The legendary pro boxer Mike Tyson has had an illustrious career. An unofficial documentary titled ‘Mike’ on Hulu was released which received major flak from British comedian London Hughes. Trevante Rhodes, an actor known for his work in movies like ‘Moonlight’, ‘Predator’, and ‘Bird Box’, plays Tyson in the biopic. ‘Iron Mike’ has criticized the series multiple times since he says Hulu never approached him for his consent before making ‘Mike’. He was accused of rape which he allegedly got away with.
Mike Tyson was accused of rape
But in “Mike,” the unauthorized Hulu miniseries that Tyson has repeatedly disavowed, executive producers Karin Gist and Samantha Corbin-Miller wanted to reexamine a key part of Tyson’s story from the perspective of Desiree Washington, the 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant who accused him of luring her to his room at the Canterbury Hotel in Indianapolis and raping her in the early hours of July 19, 1991.
Tyson was convicted on multiple charges, including rape, on Feb. 10, 1992, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in March 1995 and has continued to maintain his innocence. Following the trial, Washington agreed to a single sit-down interview, with Barbara Walters on ABC’s “20/20” but has since vanished from the public eye.
Three days after the assault, Washington went to the police and accused Tyson of rape. Six months later, she testified against him in open court — a scene that Eubanks says was “very chilling” and “jarring” to re-create, since the writers tried to stay true to the court transcripts. When Desiree first enters the courtroom, “It’s very silent, like you could hear a pin drop,” Eubanks says. “Oddly enough, it just felt like everybody was kind of against you, or everybody was just looking at you or judging you.”
During his trial, members of the Black community — including Black women and religious leaders — testified on Tyson’s behalf and a number continued to cast aspersions on Washington after the fact.
“This all happened three decades before the #MeToo movement, [when] ‘blame the victim’ was still very much the norm, especially if said victim was going up against a powerful celebrity,” Corbin-Miller explains. “When this incident happened, William Kennedy Smith had just prevailed in his sexual assault trial, and Anita Hill’s testimony hadn’t stopped Clarence Thomas from getting appointed to the Supreme Court.”
In these people’s eyes, Eubanks said:
“Because they already have this picture in their head of who this person is, what this person represents and what they mean to them, then nothing else can be truthful. When people really idolize somebody, it’s kind of hard to look at everything or consider that a few things can be true at once.”
Much of the general public took Tyson’s side:
“But I believe it was the long, reprehensible history of Black men being falsely accused of rape in order to brutalize, incarcerate and murder them that influenced the majority of Black people to rally around Mike,” she says. “Mike was also one of a much smaller pool of A-list Black celebrities than we have today. To tear Mike Tyson off his heroic pedestal was, for many, a personal affront. Unfortunately, Desiree Washington, a Black woman, didn’t receive nearly as much unconditional public support.”
As Black women Eubanks said:
“Sometimes we are very unprotected, we’re silenced, and we don’t have a voice as strong as we should, and I think she just kind of fell on that side,” Eubanks says. “I think people just saw [the trial] as her taking down Mike Tyson and her taking down this successful Black man versus [the fact that] she’s a Black woman and she got hurt too, so I don’t think anybody ever really stopped to think about that.”
