Cheerleaders, True Crime, and the American Dream

Cheerleaders are having a moment.

On December 29th, USA Network debuted its much-anticipated Dare Me series, an adaptation of Megan Abbott’s Anthony Award-winning novel of the same name. In the six short weeks since its debut, the TV version of Dare Me has garnered positive reviews from a number of outlets, including The New Yorker and Vulture. Variety’s Caroline Framke called the show “a wicked thriller that practically demands that its audience gorge upon it.” Dare Me isn’t alone in cheerleaders’ small-screen takeover. On January 8th, Netflix released Cheer, a six-episode docu-series following the elite cheerleading squad of Navarro College. Like Dare Me, Cheer has been critically acclaimed.

2019 also saw the release of Lifetime’s Death of a Cheerleader reboot. The original 1994 TV movie (starring 90210’s Tori Spelling in the titular role) is based on the real-life 1984 murder of cheerleader Kirsten Costas by would-be cheerleader Bernadette Protti.

While Dare Me and Cheer present cheerleading as an actual sport, in the Death of a Cheerleader films, the “sport” of cheerleading consists of little more than jumping around while waving pom-poms. In the 2019 reboot, cheerleading gets major screen time in only one scene—a particularly painful one in which we witness try outs for the cheerleading team.

For these fictional would-be cheerleaders, having a certain look—and smile—is more important than skill level. The look has everything to do with how a cheerleader becomes “The Cheerleader.” She is not a real person. She is a label.

***

If your image of cheerleaders involves ditzy blondes prancing around in too-short skirts, Cheer and Dare Me might change your perspective. These young women (and, in the case of Cheer, men) are real-deal athletes.

Calling the Navarro College and Sutton Grove High School teams “elite” cheer squads is an understatement. Although the Eagles and Dawgs cheer on on their respective schools’ sports teams, these sideline obligations represent a small (and not-too-significant) slice of their work. For these teams, real cheerleading is competition prep.

In both shows, cheerleaders’ bodies are on display, but not in the way you’re probably used to seeing. Instead of blonde, buxom, pom-pom-brandishing bimbos, Cheer and Dare Me present us with high-caliber athletes whose blood, sweat, and tears practically ooze off the screen. Bruises bloom on bare shoulders and muscular limbs hold “top girls” aloft. Given the gut-wrenching injuries that characterize both shows (concussions, bruised ribs, blood-gushing knocked-out teeth), it’s not hard to believe that 65% of catastrophic injuries among female athletes are cheer-related.

Injuries aren’t the only thing that set Cheer and Dare Me apart from more typical depictions of cheerleading. Both shows feature diverse casts in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Unlike in Death of a Cheerleader, having a certain “look” (skinny, white, blonde, etc) isn’t a prerequisite for becoming a cheerleader. Instead, impressing coaches French and Aldama equires talent, dedication, and an unflinching ability to endure physical pain.

***

In September 2019, 20 year-old former cheerleader Brooke Skylar Richardson of Carlisle, OH went on trial for murder.

Her alleged crime? Murdering her newborn daughter, burning the infant’s corpse in an attempt to conceal evidence of the child’s existence, and burying the remains in her parents’ backyard.

Richardson (who went by her middle name Skylar) first learned she was pregnant on April 26, 2017, when she went to her very first OB/GYN appointment to obtain a birth control prescription. At this appointment, a doctor (the same man, it turns out, who had delivered when she was born) informed his patient that she was 32 weeks along and could expect to deliver within ten weeks.

According to her doctor’s estimations, Skylar’s due date should have been in late June or early July. Instead, on May 7, 2017—just eleven days after learning she was pregnant—Skylar gave birth alone in the middle of the night, while sitting on the toilet in her parents’ home.

During her interrogations with police, Skylar said that her daughter (whom she later named Annabelle) had been born white and with her eyes closed. The infant was not breathing, had no heartbeat (Skylar checked), and the umbilical cord was not attached. Skylar surmised that her child was born dead and proceeded to bury the fetus in the backyard.

Skylar did not tell her parents, friends, or then-boyfriend (who was not the father of her child) about her pregnancy. (Skylar’s pregnancy was the result of a short-lived relationship she had during the summer of 2016, before she started dating her boyfriend.) Skylar’s pregnancy and subsequent stillbirth likely would have remained secret were it not for another OB/GYN appointment in mid-July 2017 (she was there to get her birth control prescription refilled). During this appointment, Skylar was questioned about her pregnancy and admitted to a different doctor that she had given birth in May and buried the fetus in her backyard.

This doctor and Dr. Andrew proceeded to inform police, which prompted a search at Skylar’s house that uncovered fetal skeletal remains. She was eventually acquitted of the most serious charges with which she was charged (aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment, tampering with evidence), but received a three-year probation sentence for gross abuse of a corpse.

