Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  “As Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World, a millionaire, and an important athlete, who strives to be a role model for youth, especially underprivileged black youth, Tyson should know better. It’s another blotch on Tyson’s increasingly besmirched personal image.”

  Violent. Monster. Antisocial. What was next, mental patient? That’s just what the Ruthless Two were up to. On September fourth, I was up in Catskill with Camille. I hadn’t been seeing much of Robin and Ruthless, but I had been taking those damn pills that McCurtis had prescribed, from time to time. Camille was against me taking them; she thought they made me dopey and withdrawn. I kind of liked that dopey feeling but she was urging me to get a second opinion. While I was there, Robin called me all the time. “Why are you up there? Why aren’t you with us?” all that bullshit.

  “Fuck you, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I want to divorce you. I want to kill myself,” I answered one day and hung up. I was really mad and I got into my car to go to town to get some stuff. It had been raining out and the dirt driveway was all muddy. To get to the main road you had to drive up the driveway about fifty feet at a ten-degree angle. I started my big BMW and gave it gas, but my wheels were spinning in the mud so I gave it more gas and I skidded out and headed for a big tree. I had intentionally planned to hit the tree to get attention but I never tried to kill myself. I knew the car would protect me. But my head hit the steering wheel and the next thing I knew Camille was standing over me, slapping my face, and attempting to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation so I’d come to.

  Oh great, my staged “suicide attempt” backfired on me. I didn’t want to die or even injure myself. I just wanted attention. I still loved Robin and I wanted to make her feel bad for all the pain she caused me. Even then, I had an addict mentality. I take the poison and then wait for my enemy to die.

  Because I had lost consciousness for a while, Camille called an ambulance and they took me to the local Catskill hospital. Somebody must have called Robin because while I was settling into my hospital room, eating some take-out Chinese food that I had Jay bring me, Robin rushed in, followed by camera crews and another ambulance. She was going to save the day—in time for the five o’clock news.

  “See what the fuck you made me do?” I snarled at her.

  The doctors told me I had a chest concussion and blunt head trauma, so I decided to get transferred to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in the city. Of course, Robin was right next to my gurney, dramatically trying to move the photographers away but staying right in the center of their frames. When we got to the city, Robin and her mother gave the hospital an approved list of visitors. On the list was Donald and Ivana Trump, Howard Rubenstein, the P.R. man, and their attorneys. They weren’t my friends, but my friends weren’t coming around when I was with the Terrible Two anyway.

  I did have one unwelcome visitor though. My window was open and I heard a commotion down on the sidewalk outside. I looked out and I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes. It was Mitch Green, surrounded by the media. Mitch had his shirt off and he was shadowboxing and screaming, “Cicely Tyson is a faggot! I’m going to beat his motherfucking ass.” I couldn’t escape this fool. If there was ever a black guy who resembled the Frankenstein monster it would be Mitch Green.

  I realized why the P.R. guy was on my approved guest list when I picked up the next morning’s Daily News. There was this big article by some feature writer named McAlary, a guy I didn’t know, not a boxing man. He said that my accident was a serious suicide attempt.

  “I’m going to go out and kill myself. I’m going to go out and crash my car,” he claimed that I had told Robin. Then he wrote that a week earlier I had threatened to kill Robin. Unnamed “friends” of mine were quoted as saying that I had bought two shotguns in Catskill to kill myself with. He had a grieving Givens sitting worried at my bedside while I said, “I told you I’d do it. And as soon as I get out of here I’ll do it again.” McAlary wrote that the women were pleading with me to go see Dr. McCurtis and “sources contended that McCurtis wanted to commit Tyson for psychiatric evaluation.”

  BINGO. It didn’t take a Harvard Medical School student to see that these two women were building a case that I was an out-of-control psycho that should be committed and that my wealth should be under their control.

  McAlary went on to say that I had been sick all these years and I had been on medication, but Cus took me off it because he just cared about me fighting. Total bullshit. McAlary wrote that only Trump, Rubenstein, and Parcher, their lawyer, really understood my needs and were more interested in my well-being than in my next fight. Robin’s camp must have leaked this shit to the papers. And Ruthless must have dragged out that old bullshit that I knew how to hit Robin without leaving marks because there it was in the article. Yeah, I’m a sophisticated black Fu Manchu motherfucker. So me, Iron Mike Tyson, I’m supposed to know how to beat people up without leaving a mark. Yeah right, when my whole career was built on me being a bonebreaker. The more you read of this article, the more you realized that the Ruthless Two’s fingerprints were all over this. I guess they were trying to get their mental-cruelty divorce papers in before mine.

  McCurtis kept calling Camille at the house, urging her to make sure that I took my drugs. A few days later, I flew to Moscow with Robin and her mother and her publicist because her sitcom was filming there. I was always fascinated by Russian history, so I decided to take the trip there. I used to hear Cus and Norman Mailer talk about Tolstoy, so I became a great fan of Russian culture and their prizefighters.

  Before we left we had to answer reporter’s questions. I ridiculed the attempted suicide story.

  “I love my wife, I don’t beat my wife, I’m never going to leave my wife and my wife is never going to leave me.” I was in my El Smucko mode.

  “Nobody, but nobody is busting up our marriage,” Robin said. “I’m still in this, I love Michael and will take care of him. Michael loves me too much to kill himself and leave me alone.”

  Yeah, she was still in it until she got the money.

  When we got back from Moscow, all these stories of me being out of control started getting leaked to the press. Supposedly I was running around the hotel screaming, hanging from a high ledge, threatening to kill myself. I guess they forgot that we were in Russia and the Russian cops would have beat my ass if I did anything like that. The women even tried to get me arrested in Russia, but it didn’t work. We were in the lobby of our hotel and Robin and her mother started screaming and telling the security guard to arrest me. He came over to me.

  “Come here,” he said to me. “This is nothing. These women are bullshit.”

  He pulled out a bottle of vodka and we had a drink together.

  When the U.S. reporters actually fact-checked Robin’s wild stories, they interviewed one of the producers of her show who said, “Mike was a perfect gentleman in Russia.”

  One of the makeup people on the show told her friend that the stories of me beating up Robin were a big joke.

  “I read all the papers where Robin’s being quoted as saying how much he hits her and beats up on her. I do the makeup on her, I see her. There were no bruises on this girl. I just don’t understand how she’s getting away with it.”

  A few days after we got back from Russia, Ruth and Robin finally dragged me to see Dr. McCurtis. After about an hour of him telling me how sick I was, I started believing him. He had the degrees on the wall. If I told him he was a shitty fighter, was he going to dispute me? Now they had me thinking that I was manic-depressive. That’s what he kept on drumming in. Look, I knew I had always been a depressed kind of guy, and sometimes I’d have manic energy and stay up for days. I’ve been like that all my life. So they convinced me to take the drugs and then they paraded me in front of the cameras.

  “I was born with this disease, I can’t help it. Maybe that’s why I am successful at what I do. It’s like going through a metamorphosi
s, changing from very, very depressed to very, very high-strung and the high-strung period is so overwhelming. You know, like I’m anti-drugs, but it’s like being high and not being able to sleep for three or four days and always being on the run. You’re just paranoid, it’s abnormal,” I said.

  “He’s been like this for many years and they’ve been ignoring it,” Robin chimed in. “Michael takes a great deal of protecting. You can’t put a Band-Aid on it. Who cares if he fights again, this guy’s got to live the rest of his life. We’ll be in treatment together.”

  Now that I was a zombie again, taking these pills, the Ruthless Two decided that Camille had to be out of the equation. I had just started paying for Camille’s expenses after Jimmy died. Both Ruth and Robin told Camille that if I was going to pay all the house bills, the house should be put in my name. When they told me that, I flipped out. “Are you fucking crazy, bitch?” I told Robin. The next day Robin called Camille again and she ordered Camille to stay out of my life. I never knew that at the time.

