Sarah: There's also a weird thing happening where a lot of the people who are covering the news and sort of printing like the historical record of record are just like random people with Gmail accounts who can't afford dental care.
Mike: Welcome to Your Wrong About the podcast where we trace the figures of history as they should have been drawn in the first place. Boom.
Sarah: That is so beautiful, it is a topical metaphor. That is so great.
Mike: I've never been proud of one before.
Sarah: The spirit of Tonya blessed you with true creativity.
Mike: She's around us, she flows through us.
Sarah: Yes. She's the Muad’Dib or something.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.
Mike: And we are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourwrongabout.
Sarah: Taking donations to support our work much as Tonya Harding wants did.
Mike: And today we are doing part two of our epic Tonya and Nancy extravaganza.
Sarah: Is it a capade? Is it a Tonya and Nancy capade? You know, like the ice capades? What makes a capade?
Mike: Palooza?
Sarah: Tonya and Nancy palooza? Yeah, there it is. It was the nineties after all, everything was a palooza.
Mike: And so last week we talked about the history of Nancy and Tonya, where they were up until the moment of the famous attack. So today we're going to talk about the attack itself, and the aftermath. And I suppose all of the debates around the attack afterwards of who knew what, when, all this kind of CSI stuff.
Sarah: This is the Portland Watergate.
Mike: Yeah. So, where should we pick up?
Sarah: So it's January 6th, 1994, at the Cobo Arena in Detroit, Michigan, and the ladies of the National Figure Skating Championship are having their daytime practice. And one thing that we talked about in the last episode is how weird it is that Tonya Harding is like, you know, one of the top five best in America at the sport that she competes in, and is still working at Spud King opening up and making coffee in the mornings.
One of the other interesting things is that here we are, it's this practice session for the elite athletes of the world. Two of these women are going to the Olympics. We don't know which two, but we know that two of them are, and there is no security. It's a time when the public can come and maybe they can't afford to buy tickets for that night, but they can come and watch the skaters and try and get autographs from them.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: Can you imagine?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's also weird for women too, when there's like issues of stalkers.
Sarah: Yes. And Nancy Kerrigan has already received a letter from a Canadian fan that was, to quote her mother, Brenda Kerrigan, “smutty”. It's very weird and just any John Q Driveway can be there and can go watch Nancy Kerrigan, which is how the man who assaults Nancy Kerrigan gets into the building.
Mike: So he just walks in?
Sarah: Yeah, he just wanders in.
Mike: Just like going into Banana Republic. You just walk in with your backpack on, no big deal.
Sarah: Yeah. And so what happens is he waits for Nancy Kerrigan to leave the ice. And a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who is waiting in an area that's off limits to the press - but no one cares about that either - goes up to Nancy Kerrigan to ask her a question after Nancy Kerrigan finishes her practice skate. She walks off the ice and puts on her skate guards and starts talking to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter. And then suddenly this man rushes in from behind them and clubs Nancy, aims for her knee and hits her lower thigh on her right leg, which is the leg that she lands jumps on. So that is integral to her skating, which is obvious to the people who began speculating about this. And then he runs away, and he runs toward these doors that turn out to be locked and turn out to be made of plexiglass. And so he uses his head as a blunt instrument and bursts out through them.
Mike: He breaks the doors?
Sarah: Yeah, with his head.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Sarah: Yes. Do you know what weapon was actually used on Nancy Kerrigan?
Mike: I always thought it was a club.
Sarah: What kind of club?
Mike: Ooh.
Sarah: Because what's a club when it's at home.
Mike: Good question, I don't know.
Sarah: Right.
Mike: The only kind of club I can name is a Billy Club, and that doesn't sound right.
Sarah: No, that is it. It's a collapsible police baton.
Mike: Oh, like the one Jennifer Lopez had in Out of Sight.
Sarah: Yeah. And he runs out of the building, and he hurls it away and it lands under a car. Every element of this crime and its execution is hilarious.
Mike: Yeah. It sounds like they didn't do like a Gantt chart of this needs to happen and then that, it doesn't seem like they planned it out very well.
Sarah: What's a Gantt chart?
Mike: It's a project management tool of who needs to do what and when.
Sarah: You know so many terrifying things.
Mike: This was not a McKinsey organized attack.
Sarah: No, this is these guys have between them seem Goodfellas too many times. It's like every element of this they were making up as they went along. And so then he misses his getaway car and so the getaway driver has to drive toward him and be like, hello, get in.
Mike: It's like an Uber. Are you Jeff? Yes, I'm Jeff, hello.
Sarah: Yes. And then they get away and there is an ABC camera man who is following Nancy. She's leaving the rink and so ABC is there.
Mike: So that's how we get the infamous, “Why me?” footage.
Sarah: Yeah. And describe the infamous footage, if you will.
Mike: I mean, I can barely remember it, but she's crying. The camera is close to her face. She sorts of clutching her leg and she's kind of calling out. “Why me, why me?”
Sarah: She's actually not saying “Why me?”
Mike: I know this is the opening of your essay, so I didn't want to ruin it, but yeah, I know that's not true.
Sarah: Ah, such a sport. She just says “Why, why, why?” She’s holding her knee, and then her dad comes and picks her up and carries her away. And she just reminds me of the way it feels when you're a kid and you hurt yourself and your dad picks you up and carries you away. Because someone is asking her what it was. She's like, “I don't know, some hard, black, stick. Something really, really hard.” And her voice just sort of like jumps, registers into crying, and she's just like balling. She's just like a tired kid with a skinned knee at the end of the day. And it's amazing because Nancy Kerrigan was always known for her stoic elegance.
So Nancy is examined, and it's determined that she can't skate, the baton hit above the knee. And later on the guy who carried out the assaults knew he hadn't broken her kneecap, which is what he was trying to do, because he didn't hear a popping sound. He misses the kneecap, but she’s still injured enough and injured enough in the knee area that she can't compete that night. She doesn't have the kind of control that she needs to make or land jumps. She doesn't have a full range of flexibility. But because she has won a medal at a previous World Championship, that means that she can be given a bye to compete at the Olympics, which means that she doesn't have to qualify at Nationals. The USFSA is like, we're going to send Nancy because we trust her, and also because Michelle Kwan was the second-place finisher and she's 13.
Mike: Jesus, okay.
Sarah: And so after Nancy is injured, Tonya skates better than she has in arguably years. She skates a great program. She doesn't have the triple axel, but she has beautiful triple jumps.
Mike: So, she's like the shit, she's at the top of her game.
Sarah: Yeah. She skates the skate of her life and she wins the National championship.
Mike: So, Nancy gets attacked, Tonya does the best skating of her life two days later.
Sarah: Yeah. Let me add also that Tonya lost a little bit off of her score for her costume when she won Nationals, even as she won.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Because it was considered, to quote from the book written by two Oregonian journalists, “trampy,” look up a picture.
Mike: This must be 1994 Nationals, Tonya Harding. Oh, what it's fine.
Sarah: What do you see?
Mike: It's purple. It's got like gold glitter on it and it's doing that thing that they always do in figure skating where it looks really low cut, it looks like it's going all the way down between her boobs, but there's that weird flesh colored fabric.
Sarah: Yeah. Extremely thick.
Mike: Yeah. She's wearing like a fucking turtleneck, but like a V of the turtleneck is the same color as her skin. So from 80 feet away, it looks like it's really low cut. But the fact is if you're anywhere within like throwing distance of her, you can tell that it's flesh color. So you're not actually seeing any of her body.
