Dokic: How I turned my deepest pain into my greatest power
Every morning, Jelena Dokic would wake up and think the same thing - 10 simple but haunting words that encapsulated both her nightmare and her survival.
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Jelena Dokic has been up since the crack of dawn.
Where once the retired Australian tennis player spent her mornings practising volleys, backhands and serves, these days she is likely to be found getting ready to commentate tournaments, give speeches and motivational talks at events or make television appearances.
This morning she has been busy doing fittings in preparation for something entirely new – colour reporting at the races for Channel 9.
“I’m branching out a little bit and doing more in front of the camera. I’m really excited,” she says, beaming.
Dokic, 41, is talking via video chat from her home city of Melbourne to promote her new documentary, Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story. She’s in a good place, full of energy and smiles as she talks about how far she’s come from the extraordinary physical and verbal abuse she says she endured as a young girl at the hands of her father and one-time coach, Damir Dokic.
“I want people to look at me and go, ‘You know what? She’s not just survived, she’s thriving. She’s actually a success story not just on the court but off the court’ … I want people to know that everything’s possible, that you can do anything. I want people to say, especially women and girls, ‘She did it. I can do it too,’” she says.
It’s taken a long time and a lot of work to get here. This place of hope, peace and determination to turn her pain into power.
When Dokic released her memoir of the same name, co-written by sports journalist Jessica Halloran in 2017, everything changed. It was just three years after she had retired from tennis due to injury and the first time she had revealed the full extent of the trauma and domestic violence she says she experienced.
“The book was really the beginning of my life. I would even say it saved my life. For the very first time, I found my voice. I was not silenced anymore and I really started to discover who I was. I did a lot of soul searching and healing with everything that I went through and who I’ve become today and who I wanted to be in the future and the purpose of my life,” she says.
A tennis prodigy, Dokic arrived in Australia with her mother, father and brother from war-torn Yugoslavia at the age of 11. Despite the horrendous abuse Dokic says she endured – regular beatings until she was black and blue, being punched unconscious, being hit with a belt, cruel training regimens, being called a “cow, bitch, useless” – she reached world no.4 playing against the likes of tennis greats including Martina Hingis, Venus and Serena Williams, Monica Seles, Anna Kournikova and more.
“Every morning I woke up and thought, how do I make sure he doesn’t hurt me today?” she says in the documentary that tells the heartbreaking story of her survival and her battle with PTSD, depression, anxiety, disordered eating and suicidality.
In a departure from the book, the documentary offers the perspectives of those in Dokic’s orbit during her childhood and early career. Through interviews with her former coaches, tennis players such as Pam Shriver, Lindsay Davenport, Mark Philippoussis and Todd Woodbridge, journalists and tennis officials, viewers are given insights into the culture of silence around domestic violence in sports at the time, raising important questions about what more could have been done and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Making the documentary with co-directors Ivan O’Mahoney and Halloran was even harder than writing the book for Dokic.
“It’s not an easy process and we all worked very, very hard behind the scenes,” she says.
“I am very glad and very excited that it’s coming out. It’s another layer and another chapter in my story, which ultimately I hope I can make a difference with.”
The documentary made its world premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival on November 3. Dokic hopes it will help other survivors of domestic violence and raise awareness around safeguarding of young people in sports.
“I know that it’s not the easiest watch but, you know, sometimes these powerful stories, especially when you come out of them, they’re not meant to be.
“They are supposed to be thought-provoking and they’re supposed to ask the hard questions and hopefully change things, not just for me, in tennis, in the sporting world, but in society as well,” she says.
While Dokic hasn’t spoken to her father, now based in Serbia, for over a decade, she maintains a close relationship with her brother, Savo, and has a small group of “amazing” friends and mentors.
“I’m grateful to have been able to find that today,” she says.
Dokic hasn’t given up hope of finding love again one day. She split with her partner of 19 years, Tin Bikic, in 2021 and speaks highly of him, describing him as “an incredibly caring person” who she remains on “great terms” with.
She is also considering having children down the track and is open to options including adoption, foster caring or working with charities for kids.
“When I turned 39 and I started living on my own for the very first time, I knew I had a lot of work coming up and I said, ‘I’d better just throw myself into that.’
“And that’s what I’m doing. I’m a bit of a workaholic and I’ll still continue to do that for a couple of years, and then I’ll re-evaluate and see where I’m at.
“When it comes to my personal life, I’m just kind of winging it and going with it and seeing what happens,” she says.
More than anything right now, she hopes that by sharing her story through her documentary she will offer hope to others.
“I always believed in the light at the end of the tunnel and that’s what I want to pass on to people, especially victims and survivors of domestic violence and child abuse and even mental health illnesses.
“I was bullied as well, and faced racism, and all kinds of discrimination, and also hardship. And you know what, life is not always great.
“I just want to show people that the impossible is possible. And I want people to believe in themselves and know that they can get out of the worst situations,” she says.
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Originally published as Dokic: How I turned my deepest pain into my greatest power
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