Earlier this week in an interview with Opie’s Radio show on Sirius XM, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson revealed that he was sexually abused as a seven-year-old by a man who “snatched” him off the street.
Tyson has long said that what made him a great champion was a need to fight back against bullies in his childhood environment, but the new revelation puts a darker spin on the narrative.
Co-host Jim Norton latched on a passing mention of sexual abuse in the interview. Via New York Daily News:
“I was a little kid, 7,” Tyson told co-host Jim Norton. “Old man, yea.”
“Was it one time or ongoing?” Norton asked.
“No, one time,” Tyson said. “Never seen him again….snatched me off the street.”
“He abused you and just let you go or did you escape?” Norton said.
“Well, I ran,” Tyson said.
In the 2008 documentary “Tyson,” the former champ cries talking about his gratitude for manager Cus D’Amato. Ostensibly he says he’s thankful Cus got him off the street and interested in cultivating the discipline to become a professional. But, tellingly, he’s at his most emotional when he says, “[Cus] spoke with me every night about discipline and character, and I knew, I knew nobody, noboby physically, um, was gonna fuck with me again.”
The new revelation of childhood sexual abuse casts that need for nobody to “physically fuck with me again” in a new light. It’s possible that the formative experience was the beginning of Tyson developing not only physical resolve but developing the kinds of “demons” he talks about that would eventually lead him to threaten journalists and spend six years in jail for raping an 18-year-old. Watch the segment below.