Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  There was a lot of interesting insight into the prosecution’s case, reading Garrison’s book. In fact, up until they reached the verdict, key members of the prosecution team didn’t even think they had a case against me. Jeff Modisett, the elected prosecutor of Marion County, won his office by just 285 votes out of 180,000. The only district he carried was the black district. He was no schmuck. He didn’t want to alienate his base, so he decided not to charge me with a crime; instead he would send my case to a grand jury to let the “people” decide if a crime had been committed.

  I had to testify before the grand jury on the thirtieth. Well, I didn’t have to. In fact, Jim Voyles was begging Vince Fuller NOT to have me testify. There was no upside to my testifying. The only thing it could do was give the prosecution ammunition to come after me with during the trial. But somehow Fuller and Don convinced themselves that I should go before the grand jury.

  “This man is innocent. Mike Tyson says he’s innocent. He’s testifying because I think that’s what we’re supposed to do,” Don bellowed on the courtroom steps in front of all the media that day. “I’m going to let due process take its course. I’m not an attorney, I’m just a promoter of the greatest fighter in the world, and he’s going to win the championship in the fall.”

  I was facing a long stretch in jail and he was promoting my damn fight with Holyfield that was scheduled for November. Only in America.

  They had me dress in a very conservative dark blue double-breasted suit. We were brought to a small room with a noisy window air conditioner. There were six jurors there. Five of them were white. They asked me questions and I answered very softly and the court reporter made over a hundred errors in her transcription.

  At one point they asked me if Dale Edwards had been in the parlor of my suite. I said he was. Dale had testified he was. That’s where he was supposed to be. I couldn’t know for sure because the bedroom door was closed.

  To indict me they needed five out of six votes. We took a recess at one point and I had been eyeing this large candy bowl that was in the middle of the table that the jurors had been eating from.

  “Could I have a piece of candy, please?” I asked.

  “Sure,” they said. And the one black lady handed me the candy.

  On September ninth, the grand jury began deliberations. The vote was 5–1 to indict me for rape. I was indicted on one count of rape, two counts of criminal deviate conduct (using my fingers and using my tongue), and one count of confinement. I faced sixty years in jail. My trial was scheduled to start on January ninth.

  We held a press conference after the jury came back with their vote. Don rattled on and on about famous celebrities who had gotten into trouble – Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn, Judy Garland. Then I gave my statement.

  “I know what happened. I know I’m innocent. I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t do anything. I love women – I mean, my mother’s a woman. I respect them as well.”

  From September until the start of the trial, I ate a lot. I was nervous. I was training to fight Holyfield, but my heart wasn’t into fighting. A few weeks into training, I tore cartilage in my ribs. The doctors recommended that I postpone the fight. I actually could have fought, but I was happy to postpone it. I had too much on my mind.

  While I was stressing and eating, the prosecution assembled their team. Modisett’s gamble failed. The grand jury didn’t make my case go away, so he did the next-best thing: He hired an independent Republican special prosecutor to try my case. Greg Garrison was a former deputy prosecutor who had been making money recently by prosecuting drug dealers on RICO charges and getting a cut of everything that was confiscated from the dealers.

  Modisett only paid Garrison $20,000 to take on the case, but this wasn’t about money – he was doing this for the glory and to get his name out in front of the world. If you read his book, you’d think that he took this case to help defend Indiana from the ravaging Hun. “I am a product of rural Indiana, a land of conservative Republicans and hardworking, decent people who tend their own fields, respect the law, and help their friends when needed … Make no mistake, Tyson picked the wrong place to commit his crime. Indiana is different from Palm Beach or D.C. or L.A.”

  Garrison started investigating the case. The first place he looked was at Desiree’s panties. He was concerned about the lack of any physical injury to Desiree, so he went to the grand jury room and examined the clothing she wore that night. “It seemed like a risqué costume when you just looked at it lying on the table,” he wrote, and said she wore a bustier that “would have stopped traffic on the right woman.” But as for her panties, he didn’t think they were “consistent with the image of a young gold digger heading out to get into the pants and pocketbook of the former heavyweight champ of the world.”

  “I opened the panties and looked down at them as if I were going to put them on.” Now, this is some perverted shit. He lined up the bloodstains on the panties and then concluded that Desiree had jerked her panties on after we had sex and blotted them with bleeding from injuries rather than from her period. And then it all fit in his mind. She was telling the truth and I had raped her. The smoking gun was her panties.

  He was convinced that Desiree wouldn’t have had the two small abrasions in her vagina if we had consensual sex and she was lubricated.

  Of course, this issue came up during the trial. My man Voyles wanted to address the issue of my size and get a doctor to testify that it could have caused her vaginal abrasions, but Fuller was squeamish about any of the sexual aspects of the case.

  Garrison still had no idea about my motivation to rape someone. “I admitted I had no idea why Tyson would have chosen to rape Desiree when he could have had any one of a score of women.”

  Then Garrison and his assistant, Barbara Trathen, took a little road trip. In November they went to Rhode Island to meet with Desiree and her family. They were struck by how “polite and genteel” her family was.

