Tonya Harding: The Victim?

Reached by telephone this week, Harding's mom denied abusing the girl. "I should have. Then maybe she would have respected the family," said LaVona Golden, after erupting in laughter at the question. "I did take a hair brush to her one time, one swat across the butt. She was supposed to be on the ice for a competition, and she was squirming all over the place, and I was trying to get her hair fixed, and I finally swatted her on the butt with a hair brush."

Golden said she had no qualms with the book, though. "If it makes her money, fine," Golden said. "She has to have a living. Her husband messed that up for her ... I still love her. She's my daughter."

So, who's the real Tonya? She's hoping people buy the book and decide for themselves.

Understandably, the blogosphere is suspicious of Harding's true motives. "Translation: I'm broke and quickly fading into obscurity," offered one blogger on the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site. "This story makes me want to go to Disneyland," added another. Other critics recall Harding's many desperate moves to make a buck, including boxing with Paula Jones (of Bill Clinton fame) on a Fox TV reality show.

"If you publish a book like that, you probably need to do it for financial reasons," said former gold medalist Brian Boitano, who was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame last month. "If people are going to read it, they have to read it for the entertainment value, and not go by every word as the gospel truth. She struggles with being taken seriously."

Harding knows as well as anyone that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and she's prepared to spend the next several weeks fending off skeptical questions from people "entitled to their own opinion" as she promotes her new book. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Harding struggled the most with this conflicting set of circumstances: if she knew nothing about the assault on Kerrigan until after it happened, why was her ex-husband so desperate to keep her quiet that he'd rape and threaten to kill her?

"You'll have to read the book," Harding said, explaining that it was a long time ago and that she has trouble remembering what she knew back then. "It was things I'd heard from other people."

Longtime friend Linda Lewis said she's known about the abuse since becoming good pals with Harding in 1995. Lewis kept her secret because "We respected her wishes," she said. "It was a very deep, personal emotional time for her to tell us that."

The book's author, Prouse, said she didn't want to write Harding's autobiography and was "absolutely not excited about meeting her" when Rosenberg first approached her in late 1999. But Prouse agreed to watch her skate, wondering if the "nice person" Harding projected was just an act, and decided the book would make a good comeback tale, conducting dozens of hours of telephone and videotaped interviews in the months to come. Then came the hubcap incident in February 2000, effectively ending Harding's career on the ice. The book got shelved.