Tonya Harding: The Victim?

Tonya Harding is starving. It's 1 p.m. on a muggy day in Vancouver, Wash., where she now lives, and she hasn't had anything to eat since 5 this morning, when she awoke to do a round of 10 radio interviews, one after another. Between mouthfuls of buttered bread in the restaurant at the Heathman Lodge—a place she's never been able to afford, she says with a "know what I mean?" look—Harding explains why she's finally decided to come forward with some shocking new details to a now infamous story.

If you don't remember Tonya Harding, you don't remember Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan bawling "Why? Why?" on the floor at the Cobo Arena in Detroit in 1994; her knee busted, her career potentially stolen from her in what would go down as the most sinister low blow in the history of the sport.

Harding, whose reputation as the trailer-park envoy to U.S. figure skating has only seemed to cement itself in the decade-plus since her rival's attack, has decided "it's time" to share her side of the events. It's every bit as bizarre as the historical version, which roughly follows along these lines: Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly (he's since changed his name to Jeff Stone), brainstormed with buddy Shawn Eckardt, then hired a hit man and a getaway driver named Shane Stant to whack Kerrigan's knee and knock her out of the U.S. figure-skating championships (Harding went on to win the event, securing a spot on the U.S. Olympic team, but she didn't get a medal. Kerrigan, just weeks after the attack, picked up a silver.)

Fourteen years later, Harding wants to reverse her pervasive image as a heel-slicer, one that Sen. Barack Obama conjured up in a reference last December, when he spoke out against the idea of "pulling a Tonya Harding" by going for the kneecaps of his rivals in the race for the nomination. Not only did she have nothing to do with the attack, Harding reiterates in "The Tonya Tapes," a new book compiled from a series of interviews with sports journalist Lynda Prouse, she had every intention of reporting her ex's misdeeds to the FBI—until Gillooly and two thugs convinced her otherwise.

"They said, if I didn't cooperate and say exactly what he [Jeff] told me to say, they were going to take me out. I had a gun at the back of my head and [was raped] on the back of a truck … and they told me this is what you are going to say. This is what you are going to do, and if you don't, you're not going to be here anymore," Harding writes, adding, "I wished they had pulled the trigger."

Could Harding's allegations result in a criminal investigation? The sheriff's office in Multnomah County, Ore., (where the rape allegedly occurred) didn't return phone calls from NEWSWEEK, and Harding says she's not aware of any investigation.

Stone, who tells NEWSWEEK he first learned of the charges last Friday, said he is considering a libel lawsuit against the book's publisher, World Audience Publishing. "That's ridiculous," said Stone, who maintains that Tonya was involved in the plot against Kerrigan from the beginning. "Fifteen years later, and, 'Oh I didn't say it because I was afraid.' What about the time I was in prison? Were you afraid then?" Stone said he now works "in sales" but declined to specify what industry.

Tonya's book, a compilation of interviews she granted to Prouse, paints a starkly different picture of an athlete whose notoriety is perhaps rivaled only by O. J. Simpson, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson of the World Series-throwing Chicago Black Sox or the Major League Baseball players hopped up on 'roids. The woman stripped of her championship before she went on to rack up convictions for drunk driving and assault--after throwing a hubcap at her boyfriend, Darren Silver--isn't the dastardly malfeasant the media makes her out to be, according to "The Tonya Tapes." In it, Harding claims she's the product of years of abuse at the hands of her mother, who beat her black and blue with a hairbrush after less-than-stellar performances on the ice.

"The whole world thinks of her as a demon. She's become the butt of jokes," said Michael Rosenberg, Harding's manager. "I started thinking, 'This is not a skating book. It's a woman's book.' America jumped and made Tonya Harding into a villain. Tonya Harding was really a victim."