Breaking News: With Alexander Zverev, Tennis Focuses Solely on the Game Due to…
The July 17 tweet from the Tennis Channel looked like any other from a social media account seeking to engage with fans and generate buzz. The post announced a new podcast to be hosted by German former pro Mischa Zverev along with his younger brother, world No. 4 Alexander, and their first guest sounded like quite the get: Boris Becker, Hall of Famer and legend of German tennis. The podcast had a cute name—A bis Z (“A to Z” in German)—and even had a few emojis sprinkled in the announcement. It all looked like standard fare.
The tweet has since been deleted. The podcast hasn’t appeared on Tennis.com’s podcast page. An email requesting comment from Tennis Channel public relations went unanswered. It’s an odd amount of silence because, podcast aside, Alexander Zverev is one of the stars of men’s tennis, a present and future face of the sport, someone who already has an Olympic gold medal and will be playing for one again this week. He’s the type of athlete sports fans expect a lot of noise about—tweets, endorsement deals, inspirational Instagram posts—not disappearing podcast announcements.
What deleting the tweet did accomplish was make it harder to follow the reaction to the news, which included vitriol from tennis fans mad that Zverev continued to receive such a lofty platform. The podcast announcement came just a month after Zverev reached a settlement closing a German court case with the mother of his child, a woman who said he physically abused her. That case was the second time in recent years a woman had come forward and said Zverev physically abused her; so too had a former girlfriend in 2020. Within the same time period, Zverev fought in court with his former agent, smashed his racket into an umpire’s chair after losing a doubles match, and was elected by his peers to the ATP’s Player Advisory Council for the 2024 season.
There’s no ignoring Zverev’s future as a fixture of the ATP’s top 10. He is too good and, barring injury, will play for a long time; how could he not be a part of the tour’s future planning following the retirement of Roger Federer, the imminent retirement of Rafael Nadal, and the decline of Novak Djokovic? Zverev, now a two-time major finalist, did not hoist the big prize at Roland Garros this year, but he will always be in contention for it.
It’s understandable, from that point of view, to ask what should tennis do about Zverev. Surely there is something global tennis, in all its power and glory, can change about this. But a better place to begin would be the words of the two women who both said he hurt them, whose words still seem little referenced by much of tennis itself.
Olga Sharypova spoke out for the first time more than three years ago. First she posted to Instagram, writing that someone had tried to strangle her, then she named Zverev in an interview with the Russian outlet Championat. She later spoke with tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg for a detailed article in Racquet about how she fell in love with Zverev, how she had been willing to give up her own tennis career for him, and how Zverev physically hurt her. She told Rothenberg that the first time a fight “turned physical” was in Monaco in 2019. “I was going to leave because we had a really big fight,” she said. “I was standing in the hallway, and he hit my head into the wall.” There was emotional violence too, she recalled, as well as isolation and loneliness that all became what the article called a “destructive cycle.”
When Sharypova tried to break that cycle later that year, she said the violence grew worse. This fits with what experts about intimate violence say—leaving is the most dangerous time for survivors, which is why anyone who is planning on leaving an abusive partner is encouraged to draft a safety plan beforehand.
“It starts getting worse in New York because I ran away,” she told Rothenberg. “This time, I really was scared for my life.”
Sharypova told Rothenberg that Zverev, in the lead-up to the U.S. Open, “threw me down onto the bed, took a pillow, and then sat on my face. I couldn’t breathe for some time, and I’m just trying to get out of it. I’m screaming and started to run.” She ran out of the hotel, barefoot, onto the street and eventually was picked up by a friend, who told her to reconcile with Zverev. The friend confirmed this to Rothenberg, saying, “I always trust the guys first, at some point, because I’m a guy, you know? Even though Olga, I’d known her for so long.”
The couple reunited, followed by what Sharypova described as more violence in Geneva, where she said Zverev punched her in the face. When Zverev left the room, Sharypova told Rothenberg she injected herself with insulin in an attempt to die by suicide and closed herself off in the bathroom. When Zverev realized what had happened, Sharypova said he found an event official who convinced her to let them in. She recovered after being given what she recalled were glucose tablets to offset the insulin.
In another interview with Rothenberg for an article in Slate, she described more violence at the Shanghai Masters in 2019. There she injected herself with insulin, again, and Zverev later fed her sugar when he saw her sugar was too low.
“He starts yelling at me and saying that ‘if you will die in my room, it will be big problems for me. It’s really a big responsibility for me. You said that you don’t want to live because of me—why did you say this?'” she said.