Sarah: You also get the sense that when she wore stuff like this, was Tonya being like, I'm being feminine, I'm doing the thing you said. And they're like, no, we meant some other undefinable thing. This is terrible and wrong. And she was like, what? But I spent all my money on this costume.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, it's even got glitter on the flesh-colored front part.
Sarah: You got to have glitter.
Mike: So it's not even anyone is confused as to whether she's showing her boobs.
Sarah: I can tell you when glitter took off in American figure skating. Linda Fratianne, 1980 Olympic competitor, won the silver. She was the one who started wearing sequins on her leotards as kind of a trademark thing. And again, in another way that the sport has been shaped by a broadcast, sequins look really good on TV because they catch the light and spangle. So anyway, Tonya loses points for costume, and she says, rather guilelessly quote, “It won't be a complete title without being able to go against Nancy.” Which to me is not the kind of thing that you would say if you thought you are suspected of something, right? You have to be either like a cartoon villain that you're suspected, or like a normal person who is kind of oblivious.
Mike: Right. And you can see how all of these little, not that consequential, details can get twisted later of, isn't it a little suspicious that she skated so well after Nancy was attacked. I mean, you can just see how the magnifying glass is going to illuminate these things differently.
Sarah: Yeah. You know, you can be psyched out by your competitors' performance and Nancy was the one who she was always pitted against. So being able to compete without being seen in comparison with Nancy, I can imagine it'd be a huge relief. And so, she wins the title and her quote on again, off again, husband, Jeff has flown in to be with her on the day. Jeff watches her win the title, and then after she wins, they are approached by detective Dennis Richardson of the Detroit police. Okay, so within two days they are being questioned. So the Detroit police bring Jeff in and question him jointly with the FBI and an FBI agent named Dan Sobolewski asked if his wife had a bodyguard service. And Jeff says yes. And I happen to have a card for World Bodyguard Services, which is run by Shawn Eckhardt. Is that name familiar to you?
Mike: Vaguely. And a weird like Kato Kaelin deep in the depths of my brain type of way, yeah.
Sarah: Isn't it weird how these scandals happened so kind of wrotely in America in the nineties, that there was sort of standard roles. Like, how in Shakespeare comedy there is always like the confused messenger and there is like a supporting cast member who just is like vaguely funny in every way.
Mike: It's like the best friend in every romantic comedy.
Sarah: Yeah. So Jeff happens to have business cards for his friend Shawn Eckhardt's bodyguard company, because he brought them to Detroit at Shawn's request. Because Shawn has orchestrated the assault on Nancy Kerrigan based on the promise of a relatively small amount of money. Which will then turn into an increased need for bodyguards in the figure skating world. Which means that after Jeff hands out his business cards at Nationals, he will be flooded with offers and he will make tens of thousands of dollars.
Mike: Wait, what? It's like a vertical integration scheme. It's like increasing the demand for your product artificially and then you're supplying it.
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: That's the plan.
Sarah: Yeah, that's the plan. The plan is for a couple of losers to make a relatively small amount of money.
Mike: How much of this does Jeff know? Does Shawn come to Jeff with the idea, or does Jeff come to Shawn with the idea?
Sarah: So let's talk about the beginnings of this plot. I want to read to you also a passage from Fire on Ice, the book by The Oregonian journalists about the attempts to find the man who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan and then burst out through the locked plexiglass door to escape, and who was caught momentarily on the security camera footage. Because both the footage of Nancy Kerrigan being assaulted and then the security camera footage of him escaping were broadcast nationally. It was huge news. Nancy was on the cover of Newsweek. It was just immediately a topic of deep fixation.
And after the assault, the National Figure Skating Championships gave out 250 new sets of press credentials, because suddenly they had become the focus of a lot more media attention because there had been an assault there. It's similar to me to the fact that when JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, initially this did not inspire much press attention. But then when the media caught wind of the fact that there was this footage of her competing in these child beauty pageants, then it suddenly became a big story because it was like weird. There's a lot that the media was not particularly interested in, didn't think that Americans would be interested in, unless it was like extra horrible.
Mike: I think we like crimes that take place within worlds.
Sarah: That is true.
Mike: Of murder that takes place in like the tattooing community or whatever. It's just a nice little entry point. But unfortunately, we keep using the same fucking entry point, which is always a murder.
Sarah: Well, and also, unfortunately we keep wanting our real-life crimes to mimic our fictional crimes. We get really excited when a real-life crime feels like a fictional crime, because that's what we're familiar with and what we find narratively satisfying.
Mike: And this one kind of does, I mean, to be fair, like it's pretty incredible that this happened.
Sarah: And how come, what feels so incredible about it?
Mike: Because it's an assassination but it's not an assassination of a life. It’s an assassination of an athletic ability, which is very interesting.
Sarah: And also very Agatha Christie like to be asked. It's very liked the mirror cracked or something.
Mike: Yeah. And then it also immediately points to other figure skaters because this clearly isn't a random attack and it's not like they stole her money or wanted to kill her because she's in a love triangle. It's like they wanted to remove her athletic ability and the only people that benefit from that are other figure skaters, right. Are the rankings two-through everybody else that could get into the Olympics. I'm imagining that like immediately the spotlight goes to all of the other figure skaters because no one else benefits from this.
Sarah: And immediately people start looking at Tonya.
Mike: Yeah, you would.
Sarah: And because she's always been pitted as Nancy's rival, her natural enemy, the Joker to her Batman. So of course, Tonya is the first person who people suspect and start making jokes about having done it. And she and Jeff start getting looked at by the police within 48 hours. Okay. So let me read you this passage from the book by The Oregonian journalists about the attempt to identify the man who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan, and whose image was captured very briefly and very blurry early on the security camera footage.
“Witnesses gave detectives the description of a powerfully built man, but their accounts varied wildly. Forrest said he was white too said the thug was a light-skinned black. The police eventually issued two composite drawings of their suspect. When reporters saw them, they laughed. One drawing looked like a square jawed white man, one drawing looked like a delicate oval faced black woman.”
Mike: So we've narrowed it down.
Sarah: “Never mind, police indicated technology would come to the rescue. Through special “space age” techniques, video taken right after the attack would provide a clear picture of the assailant. Computers would enhance the tiny, blurred image of the man fleeing from the downed skater. For days, the Detroit police talked about this miracle of science, but when it was finally done, the result looked only vaguely human, reporters dubbed it, the shroud of Detroit. Police, however, declared that their suspect was conclusively white and had long hair, the eventual confessed to salient fit neither of these specifics.”
Mike: It's so perfect that we've got an angle of like, technology will fix this somehow.
Sarah: Computers.
Mike: I guess this is the middle of a period where every movie has that scene where they're like zoom in, enhance, on security camera footage, and then it comes up perfectly. They're like, I need the license plate of that car 60 feet away. Boop, boop, boop enhance and then it's oh, 7 1, 2, 3. I just think cops watch movies and they believe them like everybody else.
Sarah: They watch Blade Runner, and they believe it, I guess. So the person who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan is either a delicate oval faced black woman, or a heavy set white man with long hair.
Mike: So it is either Halle Berry or Jack Black. But the assailant wasn't wearing a mask.
Sarah: Apparently not.
Mike: That's a weird choice.
Sarah: All of the choices were weird.
Mike: That seems super basic.
Sarah: I feel like this whole thing was orchestrated and carried out by a bunch of guys who were all simultaneously pretending to know what they were doing and all thinking, boy, I hope none of these other guys figure out, I don't know what I'm doing.
Mike: Yeah. Wow. It's like an online magazine.
