Jessica Alba’s Kerrigan Costume Had a Bloody Knee. The Delete Button Came Next.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Halloween night in Los Angeles, where Vas J Morgan and Michael Braun threw a “Hockey Horror” party — and Jessica Alba showed up as the most infamous moment in figure skating. Alba, 45, came dressed as Nancy Kerrigan: a white lace skating dress, a big white bow, lace-up heeled booties — and wrapped around her knee, a bandage streaked with fake blood. Beside her, Kelly Sawyer — co-CEO of the charity Baby2Baby — played Tonya Harding in a beaded burgundy dress, carrying a wooden baseball bat. They posed together on a blood-splattered rink. The hosts’ theme was hockey. The costumes were about something else entirely.

Because the bandage is the costume. Take it away and Alba is a woman in a skating dress. With it, the outfit points at one specific night — and everybody who lived through the ’90s knows exactly which night. Alba posted the photos to Instagram on Nov. 1, captioned “Happy Halloween from Tonya … and Nancy,” and the internet split on contact.

So run the real tape, because the real tape is not funny. On Jan. 6, 1994, after a practice session at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, a man named Shane Stant stepped out of the crowd at Cobo Arena and swung a metal police baton into Kerrigan’s lower thigh, just above the knee. Stant had been hired through Jeff Gillooly — Harding’s ex-husband — and Harding’s bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt. The plot, prosecutors said, was to knock Kerrigan out of the way so Harding’s road to the Olympics ran clear. It nearly worked: the injury forced Kerrigan out of the national championships.

What it didn’t do was end her. Kerrigan healed, skated at the Lillehammer Olympics weeks later and won silver; Harding finished eighth. In the aftermath, Harding was never convicted of planning the attack — she pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder the prosecution, was fined $160,000 with 500 hours of community service, and took a lifetime ban from the U.S. Figure Skating Association, which also stripped her 1994 national title. Kerrigan went on to the Figure Skating Hall of Fame. That is the night the fake blood is referencing. Not a rivalry. Not a meme. A hired assault, weeks before an Olympics, meant to end a woman’s career.

The defense writes itself, and plenty of people wrote it: it has been more than 30 years, there have been feature films and TV movies about it, it is Halloween — lighten up. One defense on Reddit pulled more than 4,000 upvotes, per BuzzFeed’s roundup. The other side was just as loud. Commenters on the post itself called the costume “immature,” as Us Weekly reported, and one Reddit user, in a comment BuzzFeed rounded up, put the whole problem in a single line: “It’s not horribly offensive but I do think it’s lame to poke fun at a woman who got physically assaulted by a man in an attempt to end her career.”

Alba’s answer, so far, is the delete button. The photos came down off Instagram — the whole Halloween dump went, including pictures of her son Hayes, 8, in his vampire costume — with no explanation and no apology. People reached out to her representatives and got nothing back. But here is the tell: as People and BuzzFeed both noted, the photos are still up on her Threads, where the comments have run mostly warm. Deleted where it was getting hot. Standing where it plays. That is not a change of heart. That is audience management.

And if you want the last word on whether any of this is ancient history, take it from the other woman in the costume. “I’m surprised that anyone is still interested in the incident from 30 years ago,” Tonya Harding told People in 2024. Thirty-two years on, Hollywood is interested enough to put it on — bloody bandage and all — and then interested enough to quietly take it off. Jessica Alba is outta pocket.

More of the day’s tape lives with Previously’s entertainment coverage.