  Garrison and his deputy started questioning Desiree about the fact that she had gone to the bathroom in my room and taken off her panty shield instead of just leaving. Desiree told them I had suddenly turned mean and lustful and she was freaked out. So she went to the bathroom. When Garrison asked Desiree why she had gone to the bathroom, she answered, “It was the first thing I could think of doing after he turned mean.”

  Garrison flew to D.C. and met with the U.S. Attorney to get dirt on Fuller. The fed told Garrison that everyone in Washington legal circles was baffled as to why Fuller had accepted the case. It didn’t fit his blue-blood firm’s profile. “They just don’t do street crimes. Never. Not even in the D.C. area.”

  While he was in D.C., Garrison stopped at the BET studios to talk with Charlie Neal, who was the announcer for the Miss Black America Pageant. Charlie told Garrison that he saw no change at all in Desiree after the alleged rape. Plus, I could have had my pick of the women there. Why did I need to rape one? I guess Garrison didn’t like what he had heard from Charlie.

  “What he [Charlie] had to say boiled down to I didn’t see nothin’, I didn’t hear nothin’, I don’t know nothin’. It was clear to me that he must be thinking that these honkies weren’t going to get a thing from him against a brother,” Garrison wrote.

  But I was most upset when I read that my old friend José Torres had met with Garrison. He went into his usual bullshit that boxing is lying for a living and that the best boxers were the best liars. And he told Garrison that no other boxer lied like I did. Then Torres repeated his bullshit stories about me and women and sex that he had put into his book. Torres told Garrison that I had bragged to him about hitting Robin so hard that she “hit every fucking wall in the room.” According to him, I said it was the greatest punch I had ever thrown.

  Torres had explained to Garrison that he was on the outs with me, so Garrison should have taken most of this with a grain of salt. The worst betrayal was when Garrison asked Torres if I was capable of rape.

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely,” he said, a
nd then he went into his pseudo Freudian bullshit about how I couldn’t control my libido because my id was too strong. “He takes what he wants. He always has,” Torres said. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. What a disgrace of a human being. Garrison finished his interview by asking Torres what he could expect if I took the witness stand.

  “He’ll try to outthink you and give the jurors what they want. Remember, boxers are liars. And Tyson’s the best.”

  Before the trial started, Desiree went to Indianapolis for her deposition. Fuller decided not to do it, so he had his co-counsel Kathleen Beggs do it. Garrison was shocked at Beggs’s strategy. She tore Desiree a new asshole. Beggs was “accusatory, arrogant, unkind, and mean-spirited,” according to Garrison. Instead of being sweet and finessing out some information that my defense could use, she reduced Desiree to tears.

  My trial began on January 27, 1992. My judge was a lady named Patricia Gifford. She had overseen the grand jury. She was a former deputy prosecutor in that county’s office who had specialized in rape cases. She helped initiate the rape shield legislation that shielded rape victims from any evidence of their sexual history being introduced. Later this would play a big role in my case. She was a card-carrying Republican who could trace her ancestry back so far she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her father was an army colonel. Just my kind of girl. And in Indiana the prosecutors got to pick the judge, so naturally they chose Judge Gifford.

  It was time to select a jury of my peers. The only problem was that back then, Indiana used voter registration rolls to get their jury poll, which meant that since a lot of black folk didn’t vote, they couldn’t be included as potential jurors. So out of 179 people called as potential jurors, 160 were white. Fuller and his team even had problems picking the jury. They had no experience doing that. Garrison meanwhile was a master at jury selection. He could interview the potential jurors and bullshit with them, ask them if they lived near that big Walmart out by the interstate. Fuller couldn’t even begin to connect with the Midwestern jurors.

  Fuller was too stubborn to even hire a jury selection expert. As a result, he let this former Marine named Tim onto the jury. Later one of the other jurors would say that Tim was “much more conservative than the rest of us, more straight, a real redneck.” This guy would become the foreman of my jury.

  If, as some people think, 90 percent of cases were decided in the opening statements, then we weren’t going to do so good in this court. Garrison’s opening lasted for forty-five minutes. You would have thought he was reading from that book Fifty Shades of Grey.

  “He’s grinning at her. His voice is low, different than before. And he pulls her legs apart and sticks his fingers into her. She cries out in pain. The medical, anatomical, physiological miracle of human sexuality that causes the female of the species to become lubricated when she’s sexually excited ain’t working, and she’s terrified. So when these big fingers go into her, it hurts a lot, and she cries out, ‘Don’t!’ ”

  “She hops up from the bed and puts her clothes on fast, wiping her tears, getting her clothes on, trying to find her dignity along with her clothes, and says, ‘Is the limo still down there?’ He says, ‘Oh, you can stay if you want.’ She says, ‘Why? So you can do that again?’ ”

  Fuller was a dry twit compared to this Garrison guy. He tried to paint a portrait of Desiree as sophisticated beyond her years, not the sweet, innocent girly girl the prosecution presented, but Garrison kept objecting during Fuller’s presentation. Fuller did point out some key inconsistencies between what Desiree told the various other girls. She told some people she screamed, told others she didn’t. She said that I attacked her in the bed to one person and that we’d had sex on the floor to someone else. But Fuller made a major error during his opening statement. He promised that the jury would hear from me. You don’t do that in a major case like this. There were some people who thought that the state’s case was so weak that we could have called no witnesses, just rested, and still have won an acquittal. But he promised them me, so I would have to testify. What’s worse, during his whole opening argument, Fuller not once came near me. Not one pat on the shoulder, not one glance in my direction, not one display of bonding between the defense lawyer and his client. That was first-year law school shit.

  “Jurors weren’t seeing a defense team at work, only a foghorn barrister from another state who had made a cold-fish first impression.” I didn’t say that, Mark Shaw did.

  After calling her roommate to the stand, Garrison brought on Desiree. She said that when I asked her to go down to the limo, she was reluctant until I told her we’d go out “sightseeing.” U.K. law doesn’t allow me to comment on our plans for the evening.

  Desiree gave evidence that we didn’t kiss or hold hands and that I didn’t display any signs of affection until I got her on the bed and I turned weird and mean. She repeated that she then went to the bathroom and took off her panty shield and threw it away. “I had a pad in my purse but I figured I could put it on later.”

  When she got back, she said, I pinned her down, took off her top, and slid her shorts off and her panties down and then inserted two fingers into her vagina. Then I penetrated her. She said that she told her mother what had happened the next night and then they called 911.

  Garrison thought that she had testified spectacularly. Others weren’t so sure. Some reporters thought that she was too “stoical” and one even wrote that she seemed “a little prissy” and “almost too perfect.” Before the trial, Garrison had brought in another attorney, Robert Hammerle, to do a mock cross-examination of her so they could see how she would respond to pressure.

  Hammerle began to ask her about the improbabilities that he saw about the case.

  “Look, you met Mike Tyson, and you saw him making all of these passes at girls … and then you gave him a picture of you in a bathing suit, and you still didn’t think he had sex on his mind?” he asked Desiree.

  “No,” she said.

  “He called you in the middle of the night, and you went down to his limousine and when you got in, he kissed you, and it still never crossed your mind that he had sex on his mind?”

  “No.”

  “Then you went to the hotel, and you went to his room, and you sat on his bed, and it never crossed your mind that he wanted to have sex with you?”

  “No.”

  “And then he said, ‘You’re turning me on,’ and you didn’t think he had sex on his mind?”

  “No.”

  I wish that Hammerle had been my attorney. When it came time for Fuller to cross-examine Desiree, he didn’t even seem to want to be doing it. Mark Shaw agreed with me.

  “Fuller’s polite and less than forceful cross-examination was difficult to understand, especially when Garrison’s direct examination gave him so many opportunities to probe Washington about what specifically happened in the hotel room between her and Tyson,” he wrote.

  He couldn’t understand why Fuller didn’t take advantage of her defensiveness. She would have given him a lot more information than was requested.

  Fuller never fired rapid questions at her like Hammerle had in his mock cross-exam. He never once put her on the defensive.

  The other state witness who hurt me was the emergency room doctor, Stephen Richardson. He testified that he had examined Desiree the night after the alleged attack. He found no bruises or abrasions on her arms or legs, no signs that she had been hit or squeezed. There was no trauma to her labia majora or labia minora. But he did find two very small abrasions, an eighth of an inch wide and three-eighths long on her introitus, the opening to her vagina. He said that 10 to 20 percent of rape victims have injuries there. And he said that in twenty years of practice, he had seen those injuries only twice from consensual sex.

  During the testimony Garrison had blown up a huge picture of Desiree’s privates, mounted it, and displayed it in the courtroom.

  Fuller had nothing to counteract Dr. Richardson’s testimony bec
ause he declined to involve the urologist lined up to examine my member and testify how those little abrasions could have been caused by size alone.

  Then the state wrapped up their case. They called Mrs. Washington to the stand.

  “Desiree is gone, and she’s not going to come back. I just want my daughter back.”

  Some of the jurors started crying.

  Then they played an edited version of her 911 tape. This was like calling Desiree to the stand again.

  “I went out with this person in a limousine that night and the person told me that he had to go in to get his bodyguards and he asked me if I wanted to come in for a second and I said, ‘Oh, okay, fine.’ You know, thinking this was a nice person. And we went in and the person started attacking me. I just came out of the bathroom and this person was in his underwear and he just basically kind of did what he wanted to do and kept saying, ‘Don’t fight me, don’t fight me.’ And I was like saying, ‘No, no, get off me, get off me, please, get off of me.’ And he was going, ‘Don’t fight me, don’t fight me.’ And the person is a lot stronger than I was and he just did what he wanted to and I was saying, ‘Stop, please, stop, please.’ And he just didn’t stop.”

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do but don’t be scared,” the dispatcher told her.

  “But someone nationally known against someone just like me, a regular person, I mean, people like just kind of naturally think that I’m going for the money or something,” Desiree said.