Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  “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. Using the rape shield law, they made her out to be some shy, naïve college student who was a Sunday school teacher and an usher in her church. She claimed that when I asked her to go down to the limo, she was reluctant until I told her we’d go out “sightseeing.” Yeah, there’s a lot to see in Indianapolis at two in the morning. I was there recently doing my one-man show and the only thing you could see around the Canterbury Hotel area was ambulatory schizophrenics, homeless people, and a washed-out hooker if you were lucky.

  Desiree repeated her story 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 claimed, 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.”

  He kept going on and on, asking her about the panty shield.

  “It didn’t make sense,” Hammerle told Garrison, “but that was her story and she stuck to it. My overall impression was that she did battle with me. I had heard that there was this eighteen-year-old naïve lady but I came away with the feeling that while it could have happened, I was dealing with someone much stronger who wouldn’t let me run over her. I couldn’t figure out how this all fit with all the naïve mistakes she was supposed to have made.”

  Hammerle told his wife about the panty shield incident. His wife said that any woman who goes to the bathroom to remove her panty shield is expecting to have sex. And he agreed with his wife. When Hammerle ran into Garrison the next day in the City-County Building, he told him, “You, my friend, are in a world of shit!”

  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. He never followed up on the specifics of the agreement her family had with her civil attorney. In fact, she lied about the purpose of having one. She knew full well she was going to sue my ass and collect lots of money when this criminal case was over. And she did.

  Fuller never fired rapid questions at her like Hammerle had in his mock cross-exam. He never put her on the defensive. If he had, the jury might have seen that she wasn’t as naïve as she projected herself to be. When Fuller had noted that Desiree had been reprimanded for acting like a groupie when she was backstage that night at Johnny Gill’s concert, she actually told the jury that she didn’t know what the word “groupie” meant!

  He didn’t even ask her any questions about her removing her panty shield! He didn’t wonder how I could have been giving her oral sex and still be pinning her to the bed. Where were the bruises if I had physically overpowered her? If she had screamed, why didn’t anyone in the hotel hear her? C’mon, we were in a hotel room in the middle of the night where the walls echo because it’s so quiet and she screamed? If anybody ever attacked me, I would have been gone. I’d have lost it as soon as I got in the hallway. I’d be in the Twilight Zone, knocking on people’s doors, “Help me, come, this guy’s right in here.” You don’t have to be F. Lee Bailey to decipher her bullshit.

  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.

  To hear him talk, these were very small abrasions, but Garrison had blown up a huge picture of Desiree’s privates, mounted it, and displayed it in the courtroom. You’d look at that picture and you’d think that somebody had taken a mallet and beat her vagina.

  Fuller had nothing to counteract Dr. Richardson’s testimony. He could have. Voyles had a urologist lined up to examine my member and testify how those little abrasions could have been caused by penetration, but Fuller didn’t want to go there. He should have. Instead of the urologist, Fuller got some lame doctor who was so confused that she started scoring points for the prosecution! My million-dollar defense team.

  Before the prosecution finished putting forward their case, my lawyers attempted to get three witnesses added for the defense. My defense team was getting a lot of crazy calls during the trial, so they were a little skeptical when they got a call from a girl who said that she and two of her friends had seen me and Desiree hugging and kissing in the back of the limo and holding hands on the way into the hotel! Now this would have been huge and it would have shown Desiree to be the sophisticated liar that she was. So Voyles got permission to take the limo out of evidence. He put it in front of the hotel at nighttime and you could see through those tinted windows like it was day.

  They checked the girls out and they were all credible, so they tried to get them admitted as witnesses but Judge Gifford nearly had a fit. She wanted to know why the prosecution hadn’t been told about these witnesses immediately. Because they had to be checked out, shown not to be nuts. She didn’t care. It was like she took it personally.

  “I am of the opinion that not excluding the witnesses would result in substantial prejudice to the State of Indiana, and I believe that the State of Indiana is entitled to a fair trial the same as the Defendant in any case,” she said, and excluded probably my most important witnesses from testifying.

  Then the state wrapped up their case. They called Mrs. Washington to the stand and she poured it on thick.

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

  Even some of the jurors started cryi
ng.

  Then they played an edited version of her 911 tape. This was like calling Desiree to the stand again and without letting us cross-examine her.

  “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.”

  Later in that tape, the dispatcher kept telling Desiree that she was the victim, she was the victim, and then Desiree slipped something very interesting in.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do but don’t be scared,” the dispatcher told her. She was pushing Desiree to report the rape.

  “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 out of nowhere.

  Allowing that tape to be entered in evidence was very prejudicial to my case.

  Many legal scholars thought that it should have been inadmissible, but that didn’t stop that little lady judge.

  It was time for us to put forward our case. By then, Voyles and I were totally disheartened. I never really had any faith in the system. The Kennedy kid had been found innocent of rape in Palm Beach just a month before my trial started, but I knew I was supposed to be convicted, that was just how the system worked. I’m a descendant of slaves. That people can respect me as a human being, to this day, is something that I have doubts about. I was the nigga and that cowboy prosecutor was going to put his spurred cowboy boots in my face. None of those people were going to help me. I was fucked the day I got indicted. They were going to get me one way or another.

  Fuller and Beggs didn’t help. Kathleen Beggs was about as warm as a table. She got into it a few times with Judge Gifford and you could see that the judge just hated her. When Voyles tried to tell Fuller that Beggs should warm up a bit, Fuller told him, “We don’t need that kind of advice from you.”

  The genius Fuller’s whole defense of me was that Desiree should have known what she was getting into because I was a boorish, vulgar, unredeemable sexual animal. That was my lawyer’s characterization of me. Even Garrison couldn’t believe Fuller’s strategy. He knew that by painting me as a sex machine it would raze my reputation and alienate me from the jury. I would be “so insensitive and crude that no right-minded person could have any sympathy for him.” What’s worse, Garrison called Fuller’s defense strategy racist. “The defense robbed Tyson of his individuality and turned him into a cardboard figure from a racist X-rated cartoon,” Garrison wrote in his book.

  I had to laugh when one girl who we called as a defense witness told the court that she overheard me telling another contestant, “I want to fuck you, and bring your roommate too, because I’m a celebrity and you know, we do that kind of thing.”

  I didn’t help my case myself. When I was called to testify, I was so arrogant and was a hostile witness for my own case. By then, the writing was on the wall. There had been a fire in the place where the jurors were staying and one of the black jurors told the judge that he was too badly shaken to continue. He was the guy who always complained about the food and the lodging. When the judge let him leave, Garrison was thrilled. He was convinced that that guy would have hung the jury. There was new only one black left on the jury.

  We put on a lot of witnesses who contradicted Desiree’s image. One of the contestants testified that Washington told her that “she wanted money, wanted to be like Robin Givens.” She also said Desiree used foul language and made sexual innuendos. According to her, I said, “Do you want to come to my room? I know I’m not gonna get nothin’ but I’ll ask anyway.” That sounded like me.

  Another girl testified that when she saw me, she said to Desiree, “Here comes your husband. He doesn’t speak very well.”

  “Mike doesn’t have to speak. He’ll make the money and I’ll do the talking,” Desiree said. Both girls said they saw no change in Desiree after the alleged rape.

  Another girl said Desiree and I were cuddling like a couple at the pageant. Still another girl said Desiree gave me a “look that could kill” when I patted another girl’s behind. Caroline Jones testified that Desiree told her, “There’s twenty million dollars,” when she saw me at the rehearsal.

  On February seventh, I took the stand. I basically told the same story that you’ve already read. Except that when I said that I told Desiree that I just wanted to fuck her, it was like the jury had been hit with a bolt of lightning, as if they had never heard the F word before. Fuller did a lousy job of preparing me and leading me through my testimony, and when he was finished, Judge Gifford called for a recess until the next day, which gave the prosecution the whole night to review my testimony and prepare their traps.