Sarah: Or a podcast.
Mike: I love this shit. I am like so fascinated by conspiracy theories. And I feel like the greatest debunking of baroque international conspiracy theories is actual conspiracies, where it's like always just like a bunch of ding-dongs and nobody knows what they're doing. And it's like super obvious within 15 minutes.
Sarah: Okay. So, in December of 1993, Tonya Harding goes to the NHK Trophy in Japan. And she's going qualify for nationals that year, no matter where she places in this event. But she is still really unhappy that she places seventh and feels like she wasn't judged fairly. And, you know, she has a point because one of the things she notes is that two of the other skaters competing, Surya Bonaly, who is French, and Chen Lu who's from China, fell in their programs, but get third and fourth place. And she gets seventh and she doesn't fall, and she skates a clean program.
Mike: Oh for fucks sake.
Sarah: And she openly complains about this to the press. She started getting a reputation as not being unfailingly polite and positive and Disney princess all the time. Which like, how dare she.
And so Tonya calls Jeff from Japan and says she feels like she was cheated. And she comes back to Portland, according to Jeff, still feeling frustrated about being held down. And so Jeff is venting about this when he is talking to his friend, Shawn Eckhardt who is the proprietor of World Bodyguard Services.
Mike: How does Jeff know him?
Sarah: They have been friends since grade school. So Jeff is complaining to Shawn and he's complaining that Nancy Kerrigan has already being propped up as the one who's going to win the Nationals, and judges are already giving Tonya lower scores then she deserves. And probably at Nationals, Nancy Kerrigan is going to win anyway, and it doesn't matter how Tonya skates. And according to Jeff ,his old friend Shawn listens to him say all this and says, “Well, what if Nancy got a threat and couldn't compete?”
Tonya has previously received a death threat when she was skating in a competition, and someone called in and said that if Harding skated, she would get a bullet in the back. And pretty soon after that it was rumored in the figure skating community that she had orchestrated a death threat so that she wouldn't have to skate at this event as a qualifying thing, because she was given a pass and automatically qualified. So Jeff claims that Shawn suggests some kind of threat. And Jeff is like, “Yes,” that's the ticket that happened with Tonya. Nancy wouldn't have to skate and then Tonya could get the score she deserved. According to Jeff, Shawn is the first one who suggests physical violence. Do you want to know what he first suggests that they do?
Mike: Ooh, yeah.
Sarah: Okay. This suggests to me that Shawn Eckhardt has been watching horror movies, and specifically Pet Semetery. He suggests that they slice her Achilles tendon.
Mike: Oooh.
Sarah: Yeah. And then Jeff is well, you know, actually if you break one of her knees or one of her legs, if you hurt her right leg somehow, she won't be able to land her jumps. Let's do that.
Mike: And it's also nicer.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's like way less difficult to do. So some background on Shawn Eckhardt. He's, I believe, 26 at the time. After the story breaks, he’s made fun of, and every media account of this, for being fat. And is just this very unfortunate kind of buffoon figure who apparently just lied to everybody who he talked to about basically his entire life. He claimed to have years of counter terrorism and espionage work, and that he had worked in the middle east, and I want to say in Central America, and that he had done all this sort of like cloak and dagger, CIA type stuff.
Mike: It is also amazing whenever you find these people that are pilloried in the press for their weight, there is always a thousand things that are so much worse about them than their weight. It is like oh, he was a larger guy. And oh yeah, there's this thing about lying about his entire life and planning to completely ruin someone's entire career. But anyway, he's a big dude, so obviously he's not worth anything.
Sarah: Yes. It says a lot about who we were at the time and continue to be as a country. Yeah, so Shawn and Jeff, you know, it seems kind of cook up this idea together. And what Jeff later says is that Shawn doesn't want to tell Tonya about this idea until after they've carried it out. But Jeff says, no, we should tell her. If we don't, it'll be too much of a shock to her.
Mike: It might affect her skating.
Sarah: Yeah. Which is a pragmatic thing to think. So what Jeff later tells the FBI is that he talks this all over with Shawn while Tonya is still in Japan. And then she comes home and is still frustrated about her scores. And he tells her, well, Shawn and I have this idea that we've been talking about. What if Nancy couldn't skate at Nationals and you were able to qualify to win and win your title back, wouldn’t that'd be great. And what he says is that Tonya agrees with this and agrees that, you know, he should keep working on it.
Mike: Let's keep workshopping that.
Sarah: Well, she's not agreeing to an active role in it, which is important to know. She is like okay, sure. That makes sense. That's what he's saying she said. So, it's interesting to me that even in Jeff's version, Tonya is not really an active participant.
Mike: What is Tonya's version of this, of her advanced knowledge?
Sarah: Tonya’s version is that she had no knowledge until after the fact, she had no idea that Jeff was planning this. She had no idea that he was connected to it until they started being questioned by the police after she won. So Jeff starts planning with Shawn. Shawn contacts, a friend of his named, Derrick Smith, who lives in Phoenix. And to quote Fire on Ice, “The two shared a love for the world of spies, espionage, and survivalism. They even talked about starting a survivalist school where Eckhardt could teach bodyguard work.”
Mike: Oh my God. This like random dude who has no experience in doing anything like, yeah, I'll train you in how to be a bodyguard. I've seen that movie twice.
Sarah: And Derrick Smith is the same kind of guy. He's like a random dude living in Phoenix who likes martial arts stuff.
Mike: I am just imagining that kid in the Star Wars video, right? He was like playing with a stick in his garage. That's the level of expertise that I'm projecting onto these dudes.
Sarah: And so Derrick Smith calls his nephew, Shane Stant, who is a bodybuilder, who also is from Oregon, but lives in Phoenix at the time. And quote, one neighbor described Stant as a “big dude with scars on his head from beatings as a child”. Smith, the neighbor said, “He is just different, he's not very sociable. He’ll just walk by you and not say anything.” So they're just like small town, martial arts, enthusiastic.
Mike: I mean, you don't want to minimize anybody's abuse or anybody's trauma and like all the systems that have failed these guys.
Sarah: You can call someone a martial arts enthusiast without minimizing their trauma.
Mike: But I don't know, there is something about the way that American culture creates men like this, with these weird fantasies of taking justice into their own hands. And this weird obsession with violence, they have been like very profoundly failed by society, but then they sort of repeat that pattern by trying to strike back by coming up with their own weird little schemes.
Sarah: Yeah. And this is absolutely that kind of masculinity, what Derrick Smith tells his nephew, Shane is that they have been offered a job where they're going to quote, take down a skater. His nephew, Shane says, well, I won't cut anyone's Achilles’ tendon because that's still on the table. But for $2,500, I will break her leg or whatever.
So once again, I guess it feels important to restate $2,500, you know, and this is they don't know these people. They have no reason to take this job. They don't seem to be in like significant financial hardship at this moment. It feels like it's the glamour of it and that this is kind of fulfilling a dream for them to be able to go to a strange city and assault someone for not very much money.
Mike: God, I knew guys like this in community college.
Sarah: That's maybe another mesmerizing aspect of this crime as the details come out, that there's so many guys like this who would be drawn to doing this kind of job, because it feels like it would allow them to play a role in a fantasy they have about themselves that involves hurting someone. Which is weird.
Mike: So the plan they come up with is Derrick is going to hit Nancy in the kneecap with no mask on, and then just run away. That is the whole plan.
Sarah: They run through a lot of different plans.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: Actually Shane is the one who hits Nancy, and Derrick is the getaway car driver who has to follow behind him for a while. So Jeff later says that he has Tonya call around to find out where Nancy trains and what her rink is called.
Mike: Interesting.
Sarah: Which is the Tony Kent Arena in Massachusetts, which Tonya allegedly writes down as ‘Toony Can Arena’ on a scrap of paper. It got found in a dumpster outside the Dockside Restaurant, a venerable outer Portland institution, which is later used to tie Tonya to the case. It's one of the smoking guns. So they find out where she practices, and also all four men have a planning meeting, which Shawn Eckhardt tapes. He says, “Wouldn't it be easier just to kill her?”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: And suggests that they get a sniper to kill Nancy.
Mike: Oh. Because they're very competent, so that will go off without a hitch.
Sarah: One of them has sniping skills and once again, to quote Fire on Ice, “Gillooly told Shawn to leave murder out of it. Talking about killing, made him uncomfortable.” So good for Jeff drawing the line at murder, very important when you're working with guys like these who seem capable of willing a lot of fantastical things into life.
Mike: That's all the whole thing. It's like the fantasy of doing this big scale, mission impossible type schemes, like part of the fun, like you mentioned a bunch of episodes that go how people like planning things and talking about fantasies. I'm going to go to Acapulco and I'm going to open a restaurant. It's fun to just talk about stuff. Even if you kind of know in the back of your head that it's not going to happen.
Sarah: Yeah. And it is just like you know something that would give your life meaning, right. Everyone has boring jobs. Everyone is like kind of a loser in some ways. This is like something where if it gets pulled off, and Shawn especially seems to have been focused on this aspect of it. If you pull it off, then like you're on the news. Your part of a story that all Americans are going to know about something that you've done.
Mike: That's part of the appeal. Because they're going to know about a bad thing that you did and then you're going to get in trouble, but just seems like they haven't thought it through.
Sarah: I think he felt that he wasn't going to get in trouble even though, also by the way, his mom knows about all of the details of what's going on, Shawn Eckhardt's mom. Everyone's like, why didn't Tonya come forward? And it's like, why didn't Shawn Eckhardt's mom come forward? Why didn't Agnes Eckhardt talk to the police?
So Shane Stant flies to Massachusetts. And I'm going to read to you, “Upon arrival, Stant checked into a hotel near Logan International Airport using a credit card and registering under his own name. He discovered that the credit card he shared with his girlfriend couldn't be used to rent a car, so he had to wait a day for his own card to arrive from Phoenix. On December 31st, the next day, Stant found the Tony Kent Arena in the resort town of South Dennis on Cape Cod. For two days, he parked outside the arena, moving his car every 30 minutes, but always keeping an eye on the front door. On January 3rd, Stant called the rink and asked about Nancy Kerrigan and whether she would be skating soon. He claimed to have a daughter who wanted to see Kerrigan skate. The woman told him Kerrigan had left for the National Championships. Stant drove back to Boston, returned his rental car and took a cab to the train station where he learned that no trains were going to Detroit.”
It's like every mistake that he could possibly makes, he makes. I really identify with this guy. That is how I feel whenever I go to the post office.
His money was getting low, he took a cab to the Greyhound bus station and bought a $125 ticket to Detroit. The 25-hour trip would bring him to Detroit late January 4th. Stant checked into a Super 8 Motel registering in his own name and paying $101.76 for three nights. Those were the days, right? He asked for a waterbed and paid $10.39 for a video player and two adult movies, Hollywood Fantasies, and The Girls of Beverly Hills. Once in his room, Stant called Smith, who had in the meantime returned to Phoenix.
Mike: I mean, you’d think that at some point they would just say that at every level, we have failed to plan this so far. So it's unlikely.
Sarah: Like maybe not, let's just not do it. You know, let's regroup and think about this and try to assault someone next year, or see if we even still want to. Maybe we'll all be really into paintballing a year from now.
I also like to think about the fact that Shane Stant spent three days, three days, Michael, on Cape Cod moving his car every 30 minutes waiting for Nancy Kerrigan. And it took him three days to call the rink.
Mike: I know it seems if you are struggling to rent a car, maybe hitting a professional figure skater in the kneecaps and getting away with it, is maybe outside of your realm of expertise. Let's focus on going to a place, renting a car, making sure someone is in the location that we think they're into. Let's master that.
Sarah: Although to be fair witnesses still described him as a delicate featured black woman. He came surprisingly close and there was also a plan initially. One of the things they are talking about is what if we rush Nancy in her hotel room and duct tape her wrists and assault her in her room and then leave her there, tied up. Which would be way more traumatic.
Mike: I mean, I was going to say it's a way better plan than what they came up with, but also it would have been more traumatic, yes.
Sarah: They would have been less likely to be caught. But they went with the lower impact stupider thing. That's nice. Meanwhile, according to Jeff, Jeff and Tonya are sitting in Portland, like okay, when is this thing going to happen that Shawn said was going to happen. And Shawn makes up all sorts of stories about what's going on, too. I don't know, guy time for himself. So he says that the hitman broken in Nancy's car outside of a 7-Eleven and got her address off of her registration. And then when she came out of the 7-Eleven, they stole the car and then he said that they hid in her house on New Year’s Eve, but she didn't go home, and all this like ridiculous kind of farcical stuff that they're supposed to be getting into.
Mike: I'm getting like weird sympathy with Jeff of supervising staff who are just totally incompetent.
Sarah: Right? Like you hire someone to do a relatively simple job and he's oh man, you wouldn't believe it. Could he just she used to do the thing I hired you to do?
Mike: Right. I don't need you to steal her car at 7-Eleven. I need you to do this one thing. Have you done the one thing yet?
Sarah: But then finally they're in Detroit, Nancy's practicing, Shane wanders in looking suspicious AF, and nobody notices or cares because there's no security hanging around. And he watches Nancy skate and waits for her to come off of the ice and then clubs her on the leg with his police baton and runs headfirst through the plexiglass doors and into history or out of history or something. So that's the planning and then it's not, it's kind of like the story of an early plane that like took a really long time to take off and then crash disastrously and got six seconds in the air. It's like err, putter, putter, putter and then it gets some clearance and then it like takes everybody down.
Mike: What is the investigation like? How do people come across this? Is it the Jeff confesses? How did the cops finally start unraveling this?
Sarah: No, I mean, there are immediately leaks. So one thing is that a woman who I believe Shawn's dad had been having phone sex with.
Mike: It was the nineties.
Sarah: Sure. Yeah. So this woman who learned about the plot, which was apparently discussed freely in the Eckhardt family home, sends an anonymous letter to Coin TV, which is one of the major network affiliates in Portland. She also sends a copy to the Detroit police, which is, I believe how they learned that there is a Derrick involved and know to ask Jeff about it. And Shawn is taking a community college class and he has a classmate who is kind of a shy guy, I think he's a student pastor. And Shawn is like do you want to hear this tape of the planning of the hit that I carried out? And the guy is like okay. Shawn plays him the tape that he made of the planning meeting with Jeff and the hitmen.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Yes. And the guy is like, it's kind of garbled, I can't really hear it. And Shawn's well, here's what it's about. So he's like immediately starts implicating himself at the first available. He like cannot stop himself from bragging.
Mike: There's like a very good lesson here for if you need to hire people to do crimes for you. People who want to do crimes because they seem cool, will tell everybody about them because they're like, look how cool I am.
Sarah: Right. You want someone like Robert De Niro in Heat who is cursed by how good they are at crimes. They don't even want to be good at crimes, but they are.
Mike: So basically immediately, everybody just starts telling anyone who will listen. We committed this crime that is like already on the news presumably.
Sarah: Yeah. Shawn immediately starts blabbing about it and the Detroit police question Tonya and Jeff. And Jeff says, “Oh, Shawn Eckhardt is my wife's bodyguard, and here's a card for his bodyguard services company.” Because I have lots right now and they're the most obvious people to suspect and pretty quickly evidence starts to turn up. So the FBI questions Jeff in Detroit, before Jeff and Tonya go home to Portland after Nationals. And they also question Tonya, and Tonya signs a statement for the FBI saying that she had no knowledge of the attack on Nancy. And they go home. And of course, the media is a swarm.
Mike: Right. Because this is when it becomes a thing, right?
Sarah: Right. She's going back to Portland on January 10th, which is four days afterward. And so, yeah, this is when the media is there at the airport to meet her and get footage of her and talk to her. The press is on her in a way that they have not been before. And so The Oregonian gets in touch with Shawn Eckhardt because they find out from a source about the tape that he has played for a classmate and they may phone him and ask him for an interview when he was like, sure, I'd be happy to talk about my counter-terrorism work. He then meets with The Oregonian reporters at a restaurant and they like talk to him about his espionage and world bodyguard services for a while. And then slide into asking him about Nancy Kerrigan.
Mike: Oh my God. It's so easy.
Sarah: Yeah. The FBI shows up in Portland and talks to Shawn. And then after that, Shawn and Jeff get together at a pancake house and work on getting their stories straight. And Jeff doesn't say much because he believes that Shawn is secretly taping the conversation which he has a reason to think. So, by the end of January 11th, five days after the assault, Derrick Smith has confessed to assaulting Nancy Kerrigan.
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: The next day, Shawn Eckhardt and Derrick Smith are arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit second degree assault. And on January 14th, Shane Stant turns himself in to the FBI in Phoenix. And then January 18th, a warrant is issued for Jeff's arrest.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: And the Olympics is in one month.
Mike: I mean, they cracked this case really fast.
Sarah: Yeah. Because everybody immediately starts implicating themselves in each other, and they made so many mistakes while committing the crime itself. And it's everyone experiences the least bit of pressure and immediately turns on each other. I mean, if they watch Goodfellas too many times, they also didn't watch it carefully enough. Because what's the main lesson of Goodfellas for at least the first two hours, don't rat on your friends.
Mike: This is my theory with all of those movies is that everybody really watches them, but nobody watches the final third.
Sarah: Yeah. I think that is true. No one watches the part where your wife gets a shag haircut, and you got all paranoid and then you go to jail. It's like not putting in the second tape of Titanic. You're like a Henry Hill stayed high and had three mistresses forever, end of movie. Tonya Harding at this time is showing up in People magazine, the press is staking out her home she's being followed everywhere. This is when she wears that great sweatshirt that says no comment. She is suddenly receiving just an incredible amount of attention, like a degree of attention that would be overwhelming and mess with your head no matter what it was for.
Mike: I remember that description from your article of her, trying to practice skating at this time and there is like hundreds of cameras around her, and she just can't do it.
Sarah: Yeah. And just in her, every move is being watched and it's like she is in an interrogation room basically, and she's trying to practice her sport. Tonya tells the press on January 11th, she maintains that she had no idea. She knows nothing, essentially, in the days immediately following. And then after that, she is interviewed again by the FBI, and they talked to her for 10.5 hours and then the agents tell her that they believe she's lying, and that lying to a federal agent is a crime. And see she goes and talks to her lawyers and then comes back and confesses to the FBI to knowing after the fact that Jeff had orchestrated an assault on Nancy Kerrigan but had not come to them with her knowledge because she was afraid of him. And that's the degree of involvement that she confesses to.
Mike: How do you feel about this?
Sarah: I mean, the way I feel about it is, A) I think her claim that she didn't know about it until after it had already happened and that she hadn't come forward because she was afraid of Jeff, is completely plausible. And I also think that if she did know in advance, if Jeff's story about all that is true, that he was like, Shawn and I are going to keep Nancy from competing. And she was like, okay but wasn't part of the planning, wasn't part of the orchestration was kind of minimally involved in the whole thing, then I understand that, too.
I can understand her behaving in that way. And this is what it comes down to in all of these cases, is like this idea that I, as an apologist for someone have to successfully argue that they're innocent and they never did anything wrong. That's what allows me to say maybe we shouldn't keep making blood sport of this person for 25 years. That's the argument that's supposed to make us question this abusive cycle of media and public attention.
And what I really think is that the evidence against her is really flimsy. The case against her is her being implicated by a co-defendant pretty much. There's stuff like someone having written ‘toony can arena’ and the handwriting expert saying that looks like her handwriting. So, there's stuff there, but really, it's Jeff's story. And like, why is Jeff so credible a person in this scenario. You know, I think the evidence against her is it doesn't really prove much of anything. I think her story is as plausible as Jeff's. But also, I think that even if she did everything Jeff said she did, that still doesn't mean that we had the right to treat her the way that we did and the way that we have in the 25 years since.
So I feel when I wrote that piece and what I was arguing to people individually in bars is, we treated her terribly and we acted like she had done something that was utterly indefensible, morally inexcusable, unimaginably conniving, and evil. And so we had the right to use her for our entertainment and use her abuse at the hands of the public and the media as our entertainment, because she had done something terrible and so it was fine. My thinking is that A) what she did in the scheme of things was not that terrible. And if we're taking Jeff's version kind of the darkest possible version of her involvement as the truth, like that degree of involvement is not that awful. And B) that I can understand why she would make any of those decisions that they were decisions that she had made. If she truly felt that like she could not be taken seriously as the athlete that she was for as long as this person who embodied everything that she wasn't and never could be, was the person that she had to compete against. If that was how she felt, and if she also was driven by this need to prove that she deserved love, she deserved to be treated like a human being because she could still do this amazing thing and could still be part of her sport in the way that she was before, when she had once briefly been treated by the world as if she mattered if she was willing to do something desperate or not even do something desperate but allow something desperate and awful to be done on her own behalf. To get that back and believe that was the only choice available to her. I can't fault her for that either. What do you think?
Mike: Maybe this is because I've been interviewing sex offenders all week, but it's difficult to talk about another person, especially a person who has committed a crime without falling into the category of I am defending them, or I am condemning them. It is very difficult to talk factually about, it's not clear what Tonya knew when she knew it. It seems to be quite well-established that there was abuse in their relationship. We have documents showing that she has filed for a restraining order. We have calls to 911 within that relationship within all of that complexity, she may have done something indefensible. She may have done something slightly less indefensible, but it's difficult to talk about these things of here's all of the information that I'm giving you. It's not necessarily saying she's a good person, or she is complete trash. It is just, she's a person. Is that what you mean?
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think we just need to let her be human again. And I think that the kind of tunnel vision that we have about all this is also informed by the fact that America was taking such great fucking joy in January and February of 1994 in mocking Tonya Harding.
Mike: It is remarkable. I mean, it is as I remember that very specifically how like ruthless it was.
Sarah: Yeah. And like why, what was that about? Was it because did we feel like she was just the ultimate bad decision maker in America that no one could be as mesmerizingly out of control as she was? And she met it made us all feel better by comparison. What was that?
Mike: What do you think?
