titled "How a Hacker Made Diana Nyad the Best Marathon Swimmer of the 1970s."
The saga then became a whodunit. Munatones posted his own piece about the breach for the WOWSA website, calling Slosberg a "shrewd sleuth" and saying his work was "greatly appreciated." Munatones also wrote that he had no idea who would do such a thing, or why.
"We have no idea why someone would do this," he wrote. "Why would they purposefully and intentionally take information that is useful to open water swimmers and media around the world—and change the data to incorrect information?"
Munatones denied being the culprit in private emails to Slosberg: "The hacker has hacked into my administrative account and is using my accounts to make changes," he wrote in a November 2019 email provided to Defector by Slosberg.
Munatones then told Slosberg that he suspected the real criminal was a computer programmer and marathon swimming obsessive who was "as upset about Diana Nyad ... as you are. Possibly more if that is possible."
The case went cold. Then WOWSA announced in March 2023 that the organization would investigate the database vandalism. Less than two months later, the partners signed a dissolution agreement and Fitzgerald took over WOWSA and Munatones was out. No official reason for the founders' breakup was ever announced.
And now Fitzgerald's lawsuit says Munatones was the vandal. The complaint, however, does not divulge what evidence, if any, Fitzgerald obtained that got him to finger Munatones. A source familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity citing a fear of retribution, told Defector that Munatones became a person of interest once computer forensics experts determined the IP address of the vandalizer.
As for motive for Munatones's alleged misdeeds, the complaint accuses Munatones of trying to use his WOWSA platform to "offer preferential treatment to athletes" in hope that they'd in turn promote KAATSU Global, Inc., a company that retails products related to a patented exercise regimen. Munatones is KAATSU's CEO. And he has indeed used Nyad's name, image and likeness to move product.
Fitzgerald's suit asks for unspecified monetary damages and attorney fees. Fitzgerald declined to be interviewed for this story. His attorney in the San Francisco lawsuit, James E. Kemp, told Defector he'd let the complaint speak for itself.
Neither Munatones nor his lawyer, Richard Ginsberg, responded to a request for comment.
Munatones, who was an official observer on Nyad's failed attempts to cross the Florida Straits but not on the jaunt she allegedly completed in 2013, has always said the swim was legit and urged other open water enthusiasts to accept it as such. That stance is surely why Munatones got asked to serve as a consultant on Nyad. During the media blitz surround its release, the filmmakers found themselves fighting off accusations that they'd presented fiction as fact. In response, director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi told The Hollywood Reporter, “We did our due diligence.”
Slosberg was not asked to provide input for the movie. Days after the premiere in September 2023, and with Munatones now out of the organization, WOWSA released a statement reiterating that the organization "will not ratify Diana Nyad‘s 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida."
The full complaint can be read below:
