Undisputed Truth

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. If I wasn’t indicted, he could care less. He even told some of his colleagues that he would “just as soon see the case go away.”

  Tommy Kuzmik, the sex crimes investigator for the police, told Modisett that they would have a problem with physical evidence because there wasn’t any. But he said that Desiree would make a great witness because she was “intelligent, articulate, attractive—easy to look at, easy to understand, easy to believe.” But most importantly, she wasn’t a victim who “talked street.” You figure out the code there.

  Garrison also said that because people who could help the case were scattered around the country, “the FBI located and interviewed potential witnesses.” Hmm. Is this standard operating procedure for every rape allegation in the country? Somehow I don’t think so.

  So a special grand jury was appointed on August 13, 1991. Modisett assigned the presentation of evidence to the grand jury to his deputy prosecutor David Dreyer. Now, Dreyer was an interesting individual. According to Garrison, Dreyer was always a little put off by Desiree’s act. When she testified before the grand jury on August sixteenth, Dreyer thought that the major problem she had was her “lack of emotion. She seemed too much the beauty queen, detached, maybe even a bit cold.” Dreyer thought that the chances of getting an indictment from the grand jury were at best fifty-fifty. In fact, Dreyer had so many reservations about Desiree that Garrison quoted him as saying, “As matter of fact, when the jury began its deliberations, I wasn’t sure in my own mind if there had been a rape or not!” And that’s the deputy prosecutor talking. That sounds like the very definition of reasonable doubt to me.

  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. You do the math. 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. Garrison was making so much money from those cases that Modisett assigned those drug cases in-house once he was elected. What a sleazeball.

  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. Damn straight. She was wearing long shorts, a bustier that “would have stopped traffic on the right woman,” and her panties. He didn’t think the panties 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 guess he didn’t understand the concept of a booty call.

  “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 decided that Desiree had jerked her panties on after we had sex and blotted them with the bleeding from the injuries I had inflicted on her. 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 thought, Hell, I’m forty-four years old and have had sex a few times in my life. And you don’t hurt a woman that way. Not and keep it up. If it hurts, you get told to stop.

  Garrison also couldn’t believe that we had oral sex for twenty minutes or so.

  “Again, his description of the event veered wildly counter to everything I knew about sex.” Maybe he should have read a little of Dr. Kinsey instead of all those law books. 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. But it wasn’t an issue of lubrication. It was an issue of size and intensity. This could happen to anyone during sex.

  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 didn’t want to hear about it. He was squeamish about any of the sexual aspects of the case.


  Even after his CSI investigation of the panties, 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.” He was still asking himself that question after I had been convicted.

  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. Of course, appearances could be deceiving. By the time the prosecution had gotten to Rhode Island, Desiree and her mother had accused her father of abusing them and he had moved out.

  Desiree and her family were met at the airport by Edward Gerstein. Now, Mr. Gerstein is a very interesting and important player in this case. Shortly after the rape investigation, a Rhode Island lawyer named Walter Stone approached the Washington family. He was a counsel to the International Boxing Federation, so he told them it would be a conflict of interest for him to represent Desiree but that his partner Edward Gerstein could do so. So Gerstein became Desiree’s civil attorney. He was the one they had hired to sue me for civil damages and negotiate big fees for movie and book rights. Gerstein’s involvement with the Washington family freaked Garrison out.

  “This news was a live wire. If there were even a hint of pending litigation out of the Washington family, the case would be hurt. It would be impossible to refute the gold digger charge.”

  So what did the prosecution do? Keep this information from my defense team. After the trial was over, Star Jones, who was then NBC’s legal correspondent, criticized the prosecution for not revealing the fact that Desiree had a retainer with a civil lawyer. “That’s sleazy. A prosecutor has the duty to turn over all the evidence,” she said.

  Garrison and his deputy started questioning Desiree. Apparently, the whole issue of Desiree going to the bathroom in my room and taking off her panty shield was a little troubling to him. According to Desiree, I had suddenly turned mean and lustful and she was freaked out. So she went to the bathroom and took off her panty shield and went back to bed. 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.”

  Well if that was true, the second thing she could have thought of doing was to keep on walking right out the door. If she sensed danger, like she claimed she did, it would have been easy for her to just leave. Voyles even re-created a model of the hotel room that cost $6,000 to demonstrate that fact. But of course Fuller shut him down and never used it during the trial.

  Garrison didn’t think much of the whole panty shield dilemma the prosecution faced. He was eager to believe Desiree when she said that she discarded her soiled panty shield “out of habit” and that when she realized that she had left her purse in the bedroom, she thought that she could pick up another panty shield “at one of the parties she wanted to attend.” WTF? Nobody ever talked about going to parties that night. Where was she going to get another panty shield?

  Garrison also heard about my deposition in the Cayton case where I propositioned Thomas Puccio’s female assistant, Joanna Crispi. He was shocked that I simulated intercourse using my fingers, and then told her, “I want to fuck you,” but somehow he couldn’t believe that I had said the exact same thing to Desiree Washington. Right there was proof of my crude m.o. at that time with women.

  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. What a lowlife racist asshole.

  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, and 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. It was a major blunder. But not the last that my million-dollar defense team would commit.

  My trial began on January 27, 1992. My judge was a lady named Patricia Gifford. She had overseen the grand jury, so she was automatically assigned to the case. 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. Judge Gifford could have easily recused herself from my case. In fact, after my conviction, the Supreme Court of Indiana wrote a new Tyson Rule. They ordered rotation so that the same judge who presided over the grand jury wouldn’t get the actual case.

  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. That’s another Tyson Rule that was changed after my case. 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. In federal court, the judge picks the jury, and Garrison was a master at that. 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 and have more of a role in getting me convicted than anybody else.

  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. It sounded like she was making up her story as she went along. 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.