Serena Williams Admits She Accidentally Made Pregnancy Announcement

Serena Williams, pictured here at a fashion show in September, admits she accidentally spilled her pregnancy news on social media. (Photo: Pietro D’Aprano/Getty Images)

Serena Williams doesn’t make many missteps on the court, but she recently made a big one on social media. The tennis great admits that when she announced her pregnancy last week via a photo of herself on Snapchat, she uploaded it accidentally.

“Well, actually it was an accident,” Williams, 35, told interviewer Gayle King on Tuesday at a TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I was on vacation just taking some time for myself and I have this thing where I’ve been checking my status and taking pictures every week to see how far along I’m going. I didn’t tell a lot of people to be quite honest and I’d been saving it. On social media, you press the wrong button and … 30 minutes later I missed four calls and I’m like, ‘That’s weird.’ But it was a good moment. I was only going to wait five or six more days [to share].”

The oops hasn’t stopped her from taking her weekly pregnancy pics, however. “Every week I just take a picture and save it and I’ve been so good about it and this was the one time I slipped, but it’s OK,” she added.

On April 19, Serena — the number one tennis player ranked tennis player in the WTA — posted a mirror selfie on Snapchat in which she was wearing a yellow swimsuit with cutouts. “20 weeks,” Williams, who is engaged to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, captioned it and the world assumed she was referring to her protruding baby bump. She deleted it soon after.

Here’s the “20 weeks” photo that Serena accidentally posted and then deleted announcing her pregnancy. (Photo: Snapchat)

Serena later confirmed her pregnancy news through her rep and on Monday posted a sweet open letter to her “dearest baby.” She wrote that her unborn child has “taught me the true meaning of serenity and peace” and said she “can’t wait” for the baby to “join the players box next year.”

Not every moment of her pregnancy has been blissful though. She had to deal with racist comments allegedly made by Romanian tennis captain Ilie Nastase, who, during a Fed Cup press conference on Friday, supposedly said of Serena’s unborn child, “Let’s see what color it has. Chocolate with milk?”