  When we resumed the next day, Garrison made a big deal out of the fact that when I said, “I want to fuck you,” an eighteen-year-old would never answer, “Fine, call me.” I guess he was living in the dark ages, but then again this was the same man who, after hearing that I claimed that I had oral sex with Desiree for twenty or so minutes, wrote, “His description of the event veered wildly counter to everything I knew about sex.”

  He also spent a lot of time getting me to confess that my success in the ring was the result of my cunning, my ability to feint, and that, of course, meant I was a liar.

  After I was finished testifying, they brought Johnny Gill on to say that when I told Desiree that I wanted to fuck her, she didn’t even flinch. Fuller called some more contestants to say that Desiree said that I was “really built” and “had a butt to hold on to.” The whole defense was so scattershot that even I could see that there was no cohesion to the case he was building. The major flaw was that Fuller and Beggs were too prudish to get into the nitty-gritty details of the sexual encounter. They didn’t give the jurors the actual facts to base their judgment on.

  Fuller was so boring during his final argument that one juror actually interrupted him and asked to go to the bathroom. That wasn’t such a good sign. When was he going to get to the crucial point that when I supposedly said that Desiree was turning me on, she responded not by leaving the hotel room but by going to the bathroom and taking off her panty shield and then coming back to the bed? I was waiting, but he never did.

  Garrison then gave his final argument. It was the same old same old, but he fed those jurors his corn-fed bullshit in a way that Fuller never could have. “The world’s eyes are upon us. People everywhere want to know if the citizens of Marion County have got the courage to do a hard thing. I don’t want this man convicted because the world watches. I want him convicted if you believe the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this beautiful, honest kid came to town, got deceived by a professional deceiver, got lied to, schmoozed and romanced, isolated and defeated, raped and made the subject of deviant behavior. If that’s what you believe, and the evidence is so, then that must be your judgment. That’s all.”

  The final nail in my coffin came right before the jury went out to deliberate. Fuller made a motion that the judge should include an instruction on implied consent when she instructed the jury before they left to discuss the case. That meant that I couldn’t be guilty of rape if the “conduct of the complainant under all the circumstances should reasonably be viewed as indicating consent to the acts in question.” But the former rape prosecutor shut Fuller down and the jury never knew about this established legal
precedent.

  On February tenth at 1:15 p.m., the jury of eight men and four women started deliberating my case. Not surprisingly, the former Marine and now IBM salesman Tim was elected foreman. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, without discussing the evidence, they took a poll. It was a six to six vote. Less than nine hours later, they had reached a unanimous verdict.

  We all went back to the courtroom. When the jury filed in, they couldn’t even look at the defense table. That was it. When I heard “guilty” on the first count, I felt like I had been punched. “Oh, man,” I whispered. But I wasn’t at all surprised.

  We had to face the press outside. I was allowed out on bail until my sentencing.

  “No way I got a fair shot,” I said. “I knew I was innocent but I knew the verdict was going to be quick because of the mentality of the court and the prosecutor. The prosecutor was a racist, weak, publicity-happy little weak man. I was nervous because I knew this was going to take me away from people I loved but I was prepared for that.”

  Tim, my ex-Marine nemesis, told the press that “when we put it together the issue of consent was clearly not given.”

  Mark Shaw got it right in his book. “To his dismay [the criminal justice system] hit Tyson with a pro-prosecution judge, prosecutors who may have withheld critical evidence, a borderline incompetent trial defense attorney whose bumbling defense may have been more responsible for the guilty verdict than everything else combined and a jury that paid more attention to Tyson’s bad-boy public image than to the incompleteness of the case’s facts. Garrison’s best achievement at trial was his strategy in successfully presenting Desiree Washington as the shy, inexperienced, naïve, prim and proper college student that they in fact knew her not to be. Utilizing the full protection of the rape shield law, and fully aware that Washington had in fact signed an agreement to sue Tyson and sell her movie and book rights, the prosecutors, who were also aware of Washington’s questionable sexual past, and her need for therapy, made certain that the jury never saw any indication that Washington was anything other than a church-going goody two-shoes.”