As the U.S. Open drew to a close in New York last weekend, the most industrious tennis writer in the country was staying at home in Washington, watching it on TV.
After more than a decade building a reputation for incisive coverage of the sport, Ben Rothenberg has become disillusioned with it. The grueling travel schedule, dwindling access to players and pains of freelance employment all took their toll.
Also: He’s being sued by one of the top players in the world.
In 2020, Rothenberg traveled to New Jersey for the first of two high-stakes interviews with a young Russian woman. Olga Sharypova had once competed as a junior player, but more recently she followed the elite professional circuit as the girlfriend of German rising star Alexander Zverev as he began to make a name for himself at Grand Slam tournaments.
The accusations she shared with the journalist of emotional and physical abuse by Zverev — which he has repeatedly denied — cast a shadow over the player’s ascent, though he has faced no official repercussions.
The resulting stories may have created more troubles for the writer himself.
Four years later, Rothenberg is still embroiled in litigation with Zverev, who sued in German court to block his reporting on the topic — and now Rothenberg’s publisher is no longer financially supporting his legal battle.
Reporting on powerful people has never been easy. But Rothenberg’s plight demonstrates exactly how challenging it can be in an increasingly global media market, where protections for journalists and definitions of libel and defamation vary from country to country — perhaps even more so for freelancers, lacking the institutional support enjoyed by staff writers.
“It’s been dispiriting,” Rothenberg said. “I don’t regret any of it … but it certainly has not made life easier.”
Dogged, obsessed, occasionally abrasive, Rothenberg has never seemed to much mind when his work puts him on players’ bad sides.
Serena Williams once complained that he had “dragged” her, he said, for his coverage of her meltdown at the 2018 U.S. Open. (Though he said they eventually smoothed things over.) Ahead of the 2019 Italian Open, Rothenberg engaged in a heated nine-minute exchange with then-world No. 1 Novak Djokovic about the inner workings of the Player Advisory Council.
In 2021, he broke a story about the Australian Open’s coronavirus protocols, prompting a public rebuke from former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka, who objected to him publicizing a leaked memo.
“Vika, this is my job,” he replied on Twitter.
The 37-year-old D.C. native — who published his first book, a biography of Naomi Osaka, this year — was drawn to tennis for its international appeal and the richness of individual players’ storylines. After establishing himself as a close observer of the game through his blog, he was contracted to cover the Grand Slams for the New York Times from 2011 to 2022.
In the small pond of tennis media, he made a big name for himself by writing not only about forehands and backhands but also the sport’s culture, controversies and scandals.
There was his scoop about a beloved British tennis writer who plagiarized dozens of entries for Wimbledon’s annual yearbook, and his feature describing the swarm of tennis pros descending on a Cincinnati Applebee’s during the city’s annual tournament. He investigated an American player’s questionable exemption to use a banned drug during competition, traveled to South Korea to profile a deaf tennis prodigy, and unraveled a yarn about a Macedonian player who catfished Martina Navratilova, Williams and the BBC. He also wrote an article for the Times about body-image concerns in women’s tennis that set many readers’ teeth on edge — and drew a measured critique from the paper’s public editor.
Rothenberg was “determined to tell stories that hadn’t been told, things about the sport that publications wouldn’t normally [cover],” said the Guardian’s tennis writer, Tumaini Carayol. “He’s one of the people who has always been willing to ask those questions and push on difficult topics.”
Rothenberg didn’t have to dig deep to uncover one of the biggest stories of his career. Sharypova first disclosed the alleged abuse in an Instagram post in October 2020, without naming Zverev. She later described in a few short interviews how she fled Zverev’s hotel room during the 2019 U.S. Open, running barefoot onto the streets of New York because she feared for her life.
“He’s one of the people who has always been willing to ask those questions and push on difficult topics.”
But there was little follow-up in the media. Rothenberg thought her allegations merited more reporting. He reached out, and Sharypova agreed to a two-hour interview in New Jersey, where she was staying with friends.
“I would have felt like I was really derelict in my duty if I knew that there was a story out there, and I chose to ignore it,” Rothenberg told The Washington Post.
Rothenberg took the interview to Racquet — an artsy and eclectic magazine about the tennis world founded in 2016. In his story, published in early November 2020, Sharypova said Zverev hit her head into a wall, punched her in the face and smothered her with a pillow, leaving her physically bruised and emotionally destroyed. The writer also interviewed Sharypova’s family and friends, and reviewed contemporaneous text messages and photos.
Zverev denied the allegations at the time. His personal representatives did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment. His lawyer described the Racquet story as “simply unlawful with regard to Alexander Zverev.”
Rothenberg’s article briefly made a sensation, prompting questions about how the Association of Tennis Professionals — the global governing body overseeing the men’s professional tennis tour — would handle the allegations.
A week later, the ATP released a vague statement “condemn[ing] any form of violence or abuse” but didn’t comment specifically on the Zverev report.
The story quickly died in the press. Zverev continued to play, making the quarterfinals of the 2021 Australian Open and the semifinals of the 2021 French Open, and won gold for Germany at the Tokyo Olympics.
Tennis commentator Mary Carillo, who called Olympic matches for NBC, recalled feeling uneasy about how the tennis world seemed to be turning a blind eye to the allegations.
“Whether I was doing color commentary or play-by-play [of Zverev’s matches], I always had to mention it,” Carillo told The Post. “It was very uncomfortable, but I knew that if I didn’t discuss it, it wasn’t going to be discussed by the people sitting next to me.”
Meanwhile, Rothenberg was preparing a second story.
