TONYA HARDING:
The disgraced figure skater talks to Taffy BrodesserAkner about the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal – now the subject of a critically acclaimed movie – and her struggles to tell her side of the story.
life after the ice-skating scandal
Tonya Harding’s name isn’t Tonya Harding any more. “My name is Tonya Price,” she said, when she saw me taking notes. In 2010, she had just returned home to Washington from Los Angeles, where she’d been doing another one of the odd jobs she’d collected over the years – colour commentary on ill-advised video stunts for the TV show World’s Dumbest. She was still in her cute LA clothes, still made-up, and she went out to a local restaurant. She was having drinks with a friend when she spotted one Joe Price, a heating and air-conditioning worker, on the karaoke stage. He was singing Great Balls of Fire.
“I’m going, damn, he’s got beautiful eyes,” she said. “I mean, the eyes are the centre to your soul, okay? You might have a nice butt, but I want to see the eyes.”
Within weeks she proposed to him. Within those same weeks she was carrying their baby. She had never met anyone so gentle or kind; she had never known a man to just love her, not for her skating abilities or for what she might potentially become, but for her. They married, and she changed her last name, like lots of people do. Okay, I told her. Tonya Price it is.
We were at a skating-themed bar where hockey and figure skates, including a signed pair of hers, hang on display. “But you should use Tonya Harding in your story,” she said. “Tonya Harding is who people know.” Which is a good point.
You can’t run from being Tonya Harding. Even if you wanted to, even if you tried, and yes, she’s tried. “I moved from Oregon to Washington because Oregon was buttheads,” she says. Then, with mock apology, “I disappointed them. It’s like, how can I disappoint a whole state? Wait, how can I disappoint a whole country?”
Oregon had been so proud when their own Tonya Harding was the first American female figure skater to land a triple axel jump in competition. Then what happened happened, and people turned on her. So she confronts it head on, the way she always has. As if she ever had a choice. She knew from the moment it all went down in 1994 that the Nancy Kerrigan attack wasn’t going to fade into the annals of history. “I knew that this would be with me for the rest of my life.” Her face has softened over the years, but she is still clearly Tonya Harding – she is left to explain herself endlessly and hope that someone is listening.
She’s tried to be understood. Over the years, E! True Hollywood Story came along. Entertainment Tonight came along. Oprah came along. But the focus was so much about what happened in 1994; it was never about before or after, and if you want to understand her at all, you have to understand her childhood and her early adulthood. But each time it came down to: Well, did you do it, or didn’t you? Did you know more than you said? Did you actually plan the attack? Are you sorry?
Then, in 2014, the screenwriter Steven
Rogers watched the ESPN documentary The Price of Gold, and decided to reach out. ESPN had given a rounder, more nuanced look at Tonya and where she came from. It laid out the facts: how on January 6, 1994, six weeks before the Lillehammer Olympics (and two nights before the conclusion of the US Figure Skating Championships), Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee by a man with a collapsible baton.
An FBI investigation found that the man had been hired by Shawn Eckardt, Tonya’s bodyguard and friend of her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. In the end, Tonya pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution – meaning that she knew who had done the attack, but only afterward, and that she didn’t report it immediately.
The prosecution believed she was much more involved than what the plea bargain encompassed, but they accepted the plea since it included a felony charge. She was sentenced to three years of supervised probation, 500 hours of community service, a $100,000 state fine, and was tasked with setting up a $50,000 fund to benefit the Special Olympics, reimbursing the Multnomah County prosecutor’s office $10,000 in costs, undergoing a psychiatric examination and participating in any courtordered treatment. And then there was this: she was forced to surrender her membership to the US Figure Skating Association. Eventually, the association barred her for life.
Rogers asked her agent for the option to her story – her whole story – for $1500, with more if the film actually got made and recouped its costs. The initial money wasn’t much, and she didn’t know if it was worth the hassle. But her agent said, “What’s the worst that could happen?” The worst had already happened.
All these years later, she’s still punished for what she did, but also for what she didn’t do. People still think she herself held a baton over Kerrigan’s leg that day. People still think she was married to Gillooly (who has since changed his last name to Stone), who planned the attack and was sentenced to two years in prison for racketeering, but they were divorced by then.
At the very least, people still think she herself hired the guy who attacked Kerrigan, Shane Stant, and they have never forgiven her for it. “I’ve had rats thrown into my mailboxes, shit left
on my door, left in my mailbox, all over my trucks. You name it, it’s been done to me.”
So yes, she said. Please call her Tonya Harding. It was Tonya Harding who was the punchline to just about every late-night TV show monologue joke in 1994. Tonya Harding is the title of a new and quite lovely Sufjan Stevens song (“This world is a bitch, girl,” it goes. “Don’t end up in a ditch, girl.”) And Tonya Harding is the name invoked in a pile of recent feminist think pieces coinciding with the movie I, Tonya, in which she is played by Margot Robbie, explaining her side of the story.
Maybe I could just call her Tonya in the story, I said. Just to avoid confusion. “You have to say Tonya Harding,” she said. Tonya Price hasn’t done anything wrong. She is a relatively recent invention with nothing on her rap sheet. It’s Tonya Harding who has a few things she would like to clear up.
For as many people who are mean or crude when they realise who she is, there are just as many who love her. We had met earlier in the day at an ice rink in Vancouver, Washington. When she entered, the 10 or so teenage wonders who had been jumping and spinning during serious-skater-only hours rushed off the ice to envelop her with hugs. “She’s such a good influence on the girls,” one of their mothers told me.
