Sports
Sportsmen

Critical Reflections on the Mike Tyson Farce (1993)

In Germany, they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, . . . . Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, but there was no one left to speak up for me.

—Martin Neimöller

Watching my friend Barbara Kopple's two-hour sort-of documentary on Mike Tyson, I was reminded of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg four decades ago. Both cases depended upon the collaboration of the American media in publicizing negative stereotypes that made conviction and sentencing popularly acceptable. Just as Jewish Communists in the early 1950s must be guilty of spying, so successful young black male athletes from lower-class backgrounds must in the early 1990s be guilty of sexual assault. There were two nagging problems here, however. Just as there were no witnesses to Tyson's purported rape (and certainly a good deal of "reasonable doubt"), so there was no evidence of any nation-threatening secrets purportedly passed by the Rosenbergs. The Rosenbergs might have wanted to be spies, but without any irrefutable evidence they were merely self-dupes. Tyson might be a rapist, but a persuasive conviction would need a stronger example than this. Given the tragedy of their trials, it is not surprising that both the Rosenbergs and Tyson suffered from ineffective legal counsel.

Both defendants became witless pawns in other people's show trials. To state the obvious, just because someone was a Jewish Communist did not necessarily make him or her a successful saboteur; just because a young black is sexually aggressive doesn't necessarily make him a rapist. Indeed, being a Jewish Communist is no more a crime under American law than being an African-American stud. Convicting them for being what they are, insufficient evidence notwithstanding, "sends a message," as we say, precisely because of disrespect for the law.

Just as Kopple's film shows that even after his conviction Tyson has defenders who continue to assert his innocence, so the Rosenbergs are forever being exonerated by a few predisposed to believe them innocent. My heuristic purpose in making this unlikely comparison, no doubt challenging to many, is that if you understand how Desiree Washington's testimony convicted Tyson, you begin to understand how the Rosenbergs were convicted forty years ago. And vice versa. Since the legions of those who believe Tyson innocent scarcely overlaps with the Rosenbergs' defenders, the purpose of such a provocative comparison is prompting people to make sympathetic leaps that transcend bias and stereotype.

Don't forget, to continue my analogy, that both the prosecutor Roy Cohn and the judge sentencing the Rosenbergs to death and thereby making the Rosenbergs worldwide martyrs were likewise ambitious, young for their roles, and Jewish. Similarly, Jews in the early 1950s were no less marginal to American society than blacks today (or than Jews were at the time in Soviet Russia, where Joseph Stalin was initiating comparable show trials of wayward Jews).

The Mike Tyson trial escaped my attention until I saw on television the accuser, who seemed too comfortable first with her success in convicting a black celebrity and then in making her identity public. She struck me as an ambitious undergraduate courting her elders' approval, desperately desiring a good mark in this course, much as she had previously won beauty contests. That accounts for why she violated the anonymity allowed her by custom and at times by law. Otherwise, the ordeal of participating in the trial would have no immediate value for her. Remember never to underestimate the vanity or talents for creating illusion of those who win, let alone enter, beauty contests. (While both boxers and beauty contest performers are essentially theatrical artists, one difference between them is that the latter wear make-up, carefully applied.)

While the Kopple film was even-handed in some respects, it white-washed Ms. Washington, for instance featuring interviews with her Caucasian high school classmates saying, among other flatteries, that "Miss Black Rhode Island" wanted to attend Brown University (my alma mater, fool that she be) without revealing that she matriculated instead at Providence College, by common consent a less striking choice. The film did not reveal that Ms. Washington waited twenty-four hours before reporting the "crime." It did not deal with the question, obvious to most, of her previous sexual experience or the possibility, since suggested, of a similar earlier ex-post-fact rape charge. (An avowed feminist, Ms. Kopple apparently believes that women are allowed fibs not available to men. People magazine caught her lying about her age, her education, and the identity of her child's father, all in a few dozen words.)

Watching Ms. Washington on television, I sensed that, perhaps in conspiracy with others, she set Tyson up or, twenty-four hours later, realized that she had the opportunity to do so. Having already acknowledged his fondling (as seen in the Kopple film) and given him her hotel telephone number, she then accepted his proposal of a date and went to his suite well after midnight (which marks her as either a dumb bunny or a wise owl, given Tyson's scarcely secret reputation with women). Need one say there is a serious difference between protesting sexual intercourse and later claiming that you protested. Other contestants reported her as saying, "I think I've been raped." Most real rape victims are not so unsure.

