Hey, everyone, Just a note that we discuss sexual and domestic violence in this episode. In nineteen eighty eight, Robin Givens, a well known actress, and her husband Mike Tyson, the heavyweight champion of the world, gave an extraordinary television interview to Barbara Walters of ABC News. As Mike sacked quietly, his arm draped around Robin, she addressed persistent tabloid rumors that he was violent and abusive.
Does he get you? He shakes, he pushes, he swings. Sometimes I think he's trying to scare me.
There are times that had happened when I fought, at least I could handle it, you know, And just recently i'd become afraid.
I mean very very much afraid.
It's a stunning interview, not just because of its honesty, but also because of what you suspect. She's still holding back, but far from eliciting sympathy for Robin, which is what you'd expect, or drawing condemnation of her husband, the interview would lead to a nasty backlash against Robin Gibbons. One month later, she would file for divorce, and soon thereafter she would become commonly referred to in the press as the most hated woman in America. I'm Susie Vanacarum.
And I'm Jessica Bennett.
And this is in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped.
Us and that we just can't stop thinking about.
Today, we're talking about the vilification of Robin Gibbons, a talented actress who in the nineteen eighties became known for her violent marriage to Mike Tyson. But we're also talking about the way she was treated by the press, what it teaches us about domestic violence, and the role race played in all of it. This is part.
One, So Susie, for our listeners, I just want to reset the scene here a little bit. What we've just heard is an interview that Robin Gibbons and Mike Tyson have given to Barbara Walters. It's nineteen eighty eight, and Robin has described the abuse she's been suffering at the hands of her husband. He happens to be the heavyweight champion of the world at this time. And first off, this clip is pretty stunning to hear, but it's even more stunning to watch.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually riveting. Television you know, for better or for worse, it really you just really see how honest this moment is. Like, I think we're just not used to seeing celebrities in this unguarded way. Even now in the age of social media. They sort of pretend they're sharing their real lives with you, but it's all very managed, and this feels like just a very honest confession at a time when that was truly very unusual. Yeah.
Absolutely, But before we get into all of it, what led Mike Tyson and Robin Gibbons to be seated together side by side on that couch for this national television interview.
Well, I think the primary reason they do it is because they're doing damage control. There's constant rumors about the violent nature of their relationship. The tabloids are hounding them. They've only been married eight months at this point, and you know, his people really want to rehabilitate his image. They hope that he's going to do more TV and films, so they need things to quiet down a bit in
terms of the public perception of their marriage. And so, you know, they agree to do this interview partially also because Mike really wants to show off his new opulent mansion to Barbara Walters, and they're hoping, Yeah, it's an interesting detail, right, and they're hoping that it will, you know, make Mike seem like a sweet family man, and to some extent also it'll rehabilitate Robin, who's being very negatively portrayed at this time.
Ah, that's so interesting because it basically just all backfires in that regard.
Yeah, I think looking back, it's very clear that the interview does not go as planned. I mean, Robin seems to reveal much more more than she was prepared to reveal. She almost seems once she reveals it to immediately kind of seem a little off that she's done it, Like you can sort of see her looking into the distance, like she seems to almost immediately regret it. But I think what it really shows you is what a gifted interviewer Barbara Walters was.
That's so interesting because what happens is that instead of people having sympathy for her, they actually turn on her.
Yeah. Absolutely, Robin gets branded a gold digger, a liar. The coverage is just so much worse than anything you'd expect, and the rabbit attention to their relationship really only increases as a result of this.
I mean, I can absolutely see why you wanted to unravel this. There's so much unpack here.
They were also really young. I think that's one thing people don't realize. Like they were twenty one and twenty three at the time of this interview.
They were babies.
Oh but I think because they're both so larger than life, in a way, they read as a little bit older, like even when you're watching it. I don't know if you had that reaction, but I kept having to sort of remind myself how.
Young they were.
And I've always kind of wondered about Robin Gibbons because at a time, you know that you and I've talked about where there's all this sort of revisiting of women and women.
Characters in a post me to world or what right.
I don't think she's ever really been given the chance to have her story revisited in a way that feels like true to what really happened to her. Yeah.
Absolutely, But can we backtrack for a second, maybe walk us through what they were like back in the nineteen eighties, because these were two twenty somethings.
Well, I mean, I think it's really important to understand that Mike Tyson was literally one of the most famous people in the world when this interview aired. Boxing now just doesn't have the same kind of appeal it once did. But at one point, boxing was more popular than football in this country, and she was famous too in her own right, but she wasn't anywhere near his level of fame. So I think their relationship from the moment it began not long before this interview. To be honest, they hadn't
been together so long. There was a lot of scrutiny to it. She was sort of this impossibly glamorous I mean, Robin Gibvens, she's so it's so beautiful. There's something really regal about her, and I think there was an automatic assumption that she was this icy bitch for you know, lack of a normal way to put it, because I don't think she is those things, but her appearance automatically lent to this real contrast between Mike Tyson, who's kind of this big bear of a man who grew up
in the streets of Brooklyn. So I think that in and of itself drew a lot of attention to them.
Yeah, that makes sense, but we Robin was already acting by this time, right.
Yeah, so she was starring in Head of the Class, which started in nineteen eighty six, which was a very popular sitcom about a bunch of kids in a gifted program in New York City high school. And you know, I grew up watching that show and I loved Robin Gibbons. You know, her character was a bit of a spoiled rich girl, but she was smart and funny, and she was ambitious, and she was a black student in a mostly white honors class. And I related to that, right, like I was.
Also in real life or in the show, in the show, in the show, sorry, in the show.
Okay, she was also very smart and clever and ambitious in real life. But the character she played, Darlene, was sort of an extension of her in some ways, right. I think she became conflated with that character. So that's also why people sort of assumed she was this spoiled rich girl, which she wasn't, you know, by any Yeah.
Can you tell us a little bit about who she was prior to this in her real life?
Yeah, So Robin is really interesting, and her background becomes kind of weaponized against her. She was born in nineteen sixty four, and she's raised by this single mom, Ruth Roper, who ends up being a really significant part of the coverage of Robin and Mike's marriage, sort of Chris Jenner's like momager before. That's a thing that she very much poured a lot of her energy into her daughters. Robin
had a sister named Stephanie, and she raised them. Oh, they grew up in New York and Ruth and Robin's father divorced when Robin was two years old, and she really raised them to be goal oriented and hardworking and ambitious, and you know, in fairness to Ruth, she was all of those things. She never went to college. But by the time Robin is acting, she has built a two million dollars a year consulting business. The designs like computer
systems for banks and brokerage firms. I mean, that's not like an easy