TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022492/0224103.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 9.3 KB | 200 lines

                ⌐
!                                                          ╚NATION, Page 25

LAW

The Bad and the Beautiful


Convicted of raping a beauty pageant contestant, Mike Tyson
faces years in prison and a ruined career. Should the verdict
comfort victims of sex crimes?

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Kathleen Adams and Sophfronia
Scott Gregory/New York


    "I believe a lot of people want to see me self-destruct.
They want to see me one day with handcuffs and walking into the
police car, going to jail. [They'll say] `Look, I told you he
was headed for that.' "

    -- Mike Tyson, June 1990

    "To reach for the highest star,
     No matter how far."

    -- Desiree Washington, declaring her goal at the Miss
Black America Pageant in Indianapolis, July 1991


    They met by a fluke of fate, like a tank and a tricycle at
an intersection. He was the most dangerous man in sport, the
once and (we supposed) future heavyweight champion of the
world, whose conquests included 40 professional boxers and
countless women. She was (we now suppose) the last innocent
child in America, an 18-year-old Sunday School teacher fresh
from high school graduation in a tiny Rhode Island town. When
Desiree Washington met Mike Tyson at a beauty pageant last July,
she saw not the pug and thug of tabloid legend but a young man
wearing a TOGETHER WITH CHRIST button who was praying with Jesse
Jackson. Tyson, it appears, saw a late-night snack.

    When an Indianapolis jury found Tyson guilty of rape and
two counts of criminal sexual-deviate conduct last week, the
verdict packed a wallop. For boxing, it meant that the sport
would lose its top attraction for the next few years; a Tyson
fight with the current champ, Evander Holyfield, could have
grossed $100 million. On more profound and intimate levels, the
conviction brought hope of legal redress to sexual victims. Says
Lynn Hecht Schafran, a New York City attorney with the NOW Legal
Defense and Education Fund: "The case provides a basis for
people to go to the police. It should also make prosecutors
pursue these cases more aggressively."

    Oddly, there was some sympathy for the devil. Many African
Americans, including many women, thought Tyson was a scapegoat
for white fears in a white town (the original jury was
one-quarter black, about the percentage in Marion County, Ind.)
and Washington was either gold-digging or criminally naive. If
she wasn't "asking for it" by joining Tyson in his hotel
bedroom, she was at least asking for trouble. Even in
Indianapolis, the judgment got mixed reviews. A local TV station
asked viewers whether they agreed with the verdict; 60% said no.

    Tyson got into this mess -- scarred his career and a young
woman's life -- because he was not "the Greatest," like Muhammad
Ali, but the baddest. The concept of bad, in its seductive and
destructive meanings, has defined his life, job, behavior -- and
conviction. Count the ways:

    Bad Attitude. Tyson was one athlete (there are others)
with the outlaw allure of rap and heavy-metal musicians, for
whom trashed hotel rooms and paternity suits are the currency
of fame. Leave the gentlemanly demeanor to Julio Iglesias --
these guys are selling sexual danger. They know there are enough
women who find the musk of celebrity irresistible, who are
thrilled by both the opportunity and the risk in spending the
night with a star.

    Tyson has been with many women, treating most, perhaps,
with no special gentility. They came not to tame the beast but
to unleash him. And few women with whom he had had sex
complained, at least officially. It's possible that at 2 a.m.
on July 19 in Room 606 at the Canterbury Hotel, Tyson was as
astonished by Washington's reaction as she was by his actions.

    Bad Company. Tyson runs with the wrong crowd. Many of his
friends are paid help, hired as extra muscle or procurers. Don
King, the convicted killer who promotes Tyson's bouts, is a
sneaky-smooth fighter in smoke-filled rooms.

    Another pal, real estate peddler Donald Trump, last week
proposed that Tyson buy his way out of jail by fighting again
and donating his take to Indiana rape centers. This scenario
will not unfold, even if Tyson could find an opponent
(Holyfield, says his promoter, Dan Duva, will not fight Tyson).
Bert Randolph Sugar, publisher of Boxing Illustrated, gives
three reasons: "The state athletic commissions will lift his
license. No hotel chain will sponsor it. And the event would
have no advertising. You just can't see the announcer saying,
`And in this corner, the convicted rapist . . . Mike Tyson!'"