My second hunch is that such a conspiracy was really aimed not at Tyson but at Don King, who, let's be frank, ought to be deposed, if only because, not unlike Ms. Desiree Washington, he exploits wealthy young black males. Remember that the principal beneficiaries of the Tyson conviction are heavyweight boxers other than Tyson (it is not for nothing that Larry Holmes refuses to fight him again) and then promoters and managers other than Don King. Tens of millions of dollars are at stake. For the latter beneficiaries, a mostly white Indiana judiciary was used to circumscribe a market. This last thought raises the question of who, other than Jewish anti-Communists, were the principal beneficiaries of the Rosenberg conviction?

The ancient truth is that, for certain young male celebrities, consensual sex is simply too accessible to bother with anyone who is really resisting. What Wilt Chamberlain revealed about his supply of women can also be found in Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, among others. Didn't Gay Talese in a 1962 profile of a retired (!), middle-aged Joe Louis portray him publicly offering his hotel room key to a woman with the promise that she would then have a story to tell her son? (See p. 157 of Talese's book Fame and Obscurity [Bantam], 1971). To prosecute such an individual for seduction is comparable to the IRS indicting a saint for accepting free meals. (Hell, I can remember times in my own life, long ago, when I had such charms. I also can't remember a woman coming to my apartment after midnight (!) only to talk about art, and I'm no Mike Tyson or Warren Beatty. Does anyone believe that this element in human nature, or female nature, has completely disappeared in the 90s?)

One interesting detail of the trial testimony was that Ms Washington did not replace or restore a menstrual pad when she used his hotel room bathroom, even though she had previously been "necking" with Tyson. (Think twice about that obvious prerequisite to sexual action). A second mutually acknowledged fact was the experience of cunnilingus before she was entered. Not every "rape victim" is so fortunate. No one claimed Tyson used a weapon, upon which many forcible rapes depend.

Not devoid of integrity, Tyson never acknowledged guilt, even though the media that pre-convicted him was forever urging him to do so (as it was urging the Rosenbergs). Tyson initially blamed the rape charge on his failure to take Ms. Washington home and thus, implicitly, upon her recognition that she would not become the second Robin Givens. In his concluding comments he apologized not to his accuser but to the Court and to others involved in the Miss Black America pageant.

The clearest truth of the videotape of the subsequent Miss Black America beauty pageant is that Ms. Washington was not debilitated by the "rape," let alone "assault," because she performed along with the other contestants the following evening. Doctors discovered no bruises beyond those indigenous to vaginal penetration with an unfamiliar lover. Similarly, the United States did not fall from the Rosenbergs' activities. (Since physical injury to Ms. Washington was negligible, I've heard claims of "psychological damage," which is of course less visible, if not reminiscent of white female charges of "damage" from black lascivious "looks" in the South some decades ago; so often nowadays does unacceptably reactionary thinking come masquerading as something Politically Correct.)

What both trials tested in the end was simple gullibility, not only of juries in New York and Indianapolis but of the American media's public. (Some people can be told that "the word 'gullible' isn't in a standard dictionary.") Just to test your own susceptibility to racist stereotype, dear reader, would you be as likely to believe the rape accusation if Tyson's guest were Caucasian? Imagine as well if he were a champion who, like Joe Louis a half century ago, declared modestly after victory, "I'ze glad I win." Imagine also if the accused were, say, an actor like Rob Lowe and the accuser a white starlet (or a black starlet?), would you be so likely to believe the accuser? Similarly, imagine the Rosenbergs to have been, instead, a pair of blonde Irish named O'Hara.

Understand how Tyson was convicted, not to mention pious media approval of that conviction, and you begin to understand American anti-Semitism forty years ago; understand how the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death and you begin to understand racism today. Don't cynically underestimate larger threats of such convictions, for both are only a step away from prosecuting individuals for being secretive gypsies, say, or having worked for the CIA, all with enthusiastic media collaboration, of course.

Watching the riots protesting the exoneration of Rodney King's policemen, I wondered why there hadn't been similar protests over the Tyson conviction, which was likewise before a wholly white jury. One difference was that in the Tyson case the media wasn't looking for a riot. Indeed, the fact that black America was so dormant in the wake of the scandalous Tyson conviction further indicates to me, as I argue elsewhere, that the Los Angeles protests simply wouldn't have happened without media encouragement.

Essentially, Ms. Washington resembles Anita Hill as a black woman attempting publicly to tear down a strong and prominent black man, all to the titillation of white America and perhaps personal profit to themselves. (Remember that were Ms. Washington now to sue Tyson for personal damages, she would not need to prove him guilty of raping her. And should such a case succeed, shouldn't we say that the concept of a seductive "gold digger" has a new definition?) Washington-Tyson became, like Hill-Thomas only months before, another example of the "battle royal" so vividly familiar to readers of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). One difference, to be frank, was that Mike Tyson, not unlike Julius and Ethel Rosenberg before him, lacked the inquisition moxie of Clarence Thomas.