The next day, after Sharypova showered, Zverev told her to leave, then punched her, she said. She did her best to fight him off before he left. As Rothenberg noted in his article, images from the tennis tournament showed scratches on Zverev’s neck that day that had not been there the day before. Sharypova also sent photos of her bruised face and arms to a friend, who shared those images and texts with Rothenberg.
Zverev has said that everything Sharypova said is untrue. The ATP would eventually do an investigation and announce in 2023 that “no disciplinary action will be taken by ATP” due to a “lack of reliable evidence and eyewitness reports” as well as “conflicting statements” from Sharypova and Zverev. The ATP never released any further details about who they talked to, what evidence was gathered, or what these conflicts were between the statements because it didn’t have to; ATP is not a government agency or law enforcement or an elected body and it only has one job—oversee men’s professional tennis.
Sharypova would later produce, per one German newspaper report, a three-page affidavit for another women’s court proceedings involving Zverev.
The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung would later write that the rising tennis star Zverev and his model girlfriend, Brenda Patea, had seemed like “a dream couple.” (The article is in German, and no longer available in its original form, likely due to a German court order. I’m working with an archived version, translated by Google.)
Speaking with SZ, Patea detailed her far-from-a-dream reality. She described Zverev as “jealous” and said he would search her cell phone and “even a wrong like on Instagram was enough.” Patea did not describe the physical violence in the interview, instead leaving that to the court documents. As quoted by SZ, the records said in May 2020, while in an Airbnb, Zverev “pushed Patea against the wall and strangled her during an argument in the hallway.” The records also included documents from two of Patea’s friends, with whom she talked about what happened.
(Strangulation is a known risk factor in the killing of women by their partners, so much so that language about it was added to the Violence Against Women Act’s reauthorization in 2013. But that only goes so far. As University of Pennsylvania professor Susan B. Sorenson, then-director of the Ortner Center on Family Violence and Abuse, told Jezebel in 2018, strangulation is “a form of abuse that can be used repeatedly, often with impunity. Again, because it’s difficult to document the injuries.”)
Per SZ, the documents said witnesses recalled Zverev admitted to touching Patea’s neck. He proposed marriage a few days later, SZ reported. He also has repeatedly denied being physically violent with Patea.
Patea learned she was pregnant a month later, she said, but nothing changed. They separated in August. In 2021, SZ reported, Zverev’s lawyers gave Patea a nine-page contract that would have stipulated financial support for herself and their child—except it also required her to “delete all pictures and videos of their child from Instagram” and not upload new ones. This even applied to “pictures of the child’s body parts, especially the hands and/or feet.” The contract required Patea and Zverev to not speak “about all details of their previous life together, their previous partnership, their current relationship with each other.” And the document also said that Patea would “lose claims” if she contacted Sharypova, per the report.
As SZ put it, “In other words, the maintenance payments and the right of residence are linked to her silence.” She did not sign it.
In Patea’s case, a Berlin criminal court issued a penalty order and fined Zverev $492,700. As the German media company Deutsche Welle explained, “For lesser crimes in Germany, a penalty order can be issued when a judge believes the case is straightforward and doesn’t warrant a trial.” Zverev contested the order, which led to the trial earlier this year, in which attorney Alfred Dierlamm portrayed Patea as a liar “motivated by fame and fortune,” DW reported. Zverev’s lawyers then asked that the rest of the trial happen without reporters and Patea’s lawyer agreed to the request, per The Athletic, with the presiding judge allowing it. Patea’s testimony began behind closed doors and never concluded after Patea and Zverev reached a settlement.
A lawyer for Patea said they applied for the settlement because “the daughter was really suffering. So now they can both look to the future and get on with their lives. We ended this deal with [the feeling] that people should stop throwing things at each other.”
“I think it’s important to continue living without any further blame,” presiding judge Barbara Lüders told the court, per DW‘s Jonathan Crane. “That is what has been agreed here. It’s a good ending, it’s a success.”
It certainly was a success for Zverev. Soon afterward, he declared the settlement meant he was innocent—never mind the reports that the settlement was not a definitive ruling on guilt or innocence; as a court spokesman told Crane, “The truth remains open.” Zverev made the French Open final, lost the match, then openly told reporters that he never wanted to hear another question about it again, a declaration uttered with the confidence of a man fairly certain the tennis press corp would abide by his demand. The settlement cost Zverev $218,000, not even a quarter of his French Open runner-up purse.
The violence within families and relationships isn’t contained to any on sport or sphere or country. A month later, Andrea Skinner, daughter of the celebrated fiction writer Alice Munro, wrote a piece for the Toronto Star detailing how her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her as a child. She told her mother, Munro, who stayed with Fremlin until he died, even after he pleaded guilty in court to one count of indecent assault. Skinner would not tell her story publicly until after her Nobel Prize-winning mother died.
