Claims a white Russian billionaire offered to pay $1 billion for NBA superstar LeBron James and tennis champion Serena Williams to have a child together
On Saturday’s U.S. Open women’s finals, a year after she almost died on the delivery-room table, tennis champion Serena Williams ran smack dab into one of the proud defenders of the patriarchy so affronted at a Black woman using her voice that he abused his authority to punish her by all the means he had. [...] But the events of Saturday night are bigger than Serena. It is evocative of a culture of misogyny and disrespect for women in sports that tennis perpetuates. The longstanding gap in prize money, unaddressed until her sister Venus, went to bat for women’s equality. The lack of accommodation for maternity leave, emblematic of that larger social issue of how women are expected to have children, but not be given any support for it—often penalized at work and "mommytracked" instead. Another player, Alize Cornet penalized for changing her shirt on-court, when no man has been. Serena’s French Open black bodysuit—which was created for her to address medical issues postpartum—was dismissed by the French Tennis Federation as "disrespectful" and then outlawed. There has been a constant policing of women’s bodies and a wash of respectability politics.