You're Wrong About - Tonya Harding Part 2

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

“The story that did the most damage to the people in it was the one that made the most money.” Sarah tells Mike about the low-rent conspiracy that sparked a ratings bonanza.  Digressions include "Out of Sight," Robert De Niro and the ancient sexting technology known as landlines. Mike continues to laugh confusedly at references he does not know.  Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

There's also a weird thing happening where like a lot of the people who are covering, you know, 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. ["Dental Care"] Welcome to You're Wrong About,

the podcast where we trace the figures of history as they should have been drawn in the first place. Boom. That's so beautiful. It's a topical metaphor. That's so great. I've never been proud of one before. The spirit of Tanya blessed you with true creativity.

She's around us. She flows through us. Yes, she's the moa-dib or something. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Hopping to Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About.

Taking donations to support our work much as Tanya Harding once did. And today we are doing part two of our epic Tanya and Nancy extravaganza. Is it a capade? Is it a Tanya and Nancy capade? Do you know like these capades? What makes a capade?

Palooza. Tanya and Nancy Palooza. Yes. There it is. It was the 90s after all. Everything was a palooza. And so last week we talked about the history of Nancy and Tanya,

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. This is the Portland Watergate. Yeah. So yeah, where should we pick up?

So it's January 6th, 1994 at the Kobo 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 like how weird it is that Tanya Harding is like, one of the top five best in America at the sport that she competes in and is still working at Spudking,

opening up and making coffee in the mornings. Yes. 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 the 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. Can you imagine? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's also weird for women too when there's issues of stalkers. Yes, and Nancy Kerrigan has already received a letter

from a Canadian fan that was to quote her mother, Brenda Kerrigan, smuddy. 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. So he just walks in?

Yeah, he just wanders in. Just like going into Banana Republic, you just walk in with your backpack on, no big deal. 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's integral to her skating,

which is obvious to the people who begin 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 blood instrument and bursts out through them. But he breaks the doors? Yeah, with his head.

Oh, wow. Yes, and do you know what weapon was actually used on Nancy Kerrigan? I always thought it was a club. What kind of club? Cause like what's a club when it's at home? Good question, I don't know. The only kind of club I can name is a Billy Club

and that doesn't sound right. No, that is it. It's a collapsible police baton. Oh, like the one Jennifer Lopez had an out of sight. Yeah, and he runs out of the building and he hurls it away and lands under a car. Every element of this crime and its execution is hilarious. Yeah, it sounds like they didn't do like a gantt chart

of like this needs to happen and then that and then that. It doesn't seem like they planned it out very well. What's a gantt chart? It's a project management tool of like who needs to do what and when. You do so many terrifying things. Yeah. This was not a McKinsey organized attack.

No, this is like these guys have between them seen good fellows too many times. It's like every element of this they were making up as they went along. Yeah. And so then he like misses his getaway car and so the getaway driver has to like drive toward him and be like, hello, get in.

It's like an Uber. It's like, are you Jeff? Yes, I'm Jeff. Hello. Yes. And then they get away. And there is an ABC cameraman who is following Nancy. She's leaving the rank.

And so ABC is there. So that's how we get the infamous why me footage. Yeah. And describe the infamous footage, if you will. I mean, I can barely remember it, but she's crying. The camera is close to her face. She's sort of clutching her leg and she's kind of calling out why me, why me.

She's actually not saying why me. I know this is the opening of your essay. So I didn't want to ruin it. But yes, I know that that's not actually true. You're such a sport. She just says why, why, why. She says why, why, why. She's like holding her knee.

And then her dad comes and picks her up and carries her away. And she just reminds me of just 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 says they're asking her what it was. She's like, I don't know, some hard, hard black stick, something really, really hard in her voice because she just sort of jumps registers into crying.

And she's just like bawling. She's just like a tired kid with a skin 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 assault says he knew he hadn't broken her knee cap, which is what he was trying to do because he didn't hear a popping sound. He misses the knee cap, 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 championships, that means that she can be given a buy 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. Jesus, OK. And so after Nancy is injured, Tanya skates better than she has in arguably years. She skates a great program. She doesn't have the triple axle, but she has beautiful triple jumps.

So she's like the shit. She's at the top of her game. Yeah, she skates a skate of her life and she wins the national championship. So Nancy gets attacked. Tanya does the best skating of her life two days later. Yeah, let me add also that Tanya lost a little bit off of her score for her costume when she won nationals,

even as she won. What? Because it was considered, to quote from the book written by two Oregonian journalists, Trampy. Look up a picture. This would be 1994 National Tanya Harding. Mm-hmm. Oh, what?

It's fine. What do you see? 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. Like it looks like it's going like all the way down to like between her boobs.

But there's that weird flesh colored fabric. Yeah, extremely thick. Yeah, she's wearing like a fucking turtleneck. But like a V of the turtleneck is the same color as her skin. So from like 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 colored. So you're not actually seeing any of her body.

You also get the sense that like when she wore stuff like this, this was Tanya being like, this is, 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. Yeah.

I mean, it's even got glitter on the like flesh colored front part. You got to have glitter. So it's not even like anyone is confused as to whether she's showing her boobs. I can tell you when glitter took off in American figure skating. Linda Fradiani, 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 broadcast, sequins look really good on TV because they catch the light and spangle. Yeah. So anyway, Tanya 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 think you are suspected of something. Yeah. Right? Like you have to be either like a cartoon villain who knows that you're suspected or like a normal person who is kind of oblivious. Right. And you can see how all of these little not

that consequential details can get twisted later of like, 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 all of these things differently. Yeah. You know, you can be psyched out by your competitor's 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 would 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. So within two days. They are being questioned. So the Detroit police bring Jeff in and question him jointly with the FBI. OK. And an FBI agent named Dan Sobolowski 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 Sean Eckhardt. Oh. Is that name familiar to you? Vaguely, in a weird Cato Kalen deep in the depths of my brain type of way, yeah. Isn't it weird how these scandals

happened so kind of rotally in America in the 90s that there were sort of standard roles, like how in Shakespeare comedies, there's always the confused messenger. In these, there's a supporting cast member who just is vaguely funny in every way. It's like the best friend in every romantic comedy. Yeah.

So Jeff happens to have business cards for his friend Sean Eckhardt's bodyguard company because he brought them to Detroit at Sean's request because Sean 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. Wait, what? It's like a vertical integration scheme. It's like you're increasing the demand for your product artificially and then you're supplying it. Yes. That's the plan?

Yeah, that's the plan. The plan is for a couple of losers to make a relatively small amount of money. How much of this does Jeff know? Does Sean come to Jeff with the idea or does Jeff come to Sean with the idea? So let's talk about the beginnings of this plot. OK.

OK, I want to read to you also a passage from Fire on Ice, the book by the Oregonian journalist about the attempts to find the man who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan and then burst out through the locked plexiglass doors 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. Yeah. It's similar to me to the fact that when John Benet 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like there's a lot that were not really that the media was not particularly interested in and didn't think that Americans would be interested in. Unless it was like, I don't know, like extra horrible. Yeah, I think we like crimes that take place within worlds. That's true.

A murder that takes place in 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. Well, and also, unfortunately, we keep wanting our real life crimes to mimic our fictional crimes.

Yeah. We get really excited when a real life crime feels like a fictional crime. Right. Because that's what we're familiar with and what we find narratively satisfying. And this one kind of does. I mean, to be fair, it's pretty incredible that this happened.

Yeah, and how come? Like what feels so incredible about it? 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. And also, very Agatha Christie-like, to be honest. It's very like the mirror cracked or something.

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. And so I'm imagining that immediately the spotlight goes to all of the other figure skaters because no one else benefits from this. And immediately people start looking at Tonya. Yeah, you would. And because she's always been pitted

as Nancy's rival and like her natural enemy, the choker to her Batman. Sure. 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. OK, so let me read you this passage

from the book by the Oregonian journalist about the attempt to identify the man who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan and whose image has captured very briefly and very blurrily on the security camera footage. Witnesses gave detectives the description of a powerfully built man, but their accounts varied wildly. Four said he was white, two 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. So we've narrowed it down. Never mind, police indicated, technology would come to the rescue.

Through special, quote, 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 assailant fit neither of these specifics. It's so perfect that we've got an angle of, like, technology will fix this somehow. Computers.

I guess this is the middle of a period where every movie has that scene where they're like, zoom in, enhance, unlike security camera footage, and then it comes up perfectly. They're like, I need the license plate of that car, 60 feet away. Yeah. Boop, boop, boop, enhance. And then it's like, oh, seven, one, two, three.

Like, I just think cops watch movies, and they believe them like everybody else. They watch Blade Runner, and they believe it, I guess. So yeah, the person who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan is either a delicate, oval-faced black woman or a heavy-set white man with long hair. So it's either Halle Berry or Jack Black. But the assailant wasn't wearing a mask?

Apparently not. That's a weird choice. All of the choices were weird. That seems like super basic. 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. Yeah, wow. It's like an online magazine. Or a podcast. 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 always just like a bunch of ding-dongs, and nobody knows what they're doing. And it's super obvious within 15 minutes. OK, so in December of 1993, Tanya Harding goes to the NHK Trophy in Japan. And she's going to 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 she has a point, because one of the things she notes is that two of the other skaters competing, Suriya Bonali, who's French, and Chen Lu, who's from China, fell in their programs, but got third and fourth place. And she gets seventh, and she doesn't fall, and she skates a clean program.

For fuck's sake. And she openly complains about this to the press. She started getting a reputation as like not being unfailingly polite and positive and Disney princess like all the time, which like, how dare she. And so Tanya 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, Sean Eckhart, who is the proprietor of World Bodyguard Services. How does Jeff know him? They have been friends since grade school. So Jeff is complaining to Sean, and he's complaining that Nancy Kerrigan is already

being propped up as the one who's going to win the Nationals. And Jacques is already giving Tanya lower scores than she deserves. And probably at Nationals, Nancy Kerrigan is going to win anyway. And it doesn't matter how Tanya skates. And according to Jeff, his old friend, Sean,

listens to him say all this and says, well, what if Nancy got a threat and couldn't compete? Tanya 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 it pretty soon after that 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 Sean suggests some kind of threat. And Jeff is like, yes, that's the ticket that happened with Tanya. Nancy wouldn't have to skate.

And then Tanya could get the score she deserved. According to Jeff, Sean is the first one who suggests physical violence. Do you want to know what he first suggests that they do? Oh, yeah. OK, this suggests to me that Sean Eckhart has been watching horror movies and specifically Pet Sematary. He suggests that they slice her Achilles tendon.

Ooh. Yeah. And then Jeff is like, well, you know, actually, if you break one of her knees or one of her legs, if you hurt her right leg somehow, I think she won't be able to land her jumps. So let's do that. That's also nicer.

Yeah. And it's like way less difficult to do. So some background on Sean Eckhart. He's, I believe, 26 at the time. He, after the story breaks, has made fun of in 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 counterterrorism 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. It's also amazing whenever you find these people that are pilloried in the press for their weight,

there's always 1,000 things that are so much worse about them than their weight. Right. It's like, oh, he was a larger guy. And like, 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. Yes, it says a lot about who we were at the time and continue to be as a country. Yeah, so Sean and Jeff, you know, it seems like kind of cook up this idea together. And what Jeff later says is that Sean doesn't want to tell Tanya about this idea until after they've carried about.

But Jeff says, no, we should tell her. If we don't, it'll be like too much of a shock to her. Oh, and it might like affect your skating. Yeah, which is a pragmatic thing to think. OK. So what Jeff later tells the FBI is that he talks this all over with Sean while Tanya is still in Japan. And then she comes home and is still frustrated

about her scores. And he tells her, well, Sean 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 and to win and win your title back? Wouldn't that be great? And what he says is that Tanya agrees with this

and agrees that, you know, he should keep working on it. Like, let's keep workshopping that. Well, she's not agreeing to an active role in it, which is important to know. She's like, OK, keep, you know, sure, that makes sense. That's what he's saying, she said. So it's interesting to me that even in Jeff's version, Tanya is not really an active participant.

What is Tanya's version of this, of her advanced knowledge? Tanya'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 Sean.

Sean contacts a friend of his named Derek Smith, who lives in Phoenix, and to quote fire on ice. The two share the love for the world of spies, espionage, and survivalism. They even talked about starting a survivalist school where Eckhart could teach bodyguard work. Oh, my God, this, like, random dude who has no experience in doing anything.

Like, yeah, I'll train you on how to be a bodyguard. I've seen that movie twice. And Derek Smith is, like, the same kind of guy. He's, like, a random dude living in Phoenix who likes martial arts stuff. I'm just imagining that kid in the Star Wars video, right? He's, like, playing with, like, a stick in his garage. That's the level of expertise that I'm projecting

onto these dudes. And so Derek Smith calls his nephew Shane Stant, who's a bodybuilder, who also is from Oregon, but lives in Phoenix at the time. And quote, one neighbor describes Stant as a big dude with scars on his head from beatings as a child. Smith, the neighbor, said, is just different. He's not very sociable.

