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Nancy Kerrigan’s Father Dies, Brother Charged With Assault

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Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is in the news today, but not because of the upcoming Winter Olympics. Tragically, Kerrigan’s father Daniel died after an altercation with her brother Mark, who is being charged with assault and battery on a person over 60. The elder Kerrigan appears to have had a heart attack as a result of a struggle with his son in their Massachusetts home. Mark was recently released from a local house of corrections after being jailed for a separate case of assault and battery. He pleaded not guilty to the charges surrounding his father’s death and is being held on $10,000 bail.

Kerrigan herself is famous for being the victim of an attack during the 1994 Winter Olympics when rival Tonya Harding and her husband Jeff Gillooly conspired to attack Kerrigan in order to take her out of the competition. She recovered from the attack to win a silver medal that year. [Photo: Getty Images]

#34: Tonya Harding Has Nancy Kerrigan Clubbed

Everyone wants to win. Yet most people wouldn’t go as far as clobbering the competition into submission with a “collapsible metal baton.” But then most people aren’t as desperate or vicious as figure-skating pariah Tonya Harding.

In 1994, the 23-year-old World silver-medalist played a key role in the crude attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a gorgeous goody-goody who was the figure skating equivalent of Snow White, and who Harding believed was her biggest obstacle to Olympic gold. A thug, hired on behalf of the high-school dropout, pounded a club into Kerrigan’s knee as she exited the ice after an Olympic trials run-through in Detroit. After Harding’s bodyguard squealed that she and her creepy husband masterminded the attack, the press went ballistic, milking the good girl/bad girl stereotype for all it was worth.

Nothing good came of Harding’s malicious envy. Although she later dodged jail-time by pleading guilty, she was stripped of her title and banished from the sport. When we last saw Harding, she had traded in her skates for boxing gloves and was trading blows with the equally sleazy Paula Jones.