Donald Trump has popped up in Netflix’s new Mike Tyson documentary with an unsolicited theory about the fighter’s 1992 rape conviction: Tyson should never have taken the stand.
“I think Mike shouldn’t have testified,” the president says in the series.
“I’m not sure that he did a bad job in testifying. But one thing with Mike, he’s very truthful. And I think the truth hurt him … in this case.”
The four-part series, titled TYSON, premiered worldwide on Netflix on Tuesday. It is directed by Floyd Russ, whose credits include Netflix’s Untold: Malice at the Palace, with Bill Simmons and Jim Gray among the executive producers.
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The two go back decades
Trump’s cameo is not out of nowhere. He promoted Tyson fights in Atlantic City in the late 1980s and early ’90s through the Trump Plaza operation, and the two have been publicly cordial ever since.
Tyson testified in an Indianapolis courtroom for 78 minutes, insisting his encounter with the complainant had been consensual.
The 1992 case
The conviction came on 10 February 1992, in Marion County Superior Court in Indianapolis. A jury found Tyson guilty of rape and two counts of criminal deviate conduct over an incident at the Canterbury Hotel in July 1991. The complainant, Desiree Washington, was 18 at the time and a contestant in the Miss Black America pageant.
Judge Patricia Gifford handed Tyson a six-year prison sentence, according to Newsweek. He served roughly three years before his release in 1995. He remains on a sex offender registry and has long maintained he did not rape Washington.
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What the series covers
Russ’s series traces Tyson’s rise from Brownsville, Brooklyn, under trainer Cus D’Amato through his reign as the youngest heavyweight champion in history, his imprisonment, and his later comebacks. The roughly four-hour run is built around interviews with the boxer himself, with his wife Lakiha “Kiki” Spicer and son Miguel also contributing.
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