  Everybody asks me about that infamous 20/20 show. Barbara Walters even recently worried that she broke up our marriage. If that was true, I wish she had interviewed us sooner. The funny thing about that show was that I recently found out that Robin wasn’t even supposed to be on it. There was a segment with Cayton shot at his office. Then the crew came to our house to film me and Ruthless individually. Just as the crew was about to pack up, Robin pulled Barbara aside and told her that she still didn’t have the truth.

  I guess Robin knew that Barbara would take the bait.

  I had no idea what she was about to say when they positioned me behind her on the couch. They started rolling the cameras again. It started innocuously enough.

  “You are a college graduate, well educated, actress. This is a man who is a high school dropout, who went to reform school. You are very different, at least on the surface. Why do you love him?” Barbara asked Robin.

  “Because he is smart and because he is gentle, he’s got this incredibly gentle side. Because Michael loves me more than anything in the world. I feel like he needs me, which I like, I like that,” she gushed.

  “That’s why I love her, she really feels that she can protect me,” I added. I could just hear Cus yelling, “Phony bastard!”

  “There was no prenuptial agreement?” Barbara said.

  “Why should there be?” Robin said. “We got married to be together forever. Not to plan for divorce.”

  Then Barbara asked me what I thought about what Robin said.

  “If you are going to marry somebody, you trust them, and that’s what marriage is all about, being together for the rest of your life. I do have many of millions, my wife would just have to ask for it and she has everything I have. If she wants it right now, take it, she can leave right now, take everything I have and just leave. She has the right to do it; she has the power to do that. She is still here, she tolerates my shit, and I love my wife.”

  Then the temperature changed.

  “Robin, some of the things that we’ve read; that he has hit you, that he has chased you and your mother around in Russia. That Mike has a very volatile temper. True?” Barbara asked.

  “Extremely volatile temper. He has got a side to him that is scary. Michael is intimidating, to say the least. I think that there is a time when he cannot control his temper and that is frightening to me, or to my mother and to anyone around, it’s scary.”

  I wasn’t on drugs right then but it felt like it. I couldn’t believe the shit she was saying.

  “What happens?” Barbara prodded.

  “He gets out of control, throwing, screaming . . .”

  “Does he hit you?”

  “He shakes, he pushes, he swings. Sometimes I think he is trying to scare me. There were times when it happened that I thought I could handle it, and just recently I have become afraid. I mean very, very much afraid. Michael is a manic-depressive, he is, that is just a fact.”

  Can you imagine sitting there hearing this shit from your wife, knowing that an audience of millions would see it? Saying our marriage has been “torture, it’s been pure hell, it’s been worse than anything I could possibly imagine.” I was fuming, but trying to keep cool. This was the ultimate betrayal.

  “I don’t know what Mike Tyson would be without my mother. She’s been the glue that kept us together,” Robin went on. “If we left Michael, and I do come with a package, my mom, my sister, that’s how I am, he would undoubtedly be alone and I don’t want that to happen. He would have gotten so, so bad that I think maybe one day he would have been more deliberate and killed himself or hurt someone else. That undoubtedly, unquestionably would have happened.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never dealt with anything of that particular magnitude before. When I look back at it now, I can’t believe I sat there and didn’t say anything. But then again, if I would’ve started smashing her fucking face and going crazy in front of the cameras, that’s what they would have wanted. So I stayed cool. I know they expected me to go crazy on television and start ranting and raving. That was the whole plan I think. But it backfired on them.

  My friends were indignant at what Robin did on that show. I was getting hundreds of irate calls. I was still angry a few days later. Robin and Ruth and I were in the New Jersey house when I got so angry that I started breaking glasses and plates and throwing and shattering empty champagne bottles. Olga was there and she called the police. The cops came and I met with them at the front door. I was polite and told them everything was all right, I just wanted to be left alone. Then the cops split up and one stayed with me and the other one went with Robin. She showed him the damage in the kitchen. The cop who was with me told me that Robin was concerned about me because of the damage I had done to the kitchen.