He'd just walk by you and not say anything. So they're just, like, small town, martial arts enthusiasts. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to minimize anybody's abuse or anybody's trauma on, like, all the systems that have failed these guys. You can call someone a martial arts

enthusiast without minimizing their trauma. But, like, I don't know. There is something about, like, the way that American culture creates men like this with, like, these weird fantasies of, like, taking justice into their own hands and this weird obsession with violence. They've 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 scheme. Yeah. And this is absolutely that kind of masculinity. What Derek Smith tells his nephew Shane is that they have been offered a job where they're going to, quote, take down a skater.

OK. 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. OK. So once again, I guess it just feels important to restate. $2,500. Yeah, my god.

And this is, like, 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's, like, it feels like it's the glamor of it and that this is, like, kind of fulfilling a dream for them to be able to go to a strange city and assault someone. Yeah.

For not very much money. God, I knew guys like this in community college. 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.

Totally. That involves hurting someone. Yeah, yeah. Which is weird. So the plan they come up with is Derek is going to hit Nancy in the kneecap with no mask on and then just run away? Like, that's the whole plan?

They run through a lot of different plans. Oh, my god. And actually, Shane is the one who hits Nancy. And Derek is the getaway car driver who has to, like, follow behind him for a while. OK. So Jeff later says that he has Tanya call around to find out where Nancy trains and what her rank is called.

Interesting. Which is the Tony Kent Arena in Massachusetts, which Tanya allegedly writes down as Toony Can Arena on a scrap of paper that got found in a dumpster outside the Dockside Restaurant, a venerable Outer Portland institution, which is later used to tie Tanya 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 Sean Eckhart tapes, at which he says, wouldn't it be easier just to kill her? Oh, my god. And suggests that they get a sniper to kill Nancy. Oh, because they're very competent. So that will go off without a hitch. Yeah, one of them has sniping skills.

And once again, to quote, fire on ice, Galooly told Sean to leave murder out of it. Talk about killing made him uncomfortable. Sure. 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.

That's a whole thing. It's like the fantasy of doing this big mission impossible-type scheme is part of the fun. You mentioned a bunch of episodes ago, how people like planning things and talking about fantasies. Like, 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. Yeah. And it's because, you know, this is something that would give your life meaning, right? Everyone has boring jobs. Everyone is kind of a loser in some ways. This is something where if it gets pulled off,

and Sean especially seems to have been focused on this aspect of it, if you pull it off, then you're on the news. You're part of a story that all Americans are going to know about something that you've done. That's part of the appeal? Yeah. Because they're going to know about a bad thing that you did,

and then you're going to get in trouble. It just seems like they haven't thought it through. I think she 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. Sean Eckhart's mom, yeah. Wow. Everyone's like, why didn't Tony come forward?

And it's like, why didn't Sean Eckhart's mom come forward? Why didn't Agnes Eckhart 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 31, 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 3, Stant called the rank 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 make, he makes that I really identify with this guy. That's how I feel whenever I go to the post office. His money 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 4. Stant checked into a Super 8 motel, registering in his own name and paying $101.76 for three nights. Those were the days, right? Yeah. He asked for a water bed and paid $10.39

for a video player and two adult movies, Hollywood Fantasies and the Girls of Beverly Hills. OK. Once in his room, Stant called Smith, who had in the meantime returned to Phoenix. God, 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. Like maybe not. Like maybe let's just not do it. Yeah. 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 rank. I know. It seems like if you're 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. Like 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. Although, to be fair, witnesses still described him as a delicate, featured black woman.

That's true. He came surprisingly close. And there's also a plan, initially. One of the things they're talking about is like, 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? What could be way more traumatic?

I mean, I was going to say it's a way better plan than when they came up with. But also, it would have been more traumatic, yes. Yeah, they would have been maybe less likely to be caught. Yeah. So but they went with the lower impact, stupider thing. Yes. That's nice.

Meanwhile, according to Jeff, Jeff and Tanya are sitting in Portland like, OK, when is this thing going to happen that Sean said was going to happen? And Sean makes up all sorts of stories about what's going on to, I don't know, buy time for himself. So he says that the hit men broke 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 ridiculous kind of farcical stuff that they're supposed to be getting into. I'm getting weird sympathy with Jeff of supervising staff

who are just totally incompetent. Right, you hire someone to do a relatively simple job, and he's like, oh, man, you wouldn't believe. And it's like, could he just do the thing I hired you to do? 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? 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 kind of like the story of an early plane that took a really long time to take off and then crashed disastrously and got like six seconds in the air. It's like, er, putt-a-putt-a-putt-a-putt. And then it gets some clearance. And then it takes everybody down.