Many people weighed in afterward about how the literary community should grapple with what Skinner said, and how to explain the way a literary genius could be complicit in family abuse. But nothing stuck with me quite like the writing of author Brandon Taylor, who wrote, “People are capable of justifying anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person.” He added:
I believe that Skinner’s story should be a part of discourses around Munro’s work. That seems obvious. I think we cannot talk about Munro’s art without also talking about this aspect of her life. Some people will find that distasteful. Some people will find it tacky. Some people say it’s not enough. And to those people, I say that it’s okay you feel that way. But I also think that we owe it to Skinner, in part because she wasn’t just silenced by her family. Her mother’s fame and prominence as an author actively aided in keeping Skinner’s story out of the news and out of the press. It was a silence that grew directly out of a cultural apparatus that privileged power over the pain and the suffering and the abuse of a young child. Skinner’s pain and the ugliness she has had to endure over decades has not simply been personal. Or familial. And so, there never was a separation between art and artist. Because if Munro had been less famous, less beloved, less known, then the truth about what happened to Skinner might have been put into the world sooner and when it was finally allowed to emerge, it wouldn’t have been silenced to the extent that it was. It wouldn’t have taken Munro dying before someone finally got brave enough to stop pretending that Andrea Skinner hadn’t been saying this all along.
Viewed that way, we are all complicit, are we not? In loving Munro, participating in her celebrity, in her art, we fed a cultural apparatus that permitted and indeed necessitated Skinner’s silencing. And if that is true, then, yes, I can see why people would be running like rats from a sinking ship, trying to fling themselves overboard, to get free of the knowledge that they had some small part in making a scapegoat of a young child. But I don’t think you can run fast enough or far enough to escape that knowledge. I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too.
And Munro never had stadiums full of fans applauding her. It’s intoxicating, and it keeps athletes coming back. It also reminds anyone who has experienced intimate-partner violence and kept quiet about it of the very power dynamics at play. You are not that famous. You do not have an army of thousands, if not millions, of rabid fans ready to defend you. The applause reminds that it’s reasonable to feel like nobody will believe you—or if they do, they won’t care that much about what happened—because, if they did, they wouldn’t be clapping.
As it has many times before, the conversation around Zverev became about what tennis should do. Should tennis fine him? Ban him? Start a policy?
Tennis leadership could make a policy, but that requires ignoring that no empirical evidence shows that any of those policies have actually made survivors of violence safer. The NFL, NBA, and MLB all passed specific anti-domestic violence policies in the 2010s and, since then, the violence still happens—along with the cases in which survivors have said they did not want draconian league action in their lives or didn’t even know a league offered support. Add to that the journalism showing that punishment in the NFL is, at best, wildly inconsistent. This was found in 2014 by ESPN and again in 2020 by The Athletic.
Perhaps the ATP could be the one organization to get it right—but that would require the leadership demonstrating a deep knowledge on how intimate-partner violence works, as well as having an open dialogue with spouses and partners about how they could help as well as how they could accidentally make things worse. I do not see that dialogue happening, and it is also possible the ATP would create a policy that put survivors in more danger. Demanding a tennis policy shifts the blame to ATP leadership. It says it is their fault. It makes it easier to ignore the tougher questions about why intimate-partner persists across the globe, why criminalization won’t stop it, the ways everyone says it’s bad until it involves someone they know and they say, That’s not really who they are.
It makes it easier to ignore all that clapping for Zverev, to forget that his own peers on the men’s tour elected him to represent them. Or glide by how, within days of Zverev’s settlement, DW reported that German police had logged more than 256,000 “acts of violence in which the suspected perpetrators were family members, partners, or ex-partners” in 2023, and 155 women had been killed by their partners.
“The numbers have been rising for years,” activist Stefanie Knaab told DW. “And every year we are shocked anew, but still nothing really changes. That makes me very sick to my stomach.”
Neither Patea nor Sharypova have demanded action from the ATP in their public statements. In her first interview with Rothenberg, Sharypova said that she did not want any criminal or civil action and she didn’t “want anything” from Zverev. She said she spoke out to help others. She reiterated that in her second interview with Rothenberg, saying she spoke out to show other survivors of intimate-partner violence that they did not need to be silent.
“It was really hard to start talking about this, but I know that many people are going through maybe not the same situation, but many people are facing the same things with harassment, abuse, bullying, toxic relationships, and they don’t understand what to do,” she told Rothenberg in 2020. “I want to show everybody at the end of the day there can be a good end to the story.”
If you or someone you know needs help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-7233 or by clicking here.
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