    Faced with a trial that could end his career and shred
their meal ticket, Tyson's advisers made the fatal mistake of
underestimating the opposition. In the mid-'80s, when the young
fighter got into trouble, his people would speak to the local
police commissioner, give him a few ringside seats for the next
bout . . . no more trouble. The Tyson camp may have tried that
tactic again, offering Washington $750,000 to withdraw her
complaint. That wouldn't happen here -- not in Indianapolis, not
with this accuser and not with Gregory Garrison, a smart
barrister with a homespun air, whom the local D.A. had hired as
special prosecutor.

    Team Tyson, represented in court by Washington attorney
Vincent Fuller, seemed unimpressed by the prosecution -- as if
Garrison were Buster Douglas just before Iron Mike got tanked
in Tokyo two years ago. "There were one or two members of
Fuller's staff," notes Garrison, "who did not think us country
bumpkins could find our asses with both hands." They were wrong
about him, and about Washington. "She's a good kid with a pure
heart and a tremendous amount of courage," Garrison says. "And
she shined like a new penny in front of that jury."

    Bad Counsel. "Fuller is an exceptionally fine attorney,"
says Robert Simels, a New York City lawyer who has represented
many athletes. "But he was probably not the right choice to
bring into Indianapolis. They certainly needed a strong local
female counsel. A woman could have handled parts of the
examination -- the questions about panty shields -- which are
much more sensitive for a male attorney to be hitting a proposed
rape victim with."

    Simels spots defense blunders throughout the process, from
jury selection to the refusal to call a key witness -- Tyson's
bodyguard -- to Fuller's loud, agitated summation. "They should
not have let Tyson testify at the grand jury," Simels argues.
"Then they compounded it by allowing Mike to come up with a
different story during the trial." Tyson appeared to be lying,
and lying stupidly, fulfilling any juror's suspicions about the
boxer's brutality. Notes Garrison: "You couldn't look at this
delicate little thing and imagine her having Mike Tyson say,
`Hey, I want to f--- you,' and her saying, `Sure, call me.' You
just said, `Aw, come on now.'"

    Bad Timing. In part, Tyson lost because the evidence, as
presented to the jury, was against him. Garrison, while happy
to sunbathe in the limelight, insists that the case won itself:
"There's nothing like being right to make it winning." But it's
also plausible that Tyson was standing trial -- if not in the
jurors' minds, then in the docket of public opinion -- for
crimes other than his. Crimes racial, judicial and sexual. To
some, Tyson was the black street creep who holds urban civility
at knife point. To others, he was the last chance for society
to atone for its dismissal of the charges against powerful men
like Clarence Thomas and William Kennedy Smith.

    To still others, Tyson was every celebrity athlete, pro or
amateur, who has misused his stardom by abusing women. Just last
week a lacrosse player at St. John's University in New York
City pleaded guilty to forcing alcohol on a fellow student and
then sexually assaulting her. Two of the player's teammates had
pleaded guilty to lesser charges; three others were acquitted
when the jury could not decide whether the woman had given
consent -- though she could not have consented, legally, since
she had been made drunk. (The players were white, the victim
black.)

    So the Tyson verdict is not only a surprise but a
desperately needed balm to those who have suffered an athlete's
educated hands. Says Barbara Otto, a director of the 9 to 5,
National Association of Working Women: "Tyson's conviction sends
a message to athletes that it's not acceptable to abuse the
rights of women who work with them."

    Before sentencing, scheduled for March 27, Tyson will
undergo examination, and both sides will offer depositions.
Garrison deflects the tantalizing rumors that Washington will
appear at the hearing to plead that Tyson has already suffered
enough. He expects "probably not a demand for much of anything.
Except that she wants Tyson to get help." Garrison seems certain
of one thing: "He will go to jail."

    And when he comes out, he will be allowed to fight again.
"If," Sugar says, "he gets out alive. There's never the
guarantee that somebody in the Michigan City, Ind., prison who's
in on four 99-year terms without the chance of parole won't want
to prove that he, and not Mike Tyson, is the baddest man on the
planet."

    Some will take ironic satisfaction in the thought that
behind iron bars, Iron Mike may finally discover that bad is not
beautiful.