What is the investigation? Like, how do people come across this? Like, is it the Jeff Confesses? Like, how do the cops finally start unraveling this? No, I mean, there are immediately leaks. So one thing is that a woman who I believe Sean's dad had been having phone sacks with. OK, it was the 90s.

Sure. Yeah, so this woman who learned about the plot, which was apparently discussed freely in the Eckhart family home, sends an anonymous letter to CoyneTV, 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 Derek involved and no to ask Jeff about it.

And Sean is taking a community college class. And he has a classmate who's like kind of a shy guy. I think he's a student pastor. And Sean is like, do you want to hear this tape of the planning of a hit that I carried out? And the guy is like, OK. And Sean plays him the tape that he made of the planning meeting with Jeff and the Hitmen.

Yes, and the guy is like, well, it's kind of garbled. I can't really hear it. And Sean's like, well, here's what it's about. So he's like immediately starts implicating himself at the first available. He cannot stop himself from bragging. There's like a very good lesson here for if you need to hire people to do crimes for you,

that people who want to do crimes because they seem cool will tell everybody about them because they're like, look how cool I am. Right. You want someone like Robert De Niro and Heat, who's like cursed by how good they are at crying. And they don't even want to be good at crimes, but they are. So basically, immediately, everybody

just starts telling anyone who will listen. Like, we committed this crime that is already on the news, presumably. Yeah, Sean immediately starts blabbing about it. And the Detroit police question Tanya and Jeff. And Jeff says, oh, Sean Eckhart is my wife's bodyguard. And I have all these. Here's a card for his bodyguard services company

because I have lots right now. Of course. And they're the most obvious people to suspect. And pretty quickly, evidence starts to turn up. So the FBI questions Jeff and Detroit before Jeff and Tanya go home to Portland after nationals. And they also question Tanya. And Tanya 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. Right. Because this is when it becomes a thing, right? Right. Well, so she's going back to Portland on January 10, 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. And yeah, the press is on her in a way that they haven't been before. Right. And so the Oregonian gets in touch with Sean Eckhart because they find out from a source about the tape that he has played for a classmate.

And they go and ask him for an interview. And he's like, sure, I'd be happy to talk about my counter terrorism work. And then meets with Oregonian reporters at a restaurant. And they talk to him about his espionage and world bodyguard services for a while. And then slide into asking him about Nancy Kerrigan. Oh my god, it's so easy.

Yeah. The FBI shows up in Portland and talks to Sean. And then after that, Sean 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 Sean is secretly taping the conversation, which he has a reason to think. So by the end of January 11, five days after the assault,

Derek Smith has confessed to assaulting Nancy Kerrigan. Holy shit. The next day, Sean Eckhart and Derek Smith are arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit second degree assault. And on January 14, Shane Stant turns himself in to the FBI in Phoenix. And on January 18, a warrant is issued for Jeff's arrest.

Wow. And the Olympics is in one month. I mean, they cracked this case really fast. Yeah, because everybody immediately starts implicating themselves in each other. And they made so many mistakes while committing the crime itself. And it's like everyone experiences the least bit of pressure

and immediately turns on each other. Wow. 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. This is my theory with all of those movies

is that everybody rewatches them, but nobody watches the final third. Yeah, I think that is true. No one watches the part where your wife gets a shag haircut, and you get all paranoid, then you go to jail. Exactly. It's like not putting in the second tape of Titanic. You're like, and then Henry Hill stayed high

and had three mistresses forever. End of movie. Yes. Tony 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.

Oh, yeah. She is suddenly receiving just an incredible amount of attention, a degree of attention that would be overwhelming and mess with your head no matter what it was for. I remember that description from your article of her trying to practice skating at this time, and there's hundreds of cameras around her,

and she just can't do it. Yeah, and her every move is being watched, and it's like she's in an interrogation room, basically. She's trying to practice her sport. So Tanya tells the press on January 11th. She maintains that she had no idea that she knows nothing, essentially, in the days immediately following.

And then after that, she is interviewed again by the FBI, and they talk to her for 10 and a half hours. Oh, wow. And then the agents tell her that they believe she's lying, and they're lying to a federal agent as 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. How do you feel about this? 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, like if Jeff's story about all that is true, that he was like, Sean and I are going to keep Nancy from competing. And she was like, OK, 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 this idea that I, as an apologist for someone, have to successfully argue that they're innocent and they never did anything wrong. And 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 why is Jeff so credible a person in this scenario? I think the evidence against her 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 in the way that we have in the 25 years since. So I feel that 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, 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 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 that was the only choice available to her. Like, I can't fault her for that either. What do you think?