Sarah: I know that there was also a tremendous sense of anticipation going into the Olympics because what happened was that Tonya confessed to the FBI. Tonya held a press conference, which was broadcast live in Portland, hooray, and led national news broadcast that day, basically tearfully confessing to having knowledge after the fact of the assaults on Nancy. And saying, you know, I want to compete for my country, I haven't done anything to violate the expectations of sportsmanship that the Olympics wants. I know some people can't forgive me for this, but, you know, I confess this is what I've done. And she was barred from competing and her coach's husband was a lawyer, so she had access to legal help through that. And so she sued the Olympics to allow her to compete and so she was allowed to.
Mike: Oh, so that's how she ended up competing, I didn't know that.
Sarah: Yeah. She had to fight back.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: And to be fair, no one fought that hard to keep her out of contention. And the point is raised in, I,Tonya that perhaps, you know, everyone knew what kind of a ratings bonanza this would be. The ‘94 Olympics are bananas.
Mike: I remember this.
Sarah: Which everyone kind of knew would be the case going in like one thing that actually happened in figure skating that season well before the scandal, was that skaters who had gone professional were allowed to regain their amateur status and qualify for the Olympics if they wanted to, which had never happened before. So all of these previous Olympic champions who had gone pro came and were back in the game.
Mike: So it was a circus for other reasons.
Sarah: Yeah, it was already a circus. And then to quote Fire on Ice, everyone is trying to get a piece of Tonya, “Reporters rushed to the airport in Chicago, in the hope that she might be changing flights there. There were rumors that she would talk to 60 Minutes or to Diane Sawyer or to Barbara Walters, but Harding remained as remote as Garbo.”
Mike: I don't know who that is, but okay.
Sarah: Greta Garbo.
Mike: I'm using context clues.
Sarah: Omg. Okay, and there's this idea that I think we have in the nineties that maybe now we're disabused of, because fame has been so democratized, but this idea that if people pay attention to you, that's power that you can use. The fact that all these people want to talk to Tonya, and the fact that she's not talking to any of them means that she has the upper hand somehow.
Mike: Right. Rather than like, all of her endorsements would have dried up at this point. She has no income. She's still married to this dude who sucks.
Sarah: Well, they're divorced actually, but she's still domestically linked to this dude who sucks. And then she announces before she heads to the Olympics that she and Jeff are going to separate. And then she gets to the Olympics and finds out that Jeff has sold their wedding night video to Penthouse.
Mike: Their wedding, like them having sex. There's a sex tape of Tonya Harding.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: Oh, I had no idea.
Sarah: You were not reading enough Penthouse in 1994, young man.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: There is and it's a video that Tonya said she didn't know Jeff was making, he set up a camcorder and film them on their wedding night when she was 19.
Mike: Which is like such a fucking rapey thing to do.
Sarah: Ah huh. We have a term for this now it's called revenge porn. That's literally what he does. He takes footage of her having sex without her consent and then sells it to Penthouse after she announces her separation from him.
Mike: Have you watched it?
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: What is it like?
Sarah: It's clearly a video taken without someone's consent.
Mike: Is it really?
Sarah: Well, okay parts of it. Because there's part of it that has oral sex that has Tonya performing oral sex on Jeff, which also you know, as we discussed in our Monica Lewinsky episodes, women are not allowed to be known to do in the 1990s.
Mike: Of course, there's only four different sex things you can do, and we have to load like three of them with weird baggage.
Sarah: And one of them is murder. Do straight people express themselves through sex crimes? And you know, if you're a woman and you have given oral sex to a man, then that's it, you know, your life is over, right. It's amazing. The idea that you can be blackmailed with something that everyone does.
Mike: Yes that literally everyone does. Yes, okay.
Sarah: Not literally everyone, but very close to literally everyone, certainly higher than our vaccination rates, I would argue. Tonya finds out that the sale is going to go through whether with or without her consent. And so she agrees so that she can get some money off of this video of herself being sold.
Mike: Yeah that's what Pam Anderson did too. It's like you know it's going to leak anyway so you might as well get 30 bucks a pop for it.
Sarah: Yeah. You know, part of the video is something that Tonya did know was being taken at the time, which has Jeff filming her as she gets undressed and act sexy for him. And it's, you know, it's him telling her that she's beautiful as she shows him, her like beautiful muscular body. And then it's like some of the like tenderness in the marriage, you know, what it was is being sold and profited off of too. And she's competing at the Olympics. Imagine that you wake up and your abusive ex has sold porn of you that you didn't know, he was taking the footage at that time, and you have to sort that out and then you have the Olympics. The number of unthink like no one has experienced what she's experienced.
Mike: Yeah, it's weird. It's like her career, her finances and her personal life are all in crisis at the same time.
Sarah: Yeah. What was happening in her horoscope? So she gets to the Olympics and the first day that she and Nancy are on the ice together practicing is this like absolute, I mean, the footage of this is incredible because this is the first time that they have been in the same frame as each other.
Mike: I know, I remember this footage. It's so stressful.
Sarah: Can you describe it?
Mike: It's like them sort of circling around each other in a way that I think is probably super normal for practice sessions.
Sarah: Oh yeah, because there's a lot of people in the rink at once and you need your own space and you're not going to be skating right next to anybody.
Mike: But everyone is looking at it like Talmudic scholars to find any little shred of meaning, any eye contact, you just know it's going to be a media story. So, it's like you have to blow it up into this huge thing, even though the footage itself, if you watch it in any other context. That's two ladies skating, I don't remember them having any actual interaction in that footage.
Sarah: No, they didn't interact in that footage. They didn't interact where any cameras could see them ever during the Olympics. And I think there is this idea that like people wanted them to fight and the lady short program, because there is a short program and a free program, the short program was watched by 45 million people.
Mike: Jesus Christ.
Sarah: That made it at the time, the fifth most watched TV broadcast ever.
Mike: It got that and like Roots where the only thing that America stopped what they were doing to watch.
Sarah: It was like Tonya Harding and Alan Alda on Mash. And you're just this woman from Clackamas County who just wants to be paid a living wage for the sport that you practice at an elite level. And you have this like terrible marriage that you don't know how to end or get out of. And suddenly you were as well-known to Americans as Geraldo, like how. It was just such a silly time.
Mike: I remember watching that with my parents. It was a huge, I mean, there was all this anticipation of it. I kind of remember the event itself because Nancy did well, right?
Sarah: Nancy did great.
Mike: And then Tonya had to like, her skate was too tight. She had to stop in the middle of it.
Sarah: That was in the long program, the long program was where it got interesting and the short program, Nancy skated really well, Tonya finished in 10th place after skating to the Much Ado About Nothing soundtrack. And then in the free program, that was where Tonya had the famous trouble with her skate lace. Where she had been in practice, she had broken a lace, they hadn't had a spare and she replaced it with a shorter lace and was trying to get the skate ready to go out with, and like they were calling her name and it looked like she was going to have to forfeit her spot and she got out with like seconds to spare. And then started skating and popped her first jump and started crying and went over to the judges table to show them her skate, which is what you're supposed to do by the way, if any of your equipment doesn't work as a skater, you're supposed to go over to the judges and show it to them.
