But the logic was not only sound, it was supported by data. A 2003 National Institute of Justice report cited research that in 70 to 80 percent of partner homicides, the man physically abused the woman before the murder, no matter which partner was killed.
BREAK THE SILENCE
Awareness of violence against women and momentum to end it were picking up in the early 90s. In 1993, the United Nations General Assembly for the first time named, defined, and vowed to eradicate domestic violence. It adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which clarified that the abuse of women and girls, whether physical, sexual, or psychological, was not a personal or family matter. It was violence, it was criminal, and perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted. Each act of domestic violence, whether it was a shove or worse, preyed on women and girls because of their “subordinate status in society,” according to a report by a gender-advocacy organization partnering with Johns Hopkins University.
This recognition and expanded definition by the world’s most prominent global institution marked an important step. It acknowledged that victimizing girls and women because of their gender was a means of exerting power over them, and it wouldn’t be tolerated. “Many cultures have beliefs, norms, and social institutions that legitimize and therefore perpetrate violence against women,” the report explained.
Two subsequent global convenings on women’s rights in the mid-90s made domestic abuse a central theme. At both the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, ending gender violence was framed as a matter of basic equality. At the latter conference, Hillary Clinton famously declared, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights—once and for all,” to a raucous crowd.
In September 1994, the year that Simpson was arrested and charged with murder, President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act into law as part of his signature crime bill. VAWA for the first time made domestic abuse a federal crime. It funded prevention and victims’ services, created special domestic abuse units within law enforcement, and designed trainings for police. It also established a new wing of the US Justice Department to enforce the new law. The bill was cheered as watershed, and encouraged a paradigm shift in how law enforcement and victims’ services agencies addressed domestic violence.
After the Simpson verdict, domestic violence awareness peaked. Women’s shelters reported greater intakes. Crisis hot-lines were flooded with calls and needed more funds to handle the additional volume. California, which in the late 80s and early 90s pioneered legislative remedies to domestic violence, recorded increased arrests. In fact, domestic violence became the number one felony arrest in the state—more than arrests for rape, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon combined, according to a San Jose Mercury News investigation. A Department of Justice report found that intimate partners committed fewer murders in 1995 and 1996 than any other year since 1976. The Simpson trial awakened the nation to a long-simmering scourge, and something was finally being done about it.
But victim stigma didn’t disappear so easily. In 1995, Bill Clinton declared October “National Domestic Violence Awareness Month,” ironically the very day before Simpson was acquitted. Many pondered whether the verdict would dissuade victims from coming forward and dash hopes that they could get help. Meanwhile, communications campaigns about violence against women seemed to hinder the cause. Posters, brochures, and television ads featured women “often literally cowering in fear and shame,” according to a 2012 Avon Foundation report. Critics said such images contributed to the stereotype of “learned helplessness” and victim-blaming. One ad featured a woman crumpled behind a toilet, with the text: “If you’re looking for help, you won’t find it here. Domestic violence, break the silence.”
Toward the end of the decade, the VAWA measures appeared to be having their intended effect. By 1999, the federal government had directed $1 billion to combat domestic abuse, leading the Associated Press to declare, “Five Years after Simpson, War against Domestic Abuse Improves.” From the law’s passage in 1994 through 2010, some $4 billion of government funds were spent fighting domestic violence. Simpson is name-checked in the first sentence of the 2003 state government report California’s Response to Domestic Violence, declaring his case as the moment that focus intensified on this “often-hidden form of abuse.”
And yet, domestic violence still endangers women far more than random crime. In 2013, women were nearly ten times more likely to be murdered by their husbands or intimate partners than by strangers. The likelihood of a woman being killed by her abusive partner increases fivefold if he can get a gun. Despite the fact that one of the nation’s most famous football players was the impetus for widespread domestic violence awareness in the United States, it wasn’t until 2014 that the National Football League was forced to change its handling of domestic violence cases. This came after the release of a shocking video in which a Baltimore Ravens running back, Ray Rice, beat his girlfriend, knocked her out, and calmly dragged her limp body out of an elevator. Rice was suspended without pay, then reinstated, and was able to recover financial damages from the league.
Misconceptions about domestic and intimate violence also persist. Victims continue to be discredited to such a large extent that most sexual assaults are never reported to law enforcement. The best that can be said nearly a quarter century after Simpson’s acquittal is that blaming victims and ignoring domestic abuse is less tolerated now than it was in the 90s.
11
Catfight
Tonya Harding became one of the most infamous villain bitches of the 90s after she was accused of kneecapping her figure skating rival to keep her from competing in the Olympic Games. But she says millennials don’t remember her for this. “People recognize me from the show World’s Dumbest Criminals and things. That’s where they recognize me now,” Harding told me. “And then they might Google me because they think I’m so funny and they might come up on skating.” She’s referring to the truTV series about “brainless bad guys” and “senseless sportsmen” that she appears in as a commentator.
For those who do remember the January 6, 1994, attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, the plotline shifts depending on who you ask. It’s not surprising that people misremember the intricacies of the scandal. What is curious is how many people believe that Harding clubbed Kerrigan. In fact, a goon hired by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, struck Kerrigan (with a retractable baton). I had the facts wrong myself when returning to this story for the first time since my youth.