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 is committed to crime without falling into the category of I am defending them or I am condemning them. It's very difficult to talk factually about it's not clear what Tanya knew, when she knew it. It seems to be quite well-established

that there was abuse in the relationship. We have documents showing that she's filed for 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? 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 Tanya Harding. It is remarkable. I mean, it is, I remember that very specifically, how ruthless it was. Yeah, and like what, like why? What was that about? Like was it just, did we feel like she was just the ultimate bad decision maker in America

that like no one could be as mesmerizingly out of control as she was and she made us all feel better by comparison? Like, what was that? What do you think? I know that there was also a tremendous sense of anticipation going into the Olympics because what happened was that Tanya confessed to the FBI.

Tanya 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 assault 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 then 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. Oh, so that's how she ended up competing?

I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, she had to fight back. Wow. And to be fair, like no one fought that hard to keep her out of contention and the point is raised in I Tanya that perhaps, you know, everyone knew what kind of a ratings banza this would be.

Right. Our Olympics are bananas. I remember this. 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. Oh, so it was a circus for other reasons. Yeah, it was already a circus. And then to quote fire on ice, everyone is trying to get a piece of Tanya.

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. I don't know who that is, but okay. Greta Garbo. I'm using context clues.

Oh my God. Okay. And there's this idea that I think we have in the 90s that maybe now we're disabused of because fame has been so democratized. But this idea that if people pay attention to you, that that's power that you can use. Like the fact that all these people want to talk to Tanya

and the fact that she's not talking to any of them means that she has the upper hand somehow. 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. Well, they're divorced actually, but she's still domestically linked to this dude who sucks.

Yeah. She announces before she heads to the Olympics that she and Jeff are going to separate. Okay. And then she gets to the Olympics and finds out that Jeff has sold their wedding night video to Penthouse. Their wedding, like them having sex? There's a sex tape of Tanya Harding?

Yeah. What? Yes. Oh, I had no idea. Okay. You were not reading enough Penthouse in 1994, young man. Wow. Yeah, there is.

And it's a video that Tanya said she didn't know Jeff was making. He like set up a camcorder and filmed them on their wedding night when she was 19. Which is like such a fucking rapey thing to do. Uh-huh. We have a term for this now. It's called revenge porn.

Like 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. Have you watched it? Yes. What's it like? It's clearly a video taken without someone's consent.

Is it really? Well, okay, parts of it. Cause there's part of it that has oral sex that has Tanya performing oral sex on Jeff, which also like, you know, as we discussed in our Monica Lewinsky episodes, women are not allowed to be known to do in the 1990s. Of course.

There's only like four different sex things you can do. And we have to load like three of them with weird baggage. And one of them is murder. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Cause 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 like that's it, you know, your life is over.

Yeah. Right? It's just, it's amazing. The idea that you can be blackmailed with something that everyone does. So like literally everyone does. Yes, okay. Not literally everyone,

but very close to literally everyone. Certainly higher than our vaccination rates, I would argue. Ha ha ha ha ha. And so Tanya finds out that the sale is gonna go through whether without her consent. And so she agrees so that she can get some money off of this video of herself being sold. Oh yeah, that's what Pam Anderson did too.

It's like, you know it's gonna leak anyway, so you might as well get 30 bucks a pop for it. Yeah. And you know, part of the video is something that Tanya didn't know was being taken at the time, which is Jeff filming her as she gets undressed and acts 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 it's like some of the like tenderness in the marriage, you know, what it was as being sold and profited off of too. And she's competing at the Olympics. Right. Like 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. Like the number of unthinkable, like no one has experienced what she's experienced. Right, right. Yeah, it's weird. It's like her career, her finances and her personal life

are all in crisis at the same time. Yeah. Like what was happening in her horoscope? Yeah. 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. No, I remember this footage. Yes. It's so stressful. Can you describe it? It's like them sort of circling around each other in a way that I think is probably super normal

for practice sessions. Oh yeah, because there's a lot of people in the rink at once and you need your own space and you're not gonna be skating right next to anybody. But everyone is looking at it like Talmudic scholars to find like any little shred of meaning, any eye contact. Like you just know it's gonna 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, you just be like, that's two ladies skating. I don't remember them having any actual interaction in that footage. 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. Yeah. And the ladies short program because there's a short program and a free program. The short program was watched by 45 million people. Jesus Christ. That made it at the time

