Former Team USA soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo has spoken out after she was discovered passed out drunk behind the wheel with her children in the car.
She was arrested on 31 March and pleaded guilty to DUI charges last month.
“I didn’t think I needed help,” she said on the podcast Hope Solo Speaks in an episode released on 18 August. “And I certainly wasn’t going to ask for it. At the time, I didn’t know that I was only doing a disservice to my family.”
“I thought that I could white-knuckle it. But the reality is that nobody gets to live without asking for help,” she added. “My sense of strength and pride became my two worst enemies. And I found myself living the worst night of my life. I let alcohol get the better of me in this moment on this godawful day, and I will suffer the consequences for some time.”
Solo pleaded guilty nearly four months after she was discovered behind the wheel of a car in North Carolina, with her two-year-old twins inside.
The former goalkeeper also faced charges of misdemeanour child abuse and resisting a public officer in relation to the incident. Solo’s lawyer Chris Clifton noted in an Associated Press report that those two charges were dismissed voluntarily.
A press release from the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office stated that the judge handed down a 24-month suspended sentence and a 30-day active sentence. Solo was given a credit of 30 days for the time that she spent at a rehabilitation facility.
The 41-year-old was also ordered to pay $2,500 in fines and a fee of $600 to pay for lab tests. Solo was also mandated to undergo a substance abuse assessment and finish all suggested treatments.
Solo is from Roaring Gap, around 60 miles (96km) northwest of Winston-Salem in northwest North Carolina.
Following the guilty plea, the former goalkeeper issued a statement shared to her social media pages saying that she took pride in being a mother and how she cared for her children alongside her husband during the pandemic, but she added that “it was incredibly hard and I made a huge mistake”.
“Easily the worst mistake of my life. I underestimated what a destructive part of my life alcohol had become,” she said at the time. “The upside of making a mistake this big is that hard lessons are learned quickly. Learning these lessons has been difficult, and at times, very painful.”
A police report noted that Solo was arrested in the parking lot of a shopping centre in Winston-Salem after a person passing her vehicle saw her passed out behind the wheel for over an hour with the engine running and the children in the backseat.
An officer responding to the scene smelled alcohol and the warrant said that Solo refused to take part in a field sobriety test. After being taken to the magistrate’s office, she still rejected a breath test leading to a police search warrant for a blood sample being issued.
The test found that she had a blood alcohol content three times the legal limit – 0.24 per cent – and had THC in her system.
The DUI arrest was hardly Solo’s first brush with controversy. In 2016, she had been dismissed from the national team following the Rio de Janeiro Olympics for making disparaging remarks about the Swedish team. Prior to that, she was suspended in 2015 for 30 days after she and her husband Jerramy Stevens were pulled over in a US Soccer-owned van. Stevens was charged with DUI.
In 2014, Solo was arrested after an altercation with her family, but those charges were later dropped.
“About four-and-a-half months ago I made the biggest mistake of my life,” Solo said at the start of the podcast episode. “I let alcohol get the better of me in a decision that I will never live down, a decision that has come at a great cost to me and my family.”
“I recently pled guilty to DUI charges and unfortunately my children were involved,” Solo said. “The reality of what this meant was horrific. The embarrassment, the shame, the financial loss, the thought of explaining this to my children when they are old enough to search the internet.”
Solo spoke about the hardships she and Stevens, a former NFL player, experienced with the birth of their children, which took place on 4 March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was shutting down the country. The twins spent almost three weeks in the NICU.
Solo noted that she didn’t leave her home for around a year and a half during quarantine while taking care of her children.
She said they moved across the country, from Seattle, Washington, where her soccer career ended, to rural Wilkes County, North Carolina to raise their children.
“We had children and nobody to share them with,” she said. “Our family and friends do not live in North Carolina and most of them live on the other side of the country. Suddenly because of the pandemic, we had no support system and now had two tiny babies.”
“Winding down with a drink was nice and it’s what we looked forward to doing,” she added. “And the drinking slowly increased, we found that eased the stresses of our everyday lives and we felt that we had the right to do so. We never drank and drove, we never went in public and we woke up every morning to handle our business.”
“My ability to compartmentalise and push forward through emotional pain in unchartered territory led me down a dangerous path,” she said.
“I was a very dedicated, committed and self-disciplined athlete, I would not drink or smoke marijuana for years in preparations for events,” Solo said on the podcast. “Then when the event would be over and whether in celebration mode or in coping mode I would party.”
“My manager, my agent, my husband and friends all knew to bring wine or champagne to help me loosen up on stage,” she added concerning her appearance on Dancing With the Stars in 2011 or “huge speaking engagements”.
Solo said that she and Stevens “found that our only time together was having a drink once the babies went to bed and that’s when we started to go down a dangerous road both for our marriage and me personally”.
“Today, I am grateful for my 30 days away, to read, think, pray, meditate and learn, reading and meditation feeds my soul, so does seeing family and friends,” she said towards the end of the podcast. “I realize now my soul was slowly starved and it was all my fault for trying to be strong for my family and being prideful. In my strength I was weak, there is no shame if we struggle with alcohol and addiction.”