  “I own this house and everything in it,” I started yelling. “I can do anything I want to my property. If I want to break something, nobody can stop me.” Then I picked up a large brass fireplace ornament and threw it through the glass window next to the front door. Right then, their pal McCurtis called.

  “Do you want to talk to your doctor?” the cop asked me.

  I ignored him and kept walking into the next room. The good doctor told the cop that Robin and her crew should leave the house and I should be committed for a psychiatric exam. The cops then rounded up the women and they moved to the driveway to go to their car so Robin could go to the police station and file a report. I stormed into the driveway.

  “Fuck you all. You’re scum. Get off my property and fuck off,” I screamed. Then I got into my Rolls-Royce and started driving through the dense backwoods of my property. I wasn’t even on a paved road. I just wanted to get away from all of them.

  The next day Robin and her mother left for L.A. My friend Mark Breland, the boxer, wanted me to make up with Bill Cayton and shake his hand. Shelly Finkel and Cayton had brainwashed Mark. They told him I was really messed up and they convinced him to come talk to me. We went up there and Cayton was very concerned about the manic-depressive label so he set up an appointment for me with Dr. Abraham Halpern, the director of psychiatry at the New York United Hospital Medical Center in Port Chester, one of the top psychiatrists in the world.

  Halpern saw me for an hour. Then he called and spoke to Camille, Steve Lott, and Bill Cayton. He was certain that I didn’t suffer from manic depression. He tried to call the Ruthless Two, but they had disconnected their phone. When Halpern called McCurtis to see why he had diagnosed me as a manic-depressive, McCurtis started backpedaling. He said I wasn’t a full-fledged manic-depressive, I merely had a mood disorder, something he called “Boxer Syndrome.” That was a new one for Freud.

  I was relieved that a much more prominent shrink had cleared me of manic depression, but I wondered why Bill made such a big deal about seeing me to Mark. He really had nothing to say. I went there under the pretense that something big was going to ha
ppen and then I got there and he was real ambiguous on what he was trying to say. My relationship with Bill had run its course.

  So when all the dust cleared, there was Don still standing. I had no illusions about him. When Robin used to ask me about Don, I’d say, “Look, I know how to control a snake. This guy is a snake, but I know how to control a snake.” Don did have his good points. Two days after the women split for the coast, Don took me around to each and every one of my bank and brokerage accounts. He had them take Robin’s name off of each account and switch them back to me. That was fifteen million right there. We got there right in time to stop payment on a check for $581,812.60 that Robin had just written out to Robin Givens Productions.

  The people in the banks hated those women’s guts so much that they were thrilled to help us. We were up there partying with the bank president and all the bank workers—popping champagne and ordering in pizzas. “Fuck them bitches,” we all shouted and downed our bubbly.

  7

  That 20/20 show really backfired on Robin and her mother. After we split up, I went to a wrestling show in Chicago and when I walked in and sat down, I got a standing ovation from the audience. People were coming up to me, telling me what ugly shit they had done to me on the Barbara Walters show. I also got tons of sympathy pussy. Women would approach me and say, “Oh, God, I can’t believe what the horrible woman did to you. Please let me hold you, let me suck your dick, let me take care of you.” I’d say, “No, ma’am, it’s all right, no. Okay, well just suck it a little, ma’am, not much.” That whole year was crazy.

  I was severely traumatized by that relationship. Those were cold broads. It was my first relationship and I wanted to just cancel it out, but love leaves a black mark on your heart. It really scars you. But you have to take chances to keep growing as an individual. That’s what life is all about. And I always had the newspapers to vent to. A guy from the Chicago Sun-Times asked me about Robin and her mother.