the fifth most watched TV broadcast ever. Got that and like roots were the only thing that America stopped what they were doing to watch. It was like Tonya Harding and Alan Alda on MASH. And like she is hard and you're just this woman from Clackamas County who just wants to be paid a living wage for this sport that you practice at an elite level

and you have this like terrible marriage that you don't know how to like 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. 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? Nancy did great. And then Tonya had to like her skate was too tight. She had to like stop in the middle of it. Well, that was in the long program. The long program was where it got interesting. In the short program, Nancy skated really well.

Tonya finished in 10th place after skating to the Machadoo 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 gonna 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 like been holding it together during like a long day at the fair. And finally it's just like, 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. Wow.

And Nancy skates an incredible program. Like I cannot overstate the beauty of her free skate at that Olympics. She skates the music. It's a Neil Diamond medley and it starts off with the music of Jonathan Livingston's Seagull. I have not read or seen Jonathan Livingston's 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 like 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's seagull is all like battered and has had just like a really bad time. Maybe he's not gonna make it. And he's like, no, I must fly. It's the triumph of the, you know, human seagull. It's like 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 Oxana Bayoule. Oh, right. Who was a teeny, tiny teenager.

Yeah. And it was very controversial at the time. Why, what? Okay, so one of the issues in figure skating scoring, there was no instant replay. Oh. And so Oxana Bayoule had made an error. I believe she two-footed a jump landing when she was kind

of at the opposite end of the ring from the judges. And one of the judges didn't mark the error because they didn't see it. Oh, okay. On top of that, Oxana Bayoule 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.

Oh. And that was Oxana. So the Electoral College gave it to Oxana. The Electoral College gave it to Oxana Bayoule. And it was the same kind of tiny 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 medals, they were apparently waiting for a long time because no one could find the Ukrainian national anthem because no one thought that Oxana Bayoule 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 Oxana Bayoule's makeup and she was like, why bother? She'll just cry it off anyway. Oh. Which was the first little ripple of like, oh my God, Nancy Kerrigan has a personality. This is terrible.

Yeah. And they were like, is Nancy like capable of not being super nice after losing a lifelong dream? Like that's not acceptable. Oh man. 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. Although that's accurate. So that seems fine to me. Once again, yeah. It's like, wouldn't you like her less if she didn't complain about being on a Disney World float?

Yeah, that sounds miserable. Although being in the closing ceremonies also sounds miserable. Yeah. I want to close 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. Whoa. 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. Holy shit. And while he's choking his father, Dan Kerrigan goes into cardiac arrest and dies. And Mark is charged with manslaughter and assault and battery on an elderly person.

Wow. And convicts it of the latter and serves a year. Jesus. 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 or when he was in the home with Nancy?

And was it not that there was this girl with a perfect, or if not perfect, then 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 could keep what Tiny called rough edges out of the public view and one couldn't. What do you think about that?

So it's like two women that potentially could have been really close and could have helped each other bond it or offered support in some way. But the whole structure in which they came into contact with each other made that impossible. Yeah, like two women who were working in a structure that didn't have any space for the realities of their lives. And one could keep her chin up and 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's all about. Make it work. Don't need special treatment. Don't need help. Right.

So what happened to Tonya afterwards? Oh, I mean, her life was 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 eye 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, which leads us to the kind of restorative justice of eye

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.

Like there's a scene in that movie where Tonya Harding shouts, 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. Like that would be like stopping your program short in the middle because you fell on a jump and like, you know, just skating away. Like no one's ever done that either.

Things that are within like the normal boundaries of human histrionics are just like, it's a sport. Like if you behave like that once, then like the repercussions for you could be maybe the end of your career. Who knows? Nobody knows. Yeah. And so I feel like what's interesting about that movie is that like, I personally have my own like,

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 like 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 like a, I'm a lion figure and someone who didn't deserve the way that she was treated. Right. 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 can't have a major social movement that doesn't overly simplify some things. And I think that the main thing that I, I didn't see in Tonya that I feel like it's part of her story and to me an important part of her story is that like, she wasn't always spunky and cute and able to stick up for herself

and someone who is easy to see yourself as, you know, she wasn't always just the 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 in, you know, media covering her at the time and in the Oregonians reporting on her about how she would like, her fan club would raise $1,000

for her to go to this Olympic training camp and then she wouldn't go, but she'd keep the money and like, oh, so villainous. And it's like, so she was like, maybe kind of unreliable and overwhelmed and immature and difficult and a complicated person. And like, we deserve to see that too. Like 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. And they can also make bad choices. I mean, 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 Tanya Harding did too. And like, 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 like, she's this hero that we all revere or like, she's this hussy who we all destroy.

