5d ago

Did not read the room.

25 comments

Watch "I, Tonya". It may not be 100% accurate, but it's entertaining as hell and makes you a bit more empathetic

Not true, it was Tonya Harding’s boyfriend they had to worry about. All Tonya herself did was give them dirty looks during competitions.
- 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.
  
  Sarah Marshall’s Remote Control
  Fascinating article, thanks for the link.
  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.
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180805052053/https://believermag.com/remote-control/
  
  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?
- And she was mostly returning the looks they were giving her!
- I tonya is a great film. Supertramp score gets 1/10 bonus points.
- Not true, it was Tonya's bodyguard that was the true culprit. All the boyfriend did was lay out the plan, which would have been nothing without Eckardt executing it.