When a reporter for the New York Daily News asked Navratilova for her reaction to King being outed, Navratilova confided to him during the interview that she identified as bisexual but didn’t feel she could publicly admit she was in a relationship with a woman because the WTA Tour could lose its major sponsorship with Avon, and perhaps others. Martina Navratilova, then only 24, did have some advance knowledge her personal life was about to become a story, too. That’s how she learned Marilyn Barnett, a former girlfriend, had outed her in a Los Angeles court filing on April 30, 1981, and was now suing her for financial support. She had no idea that a maelstrom was about to engulf her until the next day, when she returned to her hotel after an outing and found stacks of phone messages waiting for her. Billie Jean King, the tour’s iconic founder along with eight other women a decade earlier, had just been eliminated in the first round of a tournament outside Orlando. The 90 days that shook women’s tennis arrived with little warning in the late spring of 1981.