There are a number of questions swirling around this case, a principal one being whether Skylar’s baby was born dead or alive. There’s also the question of the pregnancy itself, and why it took so long for Skylar to become aware of it.

Why did it take Skylar nearly seven and a half months to realize she was pregnant? Didn’t she demonstrate any of the tell-tale “signs” of pregnancy? Wouldn’t a long-absent period have been evidence enough? Even if she was in denial about her pregnancy, wouldn’t other people have noticed?

It’s not quite so simple as that. By her senior year of high school, Skylar had been dealing with a severe eating disorder for six years. It’s this eating disorder that masked the symptoms of her pregnancy. 

As Skylar’s defense attorney Charles M. Rittgers pointed out in his opening statement, it was not unusual for his client to miss her period for months at a time as a result of her low body weight. Moreover, another result of Skylar’s eating disorder was that her weight had a tendency to fluctuate between 90 to 140 pounds (according to the CDC, the average amount of weight gain during pregnancy is 25-40 pounds.)

***

In Cheerleader!: An American Icon (arguably the definitive academic text on cheerleading), Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis argue that “cheerleaders came to represent the model citizens whose values and actions were to reflect the ideals of the community.”

Adams and Bettis believe that the cheerleader’s ever-present smile is inextricable from this “model citizen” identity:

“Americans are an optimistic people, and cheerleaders represent this optimism because they are expected, above all else, to be perky and cheerful. In fact, if there is any ubiquitous about any cheerleader, anywhere, it is their ever-present smile. That smile has been labeled in a variety of ways—as the toothpaste smiles and velcroed-on smiles. But smiling is part of the standard cheerleading uniform.”

But what about the “bad” cheerleader, the one who breaks the rules? Or the “mean-girl cheerleader” whose evil intentions lurk just beneath her smiling veneer?

***

Nearly every single headline about the case mentions the fact that Skylar was a cheerleader.

Unlike the Texas Cheerleader Scandal (in which a Texas mother solicited murder of her daughter’s friend’s mother, ostensibly to ensure her own daughter would make the school cheerleading squad), Skylar’s alleged crime was not directly connected to her cheerleading. Even still, when it came to reporting on Skylar’s case, the “cheerleader label” proved irresistible to media outlets.

Here’s a sampling of media headlines about the case (and these are just ones from the past five months):

• “Ohio Cheerleader Found Not Guilty of Murdering Her Newborn Baby”
• “Jury Sees Police Video of Cheerleader on Trial for Baby Slay”
• “Former cheerleader Brooke Skylar Richardson found not guilty”
• Ex-Cheerleader Accused of Burying Baby in Backyard Found Not Guilty of Murder
• “Skylar Richardson case: Former cheerleader accused of killing baby suffering from eating disorders, lawyers say”
• “Cheerleader accused of killing newborn, burying her in backyard after prom begins murder trial”
• “Brooke Skylar Richardson—Cop still claims cheerleader killed her baby—despite her being cleared of murder”
• “Cheerleader Who Buried Baby Girl In Her Backyard Now Wishes To Have Died In Her Place”
• “Cheerleader who buried baby after prom ‘plagued by guilt’”
• “Cheerleader who buried newborn after secret pregnancy ‘did what she needed to do’”
• “Cheerleader Brooke Skylar Richardson’s parents say guarded daughter kept lots of secrets”
• “Ex-Cheerleader Accused of Killing & Burying Newborn Didn’t Want to be Mom, Worrying Doctor: Prosecutor”
• “Cheerleader went to gym, took selfie after killing newborn”

In case you’re wondering whether all of these are tabloid headlines (which would perhaps explain the use of the cheerleader label), they’re not. The first two are from The Daily Beast, the third is from The Washington Post, the fourth is from MSN, the fifth is from The Cincinnati Enquirer, and the sixth is USA Today.

The rest come from a smattering of different middle- and lower-brow publications—some of which I would place squarely in the tabloid category (e.g. People and The Daily Mail).

This is just a tiny sampling of articles that include the word “cheerleader” in the headline. Almost every single article I’ve read about the case—even ones that don’t have “cheerleader” in the headline—identifies Skylar as a cheerleader.

***

I have to admit: when I first learned of Skylar’s case, what drew me in was (you guessed it) the cheerleader bit.

Skylar’s case had all the makings of a salacious, ripped-from-the-headlines Lifetime movie. I pictured something not entirely unlike the two Death of a Cheerleader iterations: two days after prom, a cheerleading uniform-clad teen gives birth to an unwanted child, only to kill the child and bury its remains in the backyard.

Except, this wasn’t a movie. It was Skylar’s real life. And she certainly didn’t give birth while wearing her cheerleading uniform. In fact, her having been a cheerleader had almost nothing to do with the case.

And yet the label stuck.