It's like, 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. Yeah, 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 like Tanya Harding has gotten some reparations.

American media, the same force that once destroyed her life and like 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 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. Right. I think what's like almost most haunting to me is that, is like the money thing. That like, I mean, as we saw with, you know, every other time we cover a story with the same sort of basic architecture, it is that everyone gets rich but her.

Yeah, it's like she's the goldmine and they're the miners. And then people write books about it that become best sellers and people do documentaries on it on which they sell ads for Halliburton. 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.

I mean, we talk about, you know, 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. I mean, 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 who life had already almost destroyed already and doing it just because it amused us. You know, like we needed to believe that she was somehow subhuman so that we could still have our fun. 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. Tanya Harding has like a long history of abuse. She's a complicated person. Yeah, why didn't anyone say that? The incentives in media are sort of like, you can't defend a person like that once the pile on has begun.

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 like, what I learned about Tanya Harding working at Spud City, I suddenly felt bad for her, you know, but it's like, it's this rare, not very forceful voice of dissent.

It's, there was never like a militant voice. It was always like, actually, maybe she's not terrible. Right, I was like with 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. Like 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 like gut level,

my heart goes out to her kind of reaction. We didn't think of that as distorting at the time. We didn't think of that as like a special interest group. We just thought of that as like, oh, it's 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 Tanya.

And like those were decisions. Like that was not inevitable. Those were individuals who made those decisions. Honestly, the more I think about it at this moment, I feel like we can trace so much of it back to profit. Cause if you're running a news magazine show, which was the thing we had in the 90s, and you can choose between producing a segment

that's like piling on Tanya. Cause it was like anyone who had ever met her was getting interviewed. Like the media descended on Portland in a way that we talked about for years. People probably came out of the woodwork. Like everyone who worked at that fucking mall was probably like, I knew Tanya and she kicked me

with a skate one day because if you tell a juicy story about Tanya, you'll get in the newspaper. If you tell a boring story about Tanya, like, oh, I never met her, you're not going to get in the newspaper. So all the incentives are there to make up a bunch of like, she was clubbing everyone on the knee. 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, cause the highest rates are going to go for the pieces of information confirming the story that the media wants. And if you're, you know, producing a segment for a show then your job is to go there and find people who can tell you that Tanya 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 Tanya Harding is, that's where you can get paid to go out and get, that's 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 primetime TV news in the 90s. And hate is a lot easier to find. Sex is pretty easy to find too, but yes. Maybe it's easier to inspire someone's hatefulness than to turn them on. We're just spitballing 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.

And 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. 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 assault on Nancy after the fact. No one ever convicts her of having had foreknowledge of the event, but it doesn't matter. Like in the public eye, she did it. Cause 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. 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 didn't have an interview with Tanya 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. Like if you come back with something and say like, 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's like, we don't need to talk to Tanya Harding to know that like we fucked this up. Because it was all on the record the whole time.

That's actually a pretty hard pitch for people to really accept. It is, I know. That's like the main pitch that I do when I pitch things. It's 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.

Do you think she's read your article, Tanya? 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. Oh, but that's quite interesting. Yeah, when I found that out, I was like, oh God, what is this all been for?

Yeah, I want to know what she thinks about it so bad. You know, the article I wrote, A, talked about the way she's been talked about historically, which like sucks to read about yourself. And B, it's like, 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, Tanya, came out, I had been asked by a publication to do an interview with Tanya Harding and do something. And around the time I was trying to talk to her, she locked down, basically. And I didn't push it very far. So I was like, I don't want to be a person hounding you,

you've been hounded enough. But I was talking to someone about this recently who was like, do you think you'll ever meet Tanya? And I was like, in my heart of hearts, I believe that it wouldn't be for something. It would just be an activity like of her choosing. And I believe that she would really enjoy someday, somehow, somewhere going to a dog sled race.

Oh. And I could like drive her there and make cocoa. Wow. So, Tanya, 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. I thought you were gonna say pickleball.

I hope she doesn't want to do something aerobic, but I will. I don't know where, I don't know where, I don't know where I'll come later.