Most recollections of the whacking involve a catfight. When I first Googled “Tonya Harding,” the search engine recommended “Who did Tonya hit?” as a frequently searched option. In the countless reenactments that persist today, from downtown cabaret versions, to drag re-creations, to network television sketches, Tonya decks Nancy. In a surreal SNL skit, Harding beat up others, too, like John Wayne Bobbitt—he of the severed member. It’s not uncommon for people to recall that Harding went to jail. Actually, she struck a plea bargain to avoid jail time but was put on probation, fined, and banned from figure skating for life. But the version of the story that has become stuck in our collective memory is that Harding beat up Kerrigan. In reality, Harding was not personally involved in the assault on Kerrigan. Rather, she admitted to knowing about the incident after the fact and failing to tell investigators.
Most people think Harding kneecapped her rival Kerrigan because she was jealous of her. It was easy to believe when people described Nancy with words like “elegant” and “Kennedy,” while Tonya was “hard-bitten” with “rough edges.” Female figure skaters have been called the Barbies of sports, so it’s no wonder that the promise of a doll brawl leading up to the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, was irresistible, even if you knew diddly about figure skating. Skating was simply the backdrop to our favorite kind of fight: girl-on-girl.
The catfig
ht stereotype is so intoxicating and timeless that it inspired the mistaken remembrance that Harding hit Kerrigan. Filmmaker Nanette Burstein spent eight hours interviewing Harding for her Price of Gold documentary, which revisits the biases at work around the attack. “Even though the deed was done and organized by men, there was this overriding question of Tonya’s complicity,” she told me. “I think this was distilled down to Tonya doing the deed herself. That’s what we remember from the messaging in the press explosion: the ugly duckling taking revenge on the lovely ice queen.”
The pull of the catfight was powerful enough, in a sense, to rewrite history. The events that actually transpired before and after the 1994 Winter Olympics have been all but lost to the erroneous mythology. In the process, both women were villainized, bitchified, and neither was left unscathed.
MUSIC BOX FIGURINE COME TO LIFE
Nancy Kerrigan epitomized the ice princess fantasy of ladies’ figure skating. Judges and fans praised her body, grace, and skating style for exemplifying the sport’s baked-in feminine ideals. Girlish skaters like Kerrigan were usually young and single. During competitions, cameras often cut to shots of them cuddled with their parents, feeding the fantasy that they were perennial children. One commenter described Kerrigan as a “music box figurine come to life.”
Despite Kerrigan’s looks, this image didn’t come naturally to her. In fact, it had taken her years to cultivate. Growing up in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the onetime “tomboy” had wanted to play ice hockey, not figure skate. But her mother redirected her from roughhousing with her brothers to the more ladylike sport, and her father worked two jobs to fund the hobby.
Kerrigan eventually grew her hair long and developed an effortless-looking skating style inspired by ballet. She perfected and popularized the elegant poses held for seconds while speeding across the ice that figure skating is known for. Her coaches choreographed her programs to display her lean, graceful frame. Kerrigan’s signature moves rendered her frozen, motionless—an “ice sculpture” meant to be “admired from all sides”—rather than a passionate athlete with a beating heart. Her classical costumes and musical selections were both influenced by and designed to win over skating’s rigid judges. Before the attack, the New York Times called her the best female figure skater in the country.
Kerrigan’s family and background were thoroughly working class, but she benefitted from looking like she came from wealth. She had “a very good patina to her,” said Boston Globe journalist John Powers in a documentary about the incident. Skating’s judges, writers, and commentators seemed to obsess over her “erect carriage” and the “long, slim lines of her body,” which “suggest finishing school polish and a kind of haughty distance.” Skating in designer costumes furthered the appearance of an heiress. “Doesn’t she look like a little angel? Very feminine, very ladylike style,” enthused commentator Peggy Fleming at the 1992 US Nationals ladies’ free skate. That same year, Kerrigan won a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, and a silver medal at the World Championships.
Skating authorities wanted a princess, and Nancy Kerrigan delivered. Endorsement deals piled up with brands like Reebok and Campbell’s Soup. Gone was the tomboy and the cute girl-next-door. The Kerrigan selling shoes and chicken noodles was “supermodel beautiful,” cutting a figure compared to Audrey Hepburn, Jackie O, and Snow White. Naturally, Kerrigan expected to take gold at the 1993 World Championships in Prague. But she gave a lackluster performance, only landing two of six choreographed triple jumps. She cried while exiting the ice and took a dismal fifth place.
“She thought she was going to a coronation, not a competition,” Kerrigan’s coach Evy Scotvold told Newsweek, scolding his charge through the press. Something needed to change ahead of the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, which were less than a year away. Kerrigan intensified her training, saw a sports psychologist to help her flush out negative feelings, and practiced smiling more.
HER TICKET OUT OF THE GUTTER
Unlike her rival, Tonya Harding didn’t need convincing to take up figure skating, despite never fitting the sport’s feminine mold. “I stepped out on the ice and loved it the very first time,” she told me. “Since that time I was growing up and doing many things that some of the other kids weren’t doing.” In her biography The Tonya Tapes, Harding recalls physical, verbal, and sexual abuse as early themes in her life. She remembers that her mother slapped, kicked, and even “beat her with a hairbrush” in the bathroom at a competition. Harding practiced at a public rink in a local mall, Clackamas Town Center, outside of Portland, Oregon. When she was a kid, her coach paid a competitor five dollars to insult Harding before she skated her program because anger was her greatest motivator. Her “muscular arms and chunky thighs” would earn her the derogatory label “athletic.”
Harding’s hobbies included drag racing, fishing, and smoking, despite her suffering from asthma. Even her efforts to breathe were unattractive: “Sucking on an asthma inhaler before she took the ice scarcely improved her image,” Rolling Stone said. Harding broke the fourth wall of ice skating—the space separating performer from audience—by showing her competitive streak in public and at press conferences. She spited the judges with her wardrobe choices, choreography, and musical selections. While most skaters set their programs to demure and tinkling classics, Harding chose ZZ Top and the theme from Jurassic Park. “She didn’t play by the rules,” Burstein said. Needless to say, Harding didn’t land the lucrative endorsement deals Kerrigan had.
During competitions, judges wielded tremendous power to jettison skaters they didn’t like through the incredibly subjective category of artistic impression. This comprised half of a skater’s program score. While most skaters incorporated judges’ suggestions and critiques into their future routines, Harding sassed them. In one competition, Harding wore a homemade costume. “One of the judges came up to me afterward and said, ‘If you ever wear anything like that again at a US Championship you will never do another,’” she recalled in Burstein’s documentary. “I said, ‘Well, if you can come up with $5,000 for a costume for me, then I won’t have to make it. But until then stay out of my face.’”
Harding rankled the skating world because she refused to conform to the “illusion of decorous femininity” the sport demanded. Skaters told Burstein that Harding’s odd, criticized choreography would be considered beautiful today. Skating to rock ’n’ roll music isn’t outlandish anymore. Now, athletes choose all manner of song medleys, and can even skate to music with lyrics. But back then, this was verboten.
Harding’s coach, Diane Rawlinson, a former Ice Capades star who collected wine and “looked like she stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue,” counteracted her brashness. Harding’s friend and fellow skater Sandra Luckow told me that when she suggested involving child protective services after seeing Harding’s mother beat her, Rawlinson declined, knowing that if Harding were to be taken from her home it would kill her skating career. “Skating for Tonya is her ticket out of the gutter. She would have nothing in her life if it wasn’t for her skating,” Rawlinson told Luckow.
WILD THING
In February 1991, Harding dumbfounded judges and the skating world when she became the first American woman skater to land a triple axel jump in competition. The axel is the only jump requiring a skater to take off while moving forward rather than backward, and the triple is actually composed of three and a half revolutions in the air. It was also regarded as the most difficult jump in the sport, and thought to be the province of male skaters. Going into the National Championship competition, Harding haters had plenty to jeer at, like her strange blend of program songs, including “Send in the Clowns,” “Wild Thing,” and the theme from the Batman movie, and a costume “the color of Crest toothpaste.” But when Harding stuck that jump, she took the national title and became impossible to ignore. The skating world was aghast. “There was no question that Tonya Harding was not the image that figure skating wanted,” said Powers.
Witnesses praised the jump while assailing the skater. The New York Times said it was “stunning in its athleticism and historic success,” while calling Tonya “reckless” for taking such a risk, even though it made history and earned her the title. She received a perfect technical merit score from one judge, a figure not given to a woman skater in nearly two decades. Her so-called recklessness paid off—Tonya was a favorite cruising into the World Championships that year. “If Harding skates a clean program and includes her big jump, she wins, period,” declared the Oregonian. “Unlike most skaters she almost totally controls her own destiny.” Brash, nervy, and full of promise, Tonya Harding was a phenom like figure skating had never seen. Many believed she was unstoppable.
But after 1991, she never did repeat the triple axel successfully in competition. When that athletic achievement was gone, detractors ridiculed what remained: her womanhood. “Her incompetence as a woman . . . marked her as a deviant,” wrote Abigail Feder in an essay about ladies figure skating’s “overdetermined femininity,” citing Harding’s masculine hobbies, muscular body, and a reported traffic dispute during which she allegedly picked up a baseball bat. Underscoring Harding’s failure as a woman was her inability to keep a man. First, reports of her marriage, at nineteen, raised eyebrows, as skaters her age and caliber were typically single and still lived with their parents. Kerrigan fit both virginal criteria, while Harding “brought impurity to the sport—she brought her husband,” wrote critic Laura Jacobs. After Harding took the national title, news outlets asked her how she managed to both skate and tend to her marriage. They also criticized her appearance. “Without those jumps she wasn’t much to look at,” reporters recalled. Although Harding was a top competitor, failing to be the right kind of woman impacted her financially—“it reduced her value as a television entertainer and commercial spokeswoman long before she was connected to the Kerrigan attack,” Feder observed.
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