Serena Williams is undoubtedly a tennis legend, but she recently revealed that a former opponent, whom she says she beat a lot, claimed that she got her prowess through witchcraft and black magic.
“The craziest thing I ever heard about me was that I did witchcraft, black magic because I was beating some girl a lot,” the 23-time Grand Slam champion said on her Stockton Street podcast, which she co-hosts with her sister, Venus, per PEOPLE. “And so she claimed that we did black magic to beat her.”
Despite making the aforementioned revelation, Serena, 44, did not disclose her former opponent who brought those allegations against her. Venus, 45, on the other hand, shared what she knew about that story.
“From what I understand, someone on her team consulted a black magician to beat you,” Venus recalled.
Singer Ciara was a guest on the podcast, and she similarly touched on the “craziest thing” she was once told. She said it had to do with being told that “you can’t do everything while being a mom.”
“It’s as if it’s a negative thing, right?” Serena said in response to Ciara, who is a mother of four. Serena, on the other hand, is a mother of two.
Following her retirement from tennis and outside the witchcraft allegations, Serena has been keeping tabs with her weight, previously revealing that she has been using medication for weight loss after shedding 31 pounds.
During an appearance on the Today Show on August 21, Williams disclosed that she’s been using a GLP-1 medication for over a year to lose weight. She has been doing this in partnership with health care company Ro, where her husband Alexis Ohanian is an investor and serves on its board, as reported by Fox23maine.com.
“I was on and off (the medication) and now completely on,” she said. “It was a really good decision I had to make for my life, you know, I tried everything.”
The tennis icon said she decided to use the drug because she was finding it difficult to drop the baby weight after giving birth to her two daughters, Alexis Olympia, born in 2017, and Adira River, born in 2023.
“This all started after I had my (first) kid,” she explained. “As a woman, you go through different cycles in your life. … No matter what I did — running, walking, I would walk for hours because they say that’s good, I literally was playing a professional sport — and I could never go back to where I needed to be for my health. Then, after my second kid, it just even got harder. So, then I was like, OK, I have to try something different. That’s kind of what led to this whole journey.”
Besides the weight loss drug, Williams said she hit 20,000 steps a day and even worked on becoming a vegetarian while being on a strict high-protein diet.
“A misconception is that it’s a shortcut,” the 23-time Grand Slam winner said. “As an athlete and as someone that has done everything, I just couldn’t get my weight to where I needed to be at a healthy place — and believe me, I don’t take shortcuts.”
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