How convicted rapist Mike Tyson was allowed to forget his past for a Netflix payday

IIt was March 1995 when Mike Tyson was released from an Indiana prison, having served less than three years of a six-year sentence given to him when he was convicted of rape. Tyson, then 25, was arrested in July 1991 for attacking 18-year-old Desiree Washington in a hotel room. Despite claiming his innocence, Tyson was convicted and is required by federal law to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

The case attracted widespread publicity and condemnation, but Tyson fought again after his release, reclaiming his world heavyweight title and attracting further controversy when he bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear mid-fight.

And now, almost 20 years later, the 58-year-old Tyson is poised for his biggest boxing payday yet. Thanks to streaming giant Netflix, he will step into the ring this weekend for an $80 million live streamed fight with YouTube star Jake Paul.

All of which begs the question, in 2024, seven years after the #MeToo movement rose to prominence, why does the career of the most famous convicted rapist of all continue to thrive?

Tyson has often been described as “manipulative” by those who have worked with him. When it comes to his convictions, he certainly has never shown any remorse.

“I just hate her guts,” he said of Washington in 2003. “She put me in a state where I don’t know. I really wish I did now. But now I really want to rape her.”

Tyson has also been quoted as saying he did “four or five things worse than what I’m accused of”. To remove any potential uncertainty – four or five things worse than rape.

It was the revelation of Harvey Weinstein’s brutal and predatory behavior that did so much to bring widespread attention to the #MeToo movement. In 2020, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for two sex crimes and will likely die there. But should that change, it is impossible to believe that he could rebuild his career.

In 2022, Bill Cosby talked about touring again after his sexual assault conviction was overturned and he was released after three years in prison. He has not yet done that.

In 2023, Kevin Spacey was acquitted of sexual assault charges, but his career shows no signs of recovering to anywhere near its former heights.

Tyson, by comparison, has not only been forgiven, he has reaped increasing rewards. In his first fight out of prison against Peter McNeeley – a considerably less attractive opponent than Tyson had long been used to fighting – he was paid $25m.

His opponent Saturday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas – 27-year-old Jake Paul – was born in January 1997 and is unfortunately one of the poster boys of Generation Z.

Paul, in his capacity of Most Valuable Promotions, his own company, has been accepted as positive for women’s boxing, mainly due to his influence on the career of Amanda Serrano, the featherweight world champion boxer and mixed martial artist.

To put it another way, many who will watch on Saturday — and Netflix has invested significant sums to be broadcasters — will be born after Tyson’s release from prison and will tune in primarily for Paul. But there are many others who will be there to see Tyson, well aware of his convictions and continuing to romanticize their memories of him at his terrifying and consistently entertaining peak.

Tyson’s wider rehabilitation was helped in no small part by his cameo role in 2009’s unusual comedy The hangovers. It followed the 2008 feature documentary Tysonwhere he fought through tears and a voice cracking with emotion to reflect on the influence of his former trainer and mentor Cus D’Amato, who died when Tyson was 19. A 2009 headline even described him as “cuddly” and a “changed man”.

One of the narratives of the ongoing Tyson mythology surrounds the extent of his suffering. He was born into and reared under the most difficult conditions in Brownsville, Brooklyn; he was bullied as a child; in 2014 he spoke about how he was sexually abused as a seven-year-old; as an adult, he was manipulated and exploited by the villainous boxing promoter Don King.

Observers of Tyson’s career often question what that career might have looked like if D’Amato had lived to guide him, or if he hadn’t fallen into King’s Machiavellian clutches.

Just as Tyson couldn’t possibly have been prepared for everything else the world would throw his way, there’s no way Washington could have been prepared for Tyson. There is also no way that her attempts to recover from her trauma could have been helped by Tyson’s continued insistence that she was never raped.

In his memoirs, Undisputed truthpublished in 2013, he talks about the run-up to his trial.

“I spent most of the six weeks between my rape conviction and sentencing traveling around the country romancing all my different girlfriends,” the prologue begins. “It was my way of saying goodbye to them. And when I wasn’t with them, I fended off all the women who proposed to me. Everywhere I went, women would come up to me and say, ‘Come on, I’m not going to say you raped me. You can come with me. I’ll let you film it’.

“I realized later that it was their way of saying ‘We think you didn’t do it’. But I didn’t take it that way. I would hit back indignantly with a rude reply. Even though they said what they said out of support , I was in too much pain to realize it. I was an ignorant, mad, bitter guy who had a lot of growing up to do.”

But the boxing world now seems a little interested in remembering Tyson’s past.

On the undercard of the Tyson-Paul fight, Katie Taylor will defend her undisputed junior welterweight title against Serrano. Their first fight, in April 2022, as the main event at New York’s historic Madison Square Garden, is among the most celebrated of the modern era.

The rematch is being cynically used to help legitimize the extraneous main event that will still draw an audience of millions around the world.

And while all this is happening, Tyson’s legal team is preparing to fight an ongoing civil lawsuit that accuses Tyson of raping and assaulting a woman more than 30 years ago. The claim – denied by Tyson – was originally filed in January 2023, before there was any hint of a fight between him and Paul and a bumper payday.

A successful business operator, Paul identified Tyson as a marketable opponent, raising questions about how positive that really makes him for women in their sport.

For Tyson, does the interest in Saturday’s fight also mean that the world has forgotten who he has been? If they haven’t, what does that say about the fans and broadcasters willing to bankroll such an event?