When Sharypova first agreed to an interview, Rothenberg said, she insisted that he tell her story in two parts. He agreed and returned to New Jersey a few weeks later to interview her for Part 2. But the story was delayed after Rothenberg’s father took ill and died. It didn’t appear until August 2021 — when Rothenberg published it in Slate, not Racquet.
The writer described it as a mutual decision, prompted in part by the delay and in part by what he said was Racquet’s desire to have a more established news organization validate the allegations and share any potential legal liability. This story detailed more instances of alleged abuse by Zverev, with corroborating photos and messages, and examined the ATP’s tepid response to the previous allegations.
This time, the story had legs. More news organizations picked it up as questions mounted about the ATP’s inaction — and in October, the ATP announced that it was commissioning an independent investigation into Sharypova’s allegations.
But in the meantime, Zverev filed suits against Racquet, Slate and Rothenberg in German court.
In the United States, where freedom of speech is enshrined in the law, public figures face a high bar when attempting to sue for defamation. But in Germany, like in many European nations, media laws are far more favorable to plaintiffs.
“It’s almost as if free speech and right to a private life are both constitutionally protected,” said Dave Heller, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center.
Zverev did not even need to demonstrate that the stories were defamatory — just that they had insufficient evidence to justify their personal impact on him.
A court granted Zverev a preliminary injunction and ordered Slate to remove its story. The publisher complied by “geo-blocking” it for audiences in the European Union. But Slate has continued to stand by Rothenberg’s reporting and maintain the story on its website for readers in the United States.
The litigation over the Racquet story proved far more complicated.
Because of an error in how the lawsuit was served to Racquet’s publishers, the magazine was dropped from the claim and has faced no immediate consequences — but Rothenberg did. Though Zverev’s attorney, Christian Schertz, told The Post that the “proceedings against [Racquet] are no different at all from those against Mr. Rothenberg,” the journalist was the one who got slapped with the equivalent of a cease-and-desist.
It forbade Rothenberg from repeating the allegations against the tennis pro or perpetuating the story in any way — under threat of imprisonment.
The journalist’s lawyers appealed the ruling, and he managed to stay with the Zverev saga, which had taken on its own momentum.
In early 2023, the ATP announced that its investigation — which included interviews with more than two dozen people and reviews of photos and text messages — “found insufficient evidence” to support Sharypova’s allegations, though it did not make the results of the inquiries public.
Later that year, another ex-girlfriend, Brenda Patea, accused Zverev of strangling her during an argument in 2020, which he denied, setting off a protracted criminal inquiry. After a German court found sufficient evidence to support the claim, the case went to trial, which ended when Zverev and Patea agreed to an out-of-court six-figure settlement on the eve of his ascension to the final round of this year’s French Open.
Rothenberg observed the player’s continued rise — notably, a soft-focus Netflix docuseries made no mention of the allegations — and took the tennis world to task for “protecting its own,” in a story he wrote for Slate (which the publisher also geo-blocked in the European Union).
Sportswriter Jon Crane, who covered the Patea case for Germany’s DW news channel, commended Rothenberg’s persistence. Some beat reporters, he noted, shy from critical coverage to preserve access and relationships.
“That’s why it was really important for people like Ben to do this reporting,” Crane told The Post. “He knows his tennis, and he was really pushing this and did an amazing job.”
Rothenberg continued to cover the wider world of tennis, though, and in early May wrote a newsletter about tennis player Ons Jabeur for the Second Serve — a new tennis magazine started by one of the founders of Racquet magazine, David Shaftel.
Shortly thereafter, Rothenberg says, he received word that Racquet would no longer fund the cost of appealing the Zverev case.
Some beat reporters, he noted, shy from critical coverage to preserve access and relationships.
Until then, he said, Racquet had been supportive, continuing to publish his work and assuring him that its media liability insurance policy would cover the legal bills. Confused, he asked publisher Caitlin Thompson what was going on. In a May phone conversation, he said, she told him that she didn’t want to pay to defend someone who was working for the competition.
Rothenberg had been aware of bad blood between Thompson and Shaftel, who was ousted from Racquet after an acrimonious dispute over the direction of the magazine last year. But as a freelancer, he saw no reason he couldn’t work for both publications.
Thompson told The Post that she disputes Rothenberg’s account but declined to comment further.
Unless it’s spelled out in a contract, publishers have no hard-and-fast obligations to defend freelancers in legal proceedings, said Joseph Finnerty, a New York lawyer who represents newspaper and broadcast news clients in defamation cases. Often, freelancers don’t sign contracts for stories, as was the case with Rothenberg and Racquet.
Still, Finnerty said, it is “very unusual” that a publisher would cease funding a freelancer’s case in the middle of a legal process.
The upshot is that Rothenberg is now on his own, paying out of pocket to defend his reporting and reputation. He launched a fundraiser to help cover the legal fees, which he says will be around 18,000 euros, or about $20,000. If he prevails in the case, and Zverev is forced to cover the costs of the case, Rothenberg says he will donate the money to House of Ruth, a domestic violence shelter in Washington.
Rothenberg’s case will return to court in December. His attorney, Jan Hegemann, will argue that Rothenberg’s reporting met German media law’s “standard of evidence.” He thinks their appeal stands a good chance of success.
If not, “I wouldn’t have advised my clients to bring the case to the court of appeal,” he said.
Zverev’s attorney maintains that the higher court will reject the appeal.
While Rothenberg is still hosting a tennis podcast and following the sport, he has increasingly found it difficult to get credentials to the Grand Slams or access to players. He is considering a new direction — maybe another book, maybe a different coverage area. Or maybe an entirely new career.
“Journalism,” he said, “just doesn’t seem like a very steady ground to be building any sort of future in.”
Laura Wagner is a reporter at The Washington Post
