The Shady Side Of Hope Solo

Over the course of her lengthy and dazzling soccer career, goalkeeper Hope Solo has made the news not just for her on-field skills, but also for her long history of highly controversial moments. From assault charges to some seriously bad sportsmanship, Solo has a penchant for sketchy doings that land her in hot water.

The bad girl of the backfield has such a shady rap sheet that she's even been suspended multiple times, fined, arrested, and ultimately booted from the U.S. Soccer team and banned for six months after she lost her temper — again — following the team's loss to Sweden during the 2016 Olympics.

Granted, we're talking about a top-level athlete, so passion and competitiveness come with that package, but all of the other stuff? That's where the problem lies. Let's take a look at how even off the field, life has handed her a whole bunch of yellow cards. This is the shady side of Hope Solo.

Biography

Table of Contents

• Hope Solo Shaded Her Own Teammates
• Trouble in Under 280 Characters
• Hope Certainly Doesn't Party... Solo
• Goin' to the Chapel and We're Gonna Get Arrested
• Hope Solo's Frightening Family Fracas
• The Time Hope Solo Blew Off Some Serious Training Camp Steam
• Did Hope Solo's Dirty Tricks Work Both Ways?
• A Ruckus in Rio Got Hope Solo Banned
• Another Twitter Tirade: Solo v. Chastain Edition
• Hope Solo's Memoir Was Full of Shady Spilled Tea

Hope Solo Shaded Her Own Teammates

During a U.S. team match with Brazil in 2007, the American coach started veteran goalie Briana Scurry instead of Hope Solo. Scurry had a bad match, and Brazil ran away with the game in a 4-0 win over the United States. Solo was unable to keep her frustration under wraps and launched a tirade against the coach and her teammate.

"There's no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves," she said. "And the fact of the matter is, it's not 2004 anymore ... It's 2007, and I think you have to live in the present. And you can't live by big names. You can’t live in the past. It doesn't matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold-medal game in the Olympics three years ago."

Solo's verbal attack on her coach and former Olympian Scurry earned her a temporary suspension from the team. Her teammates even shunned her from the flight home, but Solo stood by her comments nearly a year later when talking about the incident with The New York Times.

Trouble in Under 280 Characters

Hope Solo apparently didn't learn her lesson after the 2007 incident with Briana Scurry. Following a playoff loss against the Washington Freedom women's pro soccer team in September 2010, Solo took to social media and laid down a blistering Twitter attack directed at the referees and the league itself.

"It's official, the refs are straight bad," she said. "It's clear the league wanted [DC] in [the] playoffs. I have truly never seen anything like this. It's sad. I am done playing in a league where the game is no longer in control of the players."

According to reports, those comments earned her a $2,500 fine, eight hours of community service, and a one-game suspension from her team, the Atlanta Beat. It wouldn't be the last time Solo got herself into trouble in just 280 characters or less.

Hope Certainly Doesn't Party... Solo

During the 2012 summer Olympics in London, Hope Solo raised eyebrows when she went on the record about the sex, drinking, and other debauchery that happens inside the Olympic Village. She told quite the wild tale to ESPN magazine: "I've seen people having sex right out in the open. On the grass, between buildings, people are getting down and dirty."

Solo also admitted to sneaking celebrities and other non-Olympians into the Village after-hours and to going on live TV still drunk from the night before. "When we were done partying, we got out of our nice dresses, got back into our stadium coats and, at 7 a.m. with no sleep, went on the Today show drunk. Needless to say, we looked like hell."

The Olympic Village shenanigans weren't Solo's first taste of the wild life. In her memoir, Solo: A Memoir of Hope, she wrote that during a six-month training camp in California in 2006, she routinely drove to Vegas where she would "party all night, and come back to training without having slept."

Goin' to the Chapel and We're Gonna Get Arrested

Apparently, Hope Solo can't even get married without some sort of incident. Early on the morning of her wedding day on November 12, 2012, Solo, her brother Marcus Solo, and her then-husband-to-be, former Seattle Seahawks tight end Jerramy Stevens, were involved in an alleged drunken altercation during a soirée at her home.

Around 3 a.m., Marcus called 911 to request medical assistance resulting from a brawl involving a stun gun. According to KOMO News in Seattle, a female houseguest suffered injuries to her hip, Hope had a bloody elbow, and Marcus had blood on his forehead and knees.

Authorities believed Stevens caused Hope's injuries and arrested him for domestic violence assault, but the pair wed later that same day. Police reportedly dropped the charges when the alleged victims refused to cooperate.

Hope Solo's Frightening Family Fracas

Perhaps the most widely-publicized shady moment of Hope's career was her 2014 arrest on domestic violence charges stemming from a drunken brawl with her nephew and half-sister. According to reports, Solo verbally lashed out at her teenage nephew, calling him too "fat, unathletic, and crazy" to be an athlete, before physically attacking him and her half-sister.

At the police station, while cops were trying to book her into jail, it was reported that Solo was so combative that she had to be forced to the ground, prompting her to yell at one officer, "You're such a b***h. You're scared of me because you know that if the handcuffs were off, I'd kick your a**."

In a subsequent interview, Solo portrayed herself as the victim of domestic violence. The case faced various legal challenges, with charges being dismissed and reinstated multiple times.

The Time Hope Solo Blew Off Some Serious Training Camp Steam

During training camp for the U.S. women's national team in 2015, Solo reportedly slipped away from the facilities in a U.S. soccer team van for a rendezvous with her husband. Allegedly, her husband was too sloshed to be driving, and the pair was pulled over by police in Manhattan Beach, California.

Solo wasn't arrested, but the run-in with cops was embarrassing to the national team and coaches, particularly because they didn't learn about the incident until it was reported. As a result, Solo found herself serving yet another 30-day suspension from the national team.

In response to her suspension, Solo showed a rare side of obedience by apologizing to her teammates as well as the U.S. Soccer Federation. She wrote on Facebook, "I think it's best for me to take a break, decompress from the stress of the last several months, and come back mentally and physically ready to positively contribute to the team."