Starting a decade ago, the major North American sports leagues changed their approach to domestic violence allegations. Although there are some exceptions, the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball now tend to move quickly when a player stands accused of abuse, with leagues and teams handing out stiff punishments.
Professional tennis has taken a very different approach. Alexander Zverev, who’s been accused of domestic abuse by two ex-girlfriends and found liable by a criminal court in one of those cases, hasn’t been sanctioned by the tennis world at all. Instead, the Olympic gold medalist has been championed as one of the game’s biggest stars.
The first public accusation against Zverev came more than three years ago, in October 2020. Olga Sharypova, who had dated Zverev when they were in their early teens and then again in their early 20s, first detailed the alleged physical and emotional abuse in an Instagram post. Following that, she did interviews with the Russian website Championat and with CNN. I also interviewed Sharypova in person, publishing stories in Racquet (in November 2020) and Slate (in August 2021).
Sharypova told me that in August 2019, when Zverev was playing at the U.S. Open, he covered her face with a pillow at their New York hotel, preventing her from breathing. She also said that later in 2019, Zverev punched her in the face in Geneva, Switzerland, and grabbed her by the throat in Shanghai, China. While she has declined to press charges or file a lawsuit against Zverev, she has corroborated her accusations with contemporaneous photographs and WhatsApp messages. I also spoke with multiple people who said that Sharypova had told them about the alleged abuse at the time.
Zverev has denied all of Sharypova’s accusations. He also sued Slate in his native Germany, where a court granted a preliminary injunction ordering the story be taken down. The article remains available in the United States and elsewhere where the standards to obtain such an injunction are higher. Slate stands by its reporting.
In October 2021, two months after the Slate piece was published, the ATP—the main governing body for men’s tennis—announced it was commissioning an independent investigation into the allegations. According to the ATP, investigators spoke with Sharypova, Zverev, and 24 other people. After 15 months, the tour announced that it had “found insufficient evidence to substantiate published allegations of abuse.” The ATP, which to this day has no domestic violence policy, chose not to publish the investigators’ report. It did say that its ruling may “be reevaluated should new evidence come to light, or should any legal proceedings reveal violations of ATP rules.”
Ten months later, Brenda Patea—who dated Zverev immediately after his relationship with Sharypova, and who is the mother of his young child—went public with her own allegations. In a November interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Patea said that Zverev had pushed her against a wall and choked her in May 2020. While Zverev forcefully denied the accusation, a criminal court in Berlin found it credible. That court issued a “penalty order” to Zverev, fining him 450,000 euros for “physically abusing a woman and damaging her health during an argument.”
As explained by the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, 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, though, has appealed the penalty order and a trial is now scheduled to begin on May 31, during tennis’ French Open. (Zverev will not be required to appear at the trial in person.)
Despite the ATP’s earlier claim that it may reevaluate its stance “should new evidence come to light,” the tour has taken no action in response to Patea’s accusation or the German penalty order. In a statement this month, the ATP said, “We are aware of the upcoming legal trial involving Alexander Zverev, and will not be commenting until that process is complete.” In three-plus years, the only punishment he’s received from the tour had nothing to do with his alleged abuse. In March 2022, the ATP placed him on probation for a year after he smashed his racket against an umpire’s chair, nearly hitting the official’s foot with the racket.
In more recent months, the ATP has been actively involved in efforts to burnish Zverev’s image. The second season of the docuseries Break Point, which Netflix produces in close collaboration with the ATP (and its counterpart, the Women’s Tennis Association), features an episode devoted entirely to Zverev. The show makes no mention of the accusations against him. Instead, it focuses on Zverev’s return to action from an ankle injury and his relationship with his current girlfriend, Sophia Thomalla. (The episode doesn’t mention that Thomalla became well known in Germany for criticizing the #MeToo movement.) While Break Point depicts Zverev as a sympathetic figure, his tennis rival Daniil Medvedev—who defeated him in Friday’s Australian Open semifinals—gets portrayed as a tennis villain. Again, the series omits a crucial piece of background information: Medvedev’s wife, Daria, is close friends with Olga Sharypova, the first woman to accuse Zverev of domestic abuse.
