Do we like Serena Williams?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, and she has spoken up for others, but the record has a couple of marks and little on LGBTQ+ topics.
Serena Williams needs little introduction: 23 major titles, the most by any woman in the Open Era. After retiring in 2022, she did the thing everyone told her not to, and in June 2026 she announced a return to the tour, starting with doubles in London. The announcement came with a cheeky Nike video, not a press conference.
Asked why she came back, she told Reuters it started with talking about it so much that she thought, “Well, why not?” She also said she doesn't need to win, because she has already won more than most people ever will. That's a fair line from someone with a trophy cabinet like hers.
Her scandals are mostly tennis theatre. At the 2018 US Open final she was fined US$17,000 across three code violations after a blow-up with umpire Carlos Ramos. She argued each call, and the WTA and USTA backed her in the sexism row that followed. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as a champion losing her cool or a woman being held to a harsher standard than the men.
The one real stain is from 2013. A Rolling Stone profile quoted her appearing to blame the teenage victim in the Steubenville rape case, and it also carried a swipe at a rival. She apologised at a pre-tournament press conference “for everything that was said in that article” and said she had spoken to the rival privately. Eleven-plus years of silence on the topic since suggests she learned from it.
On the harm test, we found nothing against her. Her public statements go the other way: in 2016 she posted on Facebook that she would not stay silent about police killings of Black men. We found no remarks from her about trans people either way, so that part of the record is empty, not clean. No stints with dodgy studios or culture-war grifters turned up in what we read.
So the verdict: she passes the harm test and gets an asterisk on the good-person one for the 2013 interview and the fines. She's loud when she thinks the system is unfair, and she has said sorry when she got it wrong. For a family page that wants to cheer for someone, she's an easy yes.