Former United States women’s soccer star Hope Solo pleaded guilty on Monday to driving while impaired, nearly four months after she was found unconscious in a car in North Carolina which also contained her two-year-old twins.
A police report stated that Solo was observed passed out in her car for around an hour outside in the parking zone of a retail center. A passerby also told police that the engine was running on the vehicle.
A police officer who attended the scene said that Solo smelled of alcohol and that she refused a field sobriety test. A warrant was eventually obtained to get a blood sample from her, which showed she was three times over the legal limit.
Tests also confirmed the presence of THC, a derivative of marijuana, in her system.
Solo, 40, was also hit with charges of misdemeanor child abuse and resisting a public officer related to the March 31 incident, but these were voluntarily dismissed per ESPN, who cited a report by the the Winston-Salem Journal.
According to the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office, Solo received a suspended sentence of two years as well as an active sentence of 30 days – though she was given 30 days credit for time spent as a patient of a rehabilitation facility.
She was also ordered to pay $2,500 in fines as well as a further $600 to pay for associated lab costs, while she will also be required to receive a substance abuse assessment and complete any treatments prescribed to her.
Speaking in a statement after her guilty plea, she described the March incident as “easily the worst mistake of my life.”
“I underestimated what a destructive part of my life alcohol had become. The upside of making a mistake this big is that hard lessons are learned quickly. Learning these lessons has been difficult, and at times, very painful.”
Solo was capped a remarkable 202 times by the United States women’s national team, winning a World Cup and two Olympic golds during her tenure with the team.
She has long been considered to be a controversial figure in the world of US sports for several outspoken comments over the years. She was dismissed from the US team at the 2016 Olympics for calling the Swedish team “cowards” for adopting a defensive game-plan against them.
Solo was also arrested in 2014 for an altercation involving family members, but the charges were later dropped.
Her record of 102 clean sheets in her career is a record in international football.
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