Why is the cheerleader label so sticky? And why did it continue to be part of the media narrative surrounding Skylar’s case more than two and a half years after she had last donned a cheerleading uniform?

By the time she went on trial, Skylar was a 20 year-old woman.

And yet she was still “the cheerleader.”

***

Skylar’s case raises a number of potent questions about gender, reproductive rights, sex education, and social media. On the subject of reproductive rights, Skylar’s case is part of a trend a 2011 Guardian article called “the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women,” in which pregnant people face criminal penalties for miscarriages and stillbirths.

I wonder if and how being a cheerleader impacted Skylar’s case. Would her case have received as much media attention—or even been prosecuted in the first place—if she were not a cheerleader? What if she were a math whiz, 4-H Club Member, or (gasp) a completely unremarkable teenager who was not involved in any extracurricular activities whatsoever?

We also have to consider what role race plays in miscarriage criminalization cases. Skylar grew up in Carlisle, OH, an overwhelmingly white, middle-class community (98.3% of Carlisle’s 5,336 residents are white). Would Skylar still have been acquitted were she a woman of color? Even if she was still white, what if she were chemically-dependent or low-income? Would her case have turned out differently?

In examining Skylar’s case, other miscarriage criminalization cases come to mind, especially those of Marshae Jones, Keysheonna Reed, Purvi Patel, Theresa Lee Hernandez, and Bei Bei Shuai. All five of these cases (which date from 2008 to 2019) involve women of color being charged with criminal offenses for failing to bring a pregnancy to term.

In Jones’s case (the most recent of the five), the twenty-seven year-old Alabama woman was indicted for manslaughter when another person shot her in the stomach, resulting in a miscarriage of Jones’s five month-old fetus (the district attorney eventually decided not to prosecute Jones, but only after outcry about the case erupted).

I was struck by the fact that Jones’s case received far less press coverage than Skylar’s. A Google search for Marshae Jones returns 566,000 results. Searching for Skylar Richardson returns about 3 million results. I tried different keyword combinations (“Ohio cheerleader baby,” “cheerleader kills baby,” etc.) to see if that impacted the results. After all, there are probably dozens of other Skylar Richardsons out there, and by just searching for “Skylar Richardson,” I can’t be sure that I’m weeding all these same-named people out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my keyword searches returned results in the multiple millions. By the time I reached page 12 of the “Ohio cheerleader baby” search results, I had yet to see a single article that isn’t about Skylar.

***

What is it about cheerleaders? What makes this label so sticky, especially within the context of true-crime reporting? In a case that, technically speaking, had nothing to do with cheerleading, why was Skylar Richardson so inextricable from her cheerleader identity?

One of the aims of Cheerleader!: An American Icon is to examine where the cultural aura of “the cheerleader” comes from.  According to Adams and Bettis, perceptions of cheerleaders—whether negative or positive—often take root in adolescence and linger long after high-school graduation.

In Cheerleader!, Adams and Bettis describe giving a presentation on their research during which their colleagues “spent a good part of a two-hour meeting telling personal cheerleader stories, many of which were fueled by anger and pain.”

Can the chilly reception Adams and Bettis received be explained by the fact that their audience was composed entirely of academics (i.e. people who ostensibly could have been “nerds” in high school?) Or is this type of reasoning overly reductive? Either way, the authors conclude, “[a]lthough disdained as a topic of research for many academics, cheerleading still evoked powerful reflections on one’s youth and one’s position in the typical school hierarchy.”

When watching Skylar’s trial (it’s available in full on YouTube), I was struck by the vitriol with which First Assistant Prosecutor Steven Knippen delivered his opening statement.

Knippen refers to Skylar’s supposed motive—not wanting to “ruin her perfect life”—and alleges that “she murdered a baby she didn’t want and never intended to keep.”

Where does Knippen get the idea that Skylar had a “perfect life”? What about her long-standing eating disorder? Or the fact that Skylar’s mother seemed to support her daughter’s disordered eating habits?

Was Knippen’s delivery of his opening statement typical prosecutorial grandiosity? Or something else? Did he, too, have a negative “cheerleader story,” one dating back to his high-school days?

***

While shows like Cheer and Dare Me work to buck conventional notions of cheerleaders, the overwhelming media narrative surrounding cheerleaders is still very much bound up with stereotypes.

As Prof. Emma Tom writes in “Flip Skirt Fatales: How Media Fetish Sidelines Cheerleaders,” “The news media’s obsession (and fetishitic disavowals of its obsession) with cheerleaders reveals the oppressive and disempowering ramifications to young women whose sexualities are both coveted and despised.”

The cheerleader is an object of simultaneous reverence and revile. A sideline sex toy and, as Marty Beckerman writes in Death to All Cheerleaders, “a urine stain on the toilet seat of America.”

In this way, the cheerleader is more symbol than substance.

She is whatever we want—and need—her to be.