Off Thin Ice: After Decades of Media Abuse, it Took Hollywood to Repair Tonya Harding’s Image and Reputation

This qualitative study examines Tonya Harding’s experiences after she was excoriated by news media in the 1990s and given an opportunity in 2017 to tell her story through the film, I, Tonya. The critical thematic analysis of a semi-structured interview with Harding contends that her assessment of how her image was recuperated by the film is informed by her experiences with news media’s classism and sexism before and following the notorious attack on Nancy Kerrigan. Keywords: image restoration, figure skating, classism, Olympics, Tonya Harding, media, communication