‘THE SHOCKING REASON MUM STOOD BY & DID NOTHING TO SAVE ME''
With her daughter Jelena covered in bruises from daily beatings, why didn’t Ljiljana do something? The family at home in 1999, before Jelena fled.
It’s difficult to comprehend that one of Jelena Dokic’s fondest memories from childhood is as an eightyear-old refugee living in a “rat-infested storage shed” in wartorn Serbia with her mum Ljiljana and baby brother Savo.
She describes it as “hell” in her just-released biography Unbreakable, but also says it was one of the few periods in her childhood that she wasn’t abused or beaten by her dad Damir, because he wasn’t there.
Her controversial father and former tennis coach is revealed to be an absolute monster in the book, which details almost daily beatings and terrible verbal abuse. He beat her until she was unconscious in one savage attack, and whipped her with a leather belt until she bled on other occasions.
He spat on her, told her she was worthless, called her a “slut” and a “whore”, and even abandoned her as a shy 17-yearold on the day she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 2000 as punishment for not winning. He was then kicked out of Wimbledon for his abusive behaviour on the sidelines.
So where was Jelena’s mother amid all the abuse?
“My mum never steps in to stop the beatings, though sometimes she says in a sad, quiet voice, in a polite tone, ‘please stop’,” she says in Unbreakable, revealing the abuse started when she picked up her first tennis racquet at just six years old.
“He always turns to her and yells ‘shut up and piss off’ and resumes the beatings. She remains close by, witnessing this hell unfold. Savo sometimes sees me being beaten but usually they send him away to his room to play.
“I’m realising that my mother sees physical abuse as normal. I’ve cottoned on that not only has he yelled at her, emotionally abused her for years, but also he’s hit her. After the hits, out comes the brown belt.”
‘My mum never steps in to stop the beatings’
Jelena, 34, says when the belt comes out, Damir orders Ljiljana and Savo to leave, admitting, “I start to shake,” before he tells her to take off her shirt, whipping her with such force he “almost slices my skin with the belt”. She had to wear long sleeve shirts to school to cover the bruises.
The tennis star – who fled
the family home at 19 penniless and with just a suitcase and a tennis racquet, after signing over almost $3.8 million in career prize money to the monster she called her father – does not see Damir anymore and says she still has lots of issues with her mum.
“My mum and I have a better relationship these days,” she says, confirming that her mother is no longer with Damir. “We’ve had many conversations around whether she could have done things differently, if she could have done more to protect me. But she was in love with my father and, in a sense, under his spell.
“Also, she didn’t want me to grow up in a broken home and without a father,” Jelena says. “Do I understand her fear of him and what would happen if she escaped?” she asks in the book.
“Yes, I do. Because of the hell I was put through when I left – and I know he made her life unbearable – I understand her fear and concerns, even if I have mixed feelings about her lack of support and protection during those awful, abusive years.”