When the ATP Tour’s Twitter account solicited “fan questions for the stars of #BreakPointS2,” they were inundated with replies about Zverev and the accusations against him. Taylor Fritz, who is the highest-ranked American man and has been featured on both seasons of Break Point, told me that he understood the public reaction. “If you are going to make an episode about him, then I definitely understand why people want that to be, at the very least, I guess, included in the episode or touched on,” Fritz said at a press conference at the Australian Open.
Fritz’s comments are, so far, an outlier among male tennis players. “I don’t know the situation; I’m completely unfamiliar with it,” Stefanos Tsitsipas said at his own press conference in Melbourne, in response to a question from Michael Koziol, a political reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. The top-ranked Australian player, Alex de Minaur, told Koziol, “Going to stay out of it and, yeah, focus on playing tennis.”
Meanwhile, Zverev’s peers recently elected him to the ATP Player Advisory Council, a group of nine men who, according to the ATP, play “a critical role in shaping and improving life on Tour.”
Zverev’s counterparts on the women’s tour have responded to his case quite differently. Earlier this month, Daria Kasatkina told a Zverev fan on Twitter: “If you’re a female, then I would advise you to make a research about the guy you wanna watch and think again.”
“For sure it’s not good when a player who’s facing charges like that is kind of being promoted,” said world No. 1 Iga Światek at a press conference, again in response to Koziol.
“The ATP kind of beats their own drum,” 2017 U.S. Open champion Sloane Stephens said about Zverev’s ascension to the player council. “Yeah, they do what they do on that side. Would that happen on the WTA Tour? Probably not. Again, he’s going to trial, and he will be judged by his peers, and we will see what happens after that.” When I followed up, asking Stephens what the sport should do until Zverev’s criminal trial begins in May, she said, “For three years no one has done anything, so I don’t think another five months of waiting for a criminal trial to happen is going to change much on either side.”
Koziol also asked Zverev directly about his election to the player council. In a press conference after his first-round match, the German replied—perhaps correctly—that he didn’t think any of his colleagues objected: “Journalists are saying that, some who are actually interested more in this story to write about and more about the clicks than the actual truth.”
After Zverev’s second-round match, Koziol’s colleague Carla Jaeger asked him if he would attend his trial in Berlin. “Wow. That’s a question,” Zverev replied. “I played for 4 hours, 40 minutes. That’s not the first question I really want to hear, to be honest.”
For Zverev, this is a new level of scrutiny; in the three years since the first abuse allegations against him, he’s rarely been asked these kinds of questions. In addition to Koziol and Jaeger’s reporting, which has driven follow-up coverage across Australian media, ESPN.com published a summary of the charges against Zverev on Thursday. ESPN TV—which had almost never mentioned any of the accusations during its hours of covering the German player—also showed a graphic outlining his upcoming legal proceedings during his semifinal match in Australia.
Zverev and the ATP are now facing a paradox of their own creation: The more successful he is on the court, the more questions he and the tour will face.
In Australia, Zverev was just a handful of points away from playing for his first Grand Slam title. Given his high level of play this season, it’s likely that he’ll continue to be on the sport’s biggest stages, fighting for more major titles. But not everyone will be keen on watching him.
At the Australian Open, at least one pair of fans asked for a refund when Zverev’s third-round match was scheduled for the night session, which they had bought tickets for months in advance. “When we saw Alexander Zverev was to be highlighted on the Rod Laver Arena [we] felt compelled to boycott this event,” the ticketholders wrote in an email to Ticketmaster, explaining why they wanted a refund. “Zverev’s violence against women is well documented, with more than one accusing him of multiple incidents of violence, and a German court fining him more than half a million dollars to compensate for his actions—we simply can’t understand why this person would be showcased.”
Ticketmaster approved the request, and refunded the couple their $318.