Pregnant Serena Williams Poses Nude For ‘Vanity Fair’ Cover [Photo]

Tennis champion Serena Williams stripped down to show off her baby bump on the cover of the August issue of Vanity Fair. The cover shot by Annie Leibovitz, who also photographed Demi Moore for the August 1991 cover of the magazine, shows the tennis superstar in a profile shot. She is nude except for a belly chain and a thong that matches her skin tone.

The shot was taken in the seventh month of Serena’s pregnancy. It is the 35-year-old tennis superstar’s first pregnancy. She is expecting a baby with her fiance, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Serena also revealed to Vanity Fair how she discovered that she was pregnant. She took six pregnancy tests before she became convinced that she was really pregnant. She was reluctant about taking the test when she felt the first signs of pregnancy, a month after her engagement to Ohanian, because she did not believe she could have become pregnant.

She told Vanity Fair that her friend Jessica Steindorff noticed the signs and, suspecting she was pregnant, insisted that she take the test. She reluctantly gave in to pressure from Steindorff.

“I’ll take it just because (a) to prove you wrong and (b) because it’s fun, whatever,” she told Steindorff. “It’s like a joke. Why not?”

She was so convinced that she couldn’t be pregnant that she nearly forgot to check the test result after she had taken it.

“An hour and a half later, I went back to the bathroom and I totally forgot about it because it was impossible for me,” she said. “So I went back to get dressed and I went back in the bathroom and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that test.'”

She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the positive test result. She said she “did a double take and my heart dropped. Like literally it dropped.”

“I don’t know what to do with a baby. I have nothing….I’ve done absolutely nothing for the baby room.”

Serena Williams Nude & Pregnant for Vanity Fair https://t.co/2BMFWfb5h5

— TMZ (@TMZ) June 27, 2017

“If you would have told me last year in October or November that I would have a baby, not be pregnant but have a baby, I would have thought you were the biggest liar in the world,” she continued.

She also talked about how she met and fell in love with Ohanian.

The two met at a hotel in Rome. Ohanian sat at a table next to Williams as she had breakfast. He apparently tried to chat her up, and Serena joked about a rat in the room, hoping he would give up and move.

“I’m from Brooklyn. I see rats all the time,” Ohanian responded.

The two hit it off after that.

‘Respect my privacy, I'm trying to have a baby’ – Serena Williams replies to ‘men’s tennis’ comments https://t.co/kgQjIvO72O@SerenaWilliams

— RT Sport (@RTSportNews) June 27, 2017

They became engaged last December in Rome at the table where they first met. Serena revealed that Ohanaian asked her to take an unplanned trip to Rome. She suspected from the tone of his request that he was planning to pop the question, but she was not pleased to travel at the time because it clashed with her busy professional schedule.

“I knew it was coming. I was like, ‘Serena, you’re 35, you’re ready. This is what you want,'” she recalled in the interview with Vanity Fair.

“She has the biggest heart,” Ohanian gushed over Serena in a post to his Instagram after they became engaged. “Everyone sees her success as an athlete, but all of that is layered on the size of her heart. She gives 100% of herself to everything she does: as a friend, as a lover, and soon, as a mother.”

[Featured Image by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images]