Tonya Harding is back in the spotlight.

With the new biopic "I, Tonya" reaching movie theaters, the Great Olympic Ice Skating Scandal of 1994 has returned to the public consciousness -- as if it ever really left.

Now The New York Times has caught up with the former figure-skating champion, and the headline gets right to the heart of it: "Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now."

You know the story: Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, hired a thug to brutally kneecap the working-class Oregon skater's rival, the prettier and more popular Nancy Kerrigan. (Kerrigan recovered and went on to earn a silver medal at the Olympics.) Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution. She was sentenced to community service and probation, her skating career destroyed.

But that was hardly the end of it. Harding became a reviled figure, mocked and humiliated endlessly.

"I've had rats thrown into my mailboxes, [expletive] left on my door, left in my mailbox, all over my trucks," she said. "You name it, it's been done to me."

Harding adds that she was essentially forced from her native state. "I moved from Oregon to Washington [state] because Oregon was buttheads," she said.

The long, in-depth Times article strikes a sympathetic tone. "All these years later," reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes, "she's still punished for what she did, but also for what she didn't do. People still think she herself held a baton over Ms. Kerrigan's leg that day. People still think she was married to Mr. Gillooly (who has since changed his last name to Stone), who planned the attack and was sentenced to two years in prison for racketeering, but they were divorced by then."

Harding, now 47, has seen "I, Tonya" multiple times and insists the movie mostly gets the story right -- and finally shows what she went through during her early years and skating career.

"The reason she loves the movie," Brodesser-Akner writes, "is because it conveys something she doesn't feel was ever conveyed before. There were mitigating circumstances. Her life was terrible. She was beaten. She was threatened. You don't get this way unless you were counted out completely. Her own mother didn't seem to love her. The only time in her life she ever got anywhere was when she circumvented the rules and took for herself what appeared to be given to the Nancy Kerrigans of the world."

• Read the New York Times story.

-- Douglas Perry