Do we like them?Do we like Kim Clijsters?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent public record and nothing harmful found, but we couldn't open many full pages, so the picture is short on detail.
Kim Clijsters is the Belgian tennis star who became a household name in the 2000s, retired, came back, retired again and came back once more. She is in the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and the sporting record is not in dispute. What we're really asking is whether she's someone we'd happily cheer for, and so far the answer looks like yes.
Her career has been bookended by farewells. She stepped away for good from her final comeback in April 2022, and Belgian press covered it as a considered decision. She pulled out of wildcards at Miami and Charleston in 2021 during that comeback. Nothing in those stories suggests anything murky about how she handled it.
On the harm test, we went looking for anything she has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet. We found nothing harmful: no culture-war posts, no conspiracy talk and no work with people who push that stuff. That is an absence of evidence rather than a deep dive, so treat it as a clean sheet for now rather than a glowing character reference.
On the good-person test, we found no lawsuits or court outcomes against her, and no credible allegations. In 2022 she was named honorary president of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, the first woman and the first European in the role. That is a sign of how she's regarded inside the sport.
The good stuff is there too. She was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017, and a tribute collection from that induction raised money for the Hall and for Ten4Kim, a foundation she founded. The sources we could read don't spell out what that foundation funds, so we won't oversell it.
Nothing recent that we could verify made the news for the wrong reasons. A stray report of a sudden July 2026 retirement looked unreliable, and we left it out. Lately she's mostly appeared as a commentator and coach, and that's the story we'd expect.