Yep, her abusive ex-husband, whom she tried to leave, but was told to reconcile with if she wanted to make the Olympics. He was trying to promote his bodyguard business, so he had someone attack Kerrigan. As to her involvement, it’s he-said-she-said. She could have come up with the idea, or only learned of it after the fact. I’m inclined to believe her over her abuser, but it really is guesswork.
If anyone is interested in the story, Sarah Marshall’s Remote Control is mandatory reading. She also talks about it on the You’re Wrong About podcast.
Tonya described her mother using her skating trophies to store loose change, calling her fat and ugly, gulping down a thermos full of brandy as she drove Tonya to the rink in the morning, and hitting her or sending her to her room without dinner as punishment for a bad skate, preparing Tonya for the relationship she would eventually have with her husband. “My mom hit me, and she loved me,” Tonya recalled thinking. “[Jeff] hits me, he loves me. It’s just the way life goes.” She described marrying Jeff—at the time the only man she had ever dated—at nineteen, largely because she was so desperate to get out of her mother’s house. She described her half brother—who was later arrested for child molestation—attempting to rape her when she was fifteen, and how her mother refused to let her testify against him. She described Jeff’s abuse—abuse that was corroborated by her friends and by police reports available to the press at the time of the scandal, but generally utilized only as proof of Tonya’s trashiness—and how neither her family nor her coach was willing to believe her claims. She described leaving Jeff and coming back to him, leaving him again and coming back again, because he was “always saying the right things to get me back, and I’d be stupid enough to go back and get beat up again.” As with so many other women at the center of a scandal, the media did an exceptionally good job of selling Tonya as an extraordinary specimen, a woman unique in her shamelessness, greed, and brutality. Her talent aside, however, she was not unusual at all, but merely one of the countless American women attempting to escape, or at least endure, an abusive marriage.
…
As for Tonya’s claims about her own innocence in the plot itself, any attempt to dismiss her version out of hand somewhat falls apart once one realizes that the dominant version of the story—the story the press picked up and popularized, and the story that endured largely for that reason—was Jeff’s.
Wow… that gives a lot of perspective and… I feel bad for being part of that. I’ve definitely made Tonya Harding jokes and thought ill of her. That time waa just all about blaming women for shit (just like blaming a 22-year-old intern for a sexual scandal with a 49-year-old who happened to be one of the most powerful people on earth at the time) that even a cursory glance suggests they could be the victim.
It’s been mentioned above, but Sarah Marshall’s podcast You’re Wrong About explores these stories of “maligned women of the 90s” (and many others) with depth and compassion. I highly recommend it.
She said she had attempted reconciliation with Jeff following their divorce, in 1993, because a representative from the United States Figure Skating Association told her to do so “unless I didn’t want the marks. If I wanted to make the Olympic team, I need to make myself a stable life… They said I had a stable life when I was with him—married, settled down… And they wanted to make sure I was still going to be that way to go to the Olympic Games.”
In a sport where judges routinely give skaters criticism on their hairdos and costumes and earrings and eye makeup and teeth (and suggest that failing to change such details might well result in lowered scores); in a sport where, to this day, very few gay male skaters can afford to be openly gay and deal with inevitable backlash not just in the media but in their scores; in a sport where women are sometimes rewarded more for salability than skill; in a sport where gender roles are policed so rigidly, on and off the ice, that Tonya Harding, a petite, blond, white woman, was somehow butch enough to register as a threat to skating’s femininity—in a sport where all this went on, and was in fact common knowledge, the idea that the USFSA would attempt to control a skater’s marital status is hardly implausible. It wanted Tonya to be proper, or at least as proper as she could be. They wanted her to train hard and skate reliably so she could compete well at the Olympics if she remained the only American skater who could match Nancy’s maturity and skill—a very plausible prospect at the time, even if the USFSA didn’t want to admit it. If the representative Tonya says she spoke to had been aware of Jeff’s abuse, there must have seemed too much at stake to give Tonya’s claims much credence.
Yep, her abusive ex-husband, whom she tried to leave, but was told to reconcile with if she wanted to make the Olympics. He was trying to promote his bodyguard business, so he had someone attack Kerrigan. As to her involvement, it’s he-said-she-said. She could have come up with the idea, or only learned of it after the fact. I’m inclined to believe her over her abuser, but it really is guesswork.
If anyone is interested in the story, Sarah Marshall’s Remote Control is mandatory reading. She also talks about it on the You’re Wrong About podcast.
Fascinating article, thanks for the link.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180805052053/https://believermag.com/remote-control/
Wow… that gives a lot of perspective and… I feel bad for being part of that. I’ve definitely made Tonya Harding jokes and thought ill of her. That time waa just all about blaming women for shit (just like blaming a 22-year-old intern for a sexual scandal with a 49-year-old who happened to be one of the most powerful people on earth at the time) that even a cursory glance suggests they could be the victim.
It’s been mentioned above, but Sarah Marshall’s podcast You’re Wrong About explores these stories of “maligned women of the 90s” (and many others) with depth and compassion. I highly recommend it.
Oh, shit, TIL. I never knew any of this stuff.
Why did she have to reconcile with the husband in order to make the Olympics?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180805052053/https://believermag.com/remote-control/