When Tonya got out there with her first jump, the girls who had been practising all morning looked like total amateurs by comparison. At 47, she still holds so much power in those thighs and so much grace in her hands and posture. People said her sin – before her other sins – was not being the Disney princess that the Figure Skating Association demanded of its skaters. “I hated the word ‘feminine’,” she said. “It reminded me of a tampon or a panty liner.”
Tonya skates sometimes, but not as much as she used to. What would be the point? Her ban by the USFSA as a skater and a coach should leave her open to professional skating, but “because everything is owned by the association,” she said, there are very few corners of it in which she can still meaningfully participate. Even if she taught young skaters for $50 an hour at the rink, she wouldn’t be allowed to bring them to competition, so, again, what’s the point?
When she got the call from Rogers, she’d been doing fine. She could take care of herself. She had other skills. She’d worked as a welder, a painter at a metal fabrication company, a hardware sales clerk at Sears, where every day some guy would ask if there was a man who could help him, and every day she’d school that guy on how much more she knows about tools than just about anyone. She competed in a celebrity boxing bout in 2002, and started an unremarkable boxing career in 2003.
She married and had her boy, who changed her life by refocusing her attention on someone who wasn’t her. She and her husband would spend hours hunting together, just as she used to do with her father. She had a life. It was going fine. She had made some kind of peace with the idea that she’d never really be understood.
I, Tonya, which is based on hours of interviews with Tonya and her ex-husband, honours its feisty subject by showing not just the abuse she endured, but how she fought back. It gives added context to the scandal for which she is now principally known.
The story is told in the tone in which Tonya speaks, and there are scenes that have been seen a hundred times before in Lifetime movies: a young girl being hit by her mother, a young wife being hit by her husband. The film has been generally wellreceived, and Allison Janney won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Tonya’s mother. But there have also been reviews that wonder if the protagonist is a punching bag for cheap laughs and classism.
For the record, Tonya loved the movie. “Magnificent,” was her word, especially after she’d seen it a few times. You have to remember, that was her life. That those beatings were very specifically hers, not composite beatings. And that they weren’t even shown in full: “People don’t understand that what you guys see in the movie is nothing,” she said.
Gillooly, er, Stone, and Harding’s mother have denied allegations of abuse. But “that’s all true,” Harding said. The people charged with taking
care of her didn’t. Which is not to say that the movie is totally accurate. As I said, there are some things she would like to clear up.
First, because of the way it’s edited, the movie makes it look as though she hunted for rabbits and that is how she got her fur coat. Not true. She bought that coat.
Second, the movie made it seem as if she has a dirty mouth. She wants you to know she does not. “I mean, the movie portrayed me as this person who cussed every 10 seconds and I don’t cuss like that.” There’s a scene in which she confronts a table of judges and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy. “I would never say that,” she said.
That’s it? I asked. That’s it, she confirmed. Those are her only objections. Which was confusing, because the movie doesn’t vindicate her by a long shot. It presents both sides of the story, both her and her exhusband’s, and neither comes across looking particularly innocent.
The reason Tonya loves the movie is because it conveys something she doesn’t feel was ever conveyed before. There were mitigating circumstances. Her life was terrible. Her own mother didn’t seem to love her. The only time she ever got anywhere was when she circumvented the rules and took for herself what appeared to be given to the Nancy Kerrigans of the world.
Kerrigan was from a working-class family too, but she was loved. Her parents drove her to practices and cheered for her and cried with joy.
She had Vera Wang skating outfits! Tonya had nothing. They had trainers and dietitians and Tonya was eating broccoli and cheese from the food outlet where she worked at the mall. She had asthma. She had muscles.
“I was always told I was fat. I was ugly. I wouldn’t amount to anything. ‘If you don’t smile and follow through they’re not going to give you the marks. If you wear that ribbon they’re not going to give you the marks. If you wear that dress they’re not going to give you the marks.’”
This has nothing to do with exoneration; it hasn’t for a long time. Her side of the story is not about guilt or innocence – but about the finer points of being Tonya Harding: respect, mitigating circumstances, how we treat people and what we expect from them in the first place.
We adjourned to the restaurant next door to the bar where we had been talking. Tonya ordered a drink the owner created for her. It is called the Triple Axel, because no one would understand if it was called the Tonya Price.
She thinks that if she could have done a clean programme at the Olympics, if her lace hadn’t broken, if she hadn’t been so frazzled and beaten down by the news media, we would be having very different discussions about her. We would be marvelling at all she overcame. Her movie arc would have a heartfelt and triumphant trajectory like Rocky.
It was getting late when we left the restaurant. I thanked her for her time, and then she thanked me. She told me that the media had screamed at her and tricked her and lied to her and attacked her. No one ever sat down and bought her a drink and asked her for her side of the story.
Here’s the thing: throughout our interview she contradicted herself endlessly. But she reminded me of other people I’ve known who have survived trauma and abuse, and who tell their stories again and again to explain what had happened to them but also to process it themselves. The things she said that were perhaps doubtful were spiritually true, meaning they made her point, and she seemed to believe them.
As we left, she put her head against my chest, and I leaned down and hugged her. Here is something I’ll never understand – that you can be sitting across the table from someone who certainly did something bad, who appears to show no remorse for it and you can still feel love and sympathy for her. “This world is a bitch, girl,” I told her. “Don’t end up in a ditch, girl.” She looked up at me and smiled and then Mrs Price hopped into her truck and drove home to her husband and son.
Tonya loves the movie because it conveys something she doesn’t feel was ever conveyed before.