Hope Solo will face domestic violence charges again after court reopens case

Nine months after the domestic violence charges against star United States women's national team goalkeeper Hope Solo were dropped on procedural grounds, the case has been reopened, ESPN reports.

Solo, 34, originally stood accused of physically assaulting her half-sister and underage nephew in a late-night altercation in June 2014. But after the half-sister and her son failed to appear to give evidence to Solo's lawyers on several occasions, the two charges of domestic violence in the fourth degree were thrown out.

Local prosecutors, however, immediately appealed the decision – a rare occurrence. On Friday, the Washington state appeals court announced that the original decision had been reversed and that the case would be heard again.

So Solo is headed back to court.

The veteran USA and Seattle Reign goalkeeper, whose club team was on the losing end of the National Women's Soccer League's final on Thursday, has portrayed herself as the victim of the incident. However, her half-sister and nephew have claimed in interviews that she beat both of them repeatedly in some drunken fury.

Solo originally faced prison time, but after the case was dropped she was reinstated to the national team following a 30-day suspension for a separate incident. She anchored the American defense as the U.S. won its first Women's World Cup in 16 years in Canada in July, posting five shutouts in seven games.

There is no timetable for her new trial yet, but it nevertheless calls into question Solo's portrayal of the incident. She had gone on something of a publicity tour in an attempt to polish up her badly stained image, shedding a few tears in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" as she recalled the fateful night.

Throughout her career, Solo has been as controversial as she has been popular and accomplished on the field. She has been outspoken and may have herself been the victim of domestic violence in an altercation with her now-husband, former NFL player Jerramy Stephens, on the eve of their wedding, but he was not charged.

Solo remains one of the more confounding public characters in sports. She forces us to have conversation about the place of those accused of domestic violence in our professional ranks, and whether those standards are applied equally across the spectrum of men's and women's games.

U.S. Soccer, for its part, stood by Solo during her initial brush with the law, arguing that she was innocent until proven guilty and had a right to be treated as such. But it was also accused of not getting to the bottom of the case, or investigating it at all, after an ESPN expose published in July dug up new evidence and testimony.

What happens now with the World Cup and the NWSL season in the rearview mirror yet with the Summer Olympics – in which the U.S. women's national team will pursue a fourth consecutive gold medal – squarely in view and less than 10 months away, is uncertain.

But what's clear is that, if nothing else, we'll be talking about Hope Solo and all that she represents, whether well or poorly, for a while longer.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.