But of course, it's this famous image of like her with her skate up on the table and she's crying and pointing at it. And she, you know, just like Nancy had six weeks earlier, she just looks like a kid who's been holding it together during a long day at the fair. And finally, it's just It's too much. And so, they give her time to fix it, you know, better than it is fixed to do what she can. And so she goes off and gets it fixed and composes herself to really an amazing degree and skates, well, like not perfectly, but she skates and she pulls up her standings and she finishes the Olympics in eighth place.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: And Nancy skates an incredible program, I cannot overstate the beauty of her free skate at that Olympics. She skates the music, it is a Neil Diamond medley, and it starts off with the music of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I have not read or seen Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but I understand that it's about a seagull and it's like a seagull who can fly higher than all the other seagulls, but then something goes wrong, but then he flies even higher, somehow, I think. The part of the music that Nancy is skating to. Stop laughing. Just because I'm saying the word seagull so many times. The part of the music that Nancy starts skating to in that program is when Jonathan Livingston Seagull is all like battered and has had just like a really bad time. Maybe he's not going to make it. And he's like no, I must fly, it is the triumph of the, you know, human seagull. It is this beautiful performance by Nancy, which was never choreographed to be about overcoming, you know, an injury. It was supposed to be about overcoming just the whole, what her career has been for the past couple of years. And she skates beautifully and she's more consistent than maybe she's ever been. And she finished in second place to Oksana Baiul. It was a teeny tiny teenager, and it was very controversial at the time.
Mike: Why?
Sarah: Okay. So one of the issues in figure skating scoring, there was no instant replay. And so, Oksana Baiul had made an error, I believe she two footed a jump landing when she was kind of at the opposite end of the rink from the judges. And one of the judges didn't mark the error because they didn't see it. On top of that, Oksana Baiul and Nancy Kerrigan scores were mathematically identical, but because of the way the system works, the winner is the person with the highest artistic score and that was Oksana.
Mike: So the electoral college gave it to Oksana.
Sarah: The electoral college gave it to Oksana Baiul, and it was the same kind of Tonya, Nancy paradox of like, how do you score two different, but equally good performances from two different yet equally skilled skaters. And it replicated there. And Nancy, while standing on the podium waiting to get their metals, they were apparently waiting for a long time because no one could find the Ukrainian National Anthem because Oksana Baiul would win because everyone was distracted by something.
And so, while they were waiting, Kerrigan was caught saying, she thought that someone had told her that they were doing Oksana Baiul’s makeup and she was like, why bother, she'll just cry it off anyway. Which was the first little ripple of oh my God, Nancy Kerrigan has a personality, this is terrible. And they were like, is Nancy like capable of not being super nice after losing a lifelong dream? That is not acceptable.
Mike: Oh man.
Sarah: And then she was on a float at Disney World which she skipped the Olympic closing ceremonies to do a contractually obligated Disney World event. And she was on a float and was again caught by a mic saying to someone in a Mickey Mouse costume. This is the corniest thing I've ever done.
Mike: Although that's accurate, so that seems fine to me.
Sarah: Once again, yeah, wouldn’t you like her less, if she didn't complain about being on a Disney World float.
Mike: Yeah. That sounds miserable. Although being in the closing ceremony is also sounds miserable.
Sarah: Yeah. But I want to close those my Nancy you're wrong about with something that happened many years after all this. Nancy has two brothers. One of them is named Mark and in the years, following the scandal and their family being in the news. Mark serves two years for assaulting his wife, Janet, who also gets a restraining order against him. And there's one incident where Mark chokes Janet, during an argument, she escapes by jumping out the window, calls the police and the police come and find Mark holding a hunting knife in each hand saying, come on kill me, I want to die. And after this all happens, after he goes to prison and is released, the Kerrigan family has supported him through this whole thing. And he is living with his parents in 2010 when he gets in an altercation with his father, when the father won't let him use the family phone and he chokes him the same way he had his wife.
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: And while he's choking his father, Dan Kerrigan and goes into cardiac arrest and dies, and Mark is charged with manslaughter and assault and battery on an elderly person.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: And convicted of the latter and serves a year.
Mike: Jesus.
Sarah: One of the things that I've thought about since then is how much of this was present in the Kerrigan home when they were the subject of so much media attention. And did Mark have anger issues or behave violently when he was younger, when he was in the home with Nancy. And was it not that you know, there was this girl with a perfect, or if not perfect than at least totally healthy and stable home life and the girl who was living in chaos. Things were difficult for both of them, but one family to keep there what Tonya called rough edges out of the public view and one couldn't. What do you think about that?
Mike: So it's two women that potentially could have been really close and could have helped each other or bonded or offered support in some way, but the whole structure in which they came into contact with each other, made that impossible.
Sarah: Yeah. Two women who were working in a structure that didn't have any space for the realities of their lives. And one could, you know, keep her chin up and, you know, make it work financially and stay out of the news and also bear her trauma in a way that allowed her to behave in the ways expected and desired of her. And you're kept isolated if it is all about make it work, don't need special treatment, don't need help.
Mike: So what happened at Tonya afterwards?
Sarah: Oh, I mean, her life was, you know, destroyed by this. She was stripped of her national title. She was barred forever from competing in amateur figure skating and also unofficially barred from, you know, ice shows and that kind of thing. She taught figure skating for a long time. She stayed in shape and kept herself trained and skated on her own time for years after this happened, waiting to be asked back and waiting to be able to skate again. And married another guy after Jeff, who was also abusive, and she got out of that marriage fast and is now married to a guy who it seems like she's had no trouble with and has a son.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: Which leads us to the kind of restorative justice of I,Tonya, which is an interesting movie because it doesn't tell her story to the degree of detail that we have about her. It doesn't talk about the degree of abuse that she claimed happened to her. And it shows her as someone who has given more of a chance to talk back to the skating powers that be, that she thinks she had in real life.
There's a scene in that movie where Tonya Harding shout, suck my dick at a panel of judges, which like, oh my God, no one has ever in the history of the sport done anything like that. That would be like, stopping your program short in the middle because you fell on a jump and you know, just skating away. No one's ever done that either. Things that are within like the normal boundaries of human history onyx, it's a sport. If you behave like that once, then like the repercussions for you could be at the end of your career, who knows, nobody knows. And so I feel like what's interesting about that movie is that I personally have my own, I'm a scholar of film issues with it.
And yet at the same time, Tonya Harding loves that movie, and she was played by Margot Robbie, one of the most beautiful ladies in the whole world, who then was nominated for an Oscar for playing her. And then Tonya went to the Golden Globes, and Sharon Stone gave her advice on how to feel calm when there's people taking her picture.
And then Tonya got to be on Dancing with the Stars. And now she has all of this reality TV work because her legacy has changed, and people are now willing to adopt her as a maligned figure of someone who didn't deserve the way that she was treated. And I feel like we can't have a major social movement that, which I'm calling this a major social movement, I guess. We cannot have a major social movement that doesn't overly simplify some things. And I think that the main thing that I didn't see in I, Tonya that I feel like as part of her story. And to me, an important part of her story is that she wasn't always funky and cute and able to stick up for herself and someone who is easy to see yourself, as she wasn't always just this spunky outsider. She's someone whose life bore the scars of the abuse that she had suffered.
You know, there's a lot of little sections and media covering her at the time and in The Oregonians reporting on her about how she would like her fan club would raise a thousand dollars for her to go to this Olympic training camp. And then she wouldn't go, but she'd keep the money and ah, so villainous and it's so she was like maybe kind of unreliable and overwhelmed. And immature and difficult and a complicated person and we deserve to see that too, we deserve to have the chance to see that having a lifetime of lovelessness and abuse can make someone difficult to love, and yet it's still worth learning to love them and to meet them on their own terms.
Mike: And they can also make bad choices and we've seen this in so many of the stories that we've covered on this show that like Amy Fisher made bad choices and Monica Lewinsky made bad choices and Tonya Harding did too. And that doesn't make them less of a person. And it doesn't take away from the fact that we can still empathize with them. It's not, we don't have to put them in this little box of she's this hero that we all revere or she's this hussy who we all destroy. It's okay for them to have some flaws and some character and do some kind of dumb shit because everyone does dumb shit and that's okay.
Sarah: It's okay for her to have rough edges. It's okay for her to be more complicated than maybe we want her to be. But you know what I find great in all this is that Tonya Harding has gotten some reparations. American media, the same force that once destroyed her life and lifted her house away and carried her up to Oz, was like, what if you were played by the most beautiful, sexy, special lady in the world. And everyone realized that they were assholes. This is what she deserves and also like lots of money and anyone who profited off her story, looking her in the eye and apologizing to her.
Mike: Right. I think what's like almost most haunting to me is that, is like the money thing. That like, as we saw with every other time, we cover a story with the same sort of basic architecture it is that everyone gets rich, but her.
Sarah: Yeah. It's like she's the goldmine and they're the miners.
Mike: Yeah, and then people write books about it that become bestsellers and people do documentaries on it on which they sell ads for Halliburton.
Sarah: And then some bitch writes a lyric essay about it and bases her whole career on that and sits in a closet obsessing over it.
Mike: I mean we talk about people making bad decisions, but you think about the way that rich kids’ bad decisions get papered over and they get compensated for, and they get explained away in a way that poor people's bad decisions never do.
Sarah: Just also what gets me is the feeling that people seem to have at the time that like we needed to find some way to ignore the fact that we were just destroying this person whose life had already almost destroyed already and doing it just because it amused us. We needed to believe that she was somehow subhuman so that we could still have our fun.
Mike: You know, what's interesting to me is I wonder if there was something in journalism at the time, too, that like nobody wanted to write the article that was like, hey, let's all slow down, Tonya Harding has like a long history of abuse. She's a complicated person.
Sarah: Yeah, why didn’t anyone say that?
Mike: The incentives in media are sort of like you can't defend a person like that once the pylon has begun.
Sarah: Well, I've read a lot of coverage of this from the time and there'll be like an opinion piece or something somewhere in a newspaper. And, you know, during the scandal that's. What I learned about Tonya Harding, working at Spud City, I suddenly felt bad for her, you know. It is just this rare, not very forceful voice of dissent. There was never like a militant voice. It was always like, actually, maybe she's not terrible.
Mike: I was thinking about the role of editors and the role of gatekeepers in these things too, that at the time there would have been like some finite number of newspapers, some finite number of websites. You know, if 75 people in the country, all of whom are editors decide this isn't an opinion worth hearing. No one would hear that opinion.
It wasn't that big of a group of people who could just banish an opinion from polite discourse. And so the fact that most of the media at the time was being run by men. Most of whom didn't have a gut level, my heart goes out to her kind of reaction. We didn't think of that distorting at the time, we didn't think of that as like a special interest group. We just thought of that as oh, just editors, editors do what editors do. But you look back on it now and you're like, well, there were a lot of people who decided what we heard and what we didn't hear about Tonya. And those were decisions like that was not inevitable.
Sarah: Honestly the more I think about it at this moment, I feel like we can trace so much of it back to profit because if you're running a news magazine show, which was a thing we had in the nineties, and you can choose between producing a segment, that's like piling on Tonya. Because it was like anyone who had ever met her was getting interviewed, the media descended on Portland in a way that we talked about for years.
Mike: People probably came out of the woodwork, everyone who worked at that fucking mall was probably like, I knew Tonya and she kicked me with a skate one day because if you tell a juicy story about Tonya, you'll get in the newspaper. If you tell a boring story about Tonya oh, I never met her, you're not going to get the newspaper. So, all the incentives are there to make up a bunch of yeah, she was clubbing everyone on the knee.
Sarah: Yes. And you're going to have the best odds of being in the paper or on TV or making some money, if you can sell something that makes her look bad or implicates her in some way. Because the highest rates are going to go for the pieces of information, confirming the story that the media wants. And if you're producing a segment for a show, then your job is to go there and find people who can tell you that Tonya is who you think she is, which is a monster you're being paid to believe that she's a monster.
And so it just is this little industry for a while, for as long as people want news of how terrible of a person Tonya Harding is, that's what you can get paid to go out and get. That is what gets the most viewers. That's what gets people to change the channel or come in from the kitchen. Everyone knows that hate and sex are two of the great lucrative commodities and prime time TV news, in nineties and hate is a lot easier to find.
Mike: Sex is pretty easy to find to but yes.
Sarah: Maybe it's easier to inspire someone's hatefulness than to turn them on. We're just spit balling here. But the point is, the story that did the most damage to the people in it was the one that made the most money. After the fact she is assigned, I think 500 hours of community service, she never serves time. She accepts the lifetime ban from figure skating. You know, the only thing that anyone ever finds her guilty of is hindering the prosecution, which is what she admitted to having done by not having come forward to offer the police or the FBI, her knowledge about the assaults on Nancy, after the fact. No one ever convicts her, of having had, for knowledge of the event. It doesn't matter like in the public eye, she did it because people don't remember her as having been connected to a plot to take out her rival. People remember her as having been holding the club. I know this because I lectured a lot of people about it when I was in grad school.
Mike: I mean, I do think one thing you said last week that I've been thinking a lot about is how you said that nobody wanted the article because there wasn't anything new in it. You know, you didn't have an interview with Tonya or whatever. And I think that's so interesting in that it's like another form of media bias, I think that is invisible. The novelty bias, the newness. If you come back with something and say no, I want to write about something that's been there all the time. That's like a difficult thing to pitch and a thing that is we don't need to talk to Tonya Harding to know that like we fuck this up. Because it was all on the record the whole time. That's actually a pretty hard pitch for people to really accept.
Sarah: It is I know that's like the main pitch that I do when I pitch things. It is like what if I talked about that thing that no one noticed when it was happening, because I am willing to admit that I am bad at noticing things when they are currently happening.
Mike: Do you think she's read your order? Tonya.
Sarah: Oh, I know that she's read at least part of it because I found out after I published it, I think through her manager that she had read it and had, I believe quote some problems with it.
Mike: Oh, but that's quite interesting.
Sarah: Yeah. When I found that out, I was like, oh God, what is this all been for?
Mike: Yeah. I want to know what she thinks about it so bad.
Sarah: You know, the article I wrote about, A) talked about the way she's been talked about historically, which like sucks to read about yourself. And B) it's about her and I didn't talk to her for it because I had tried to reach out to her before and had received word that she didn't want to talk and then didn't push it further. And so, then after I, Tonya came out, I had been asked by a publication to do an interview with Tonya Harding and do something. At around the time I was trying to talk to her she locked down basically, and I didn't push it very far. Because I was like, I don't want to be a person hounding ,you've been hounded enough.
But I was talking to someone about this recently, who was like, do you think you'll ever meet Tonya? And I was like, in my heart of hearts, I believe that it wouldn't be for something. It would just be an activity of her choosing, and I believe that she would really enjoy someday, somehow, somewhere going to a dog sled race. And I could drive her there and make cocoa.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: So Tonya, if you are listening, I will take you to a dog sled race, or do any activity that you choose to do. I am your humble servant, Sarah Marshall.
Mike: I thought you were going to say, ‘pickle ball’.
Sarah: I hope she doesn't want to do something aerobic, but I will.
Song Playing: “She was morning, and I was nighttime. I one day woke up to find her lying beside my bed. I softly said, ‘Come take me’. For I’ve been lonely, in need of someone, as though I’ve done someone wrong, somewhere. But I don’t know where, I don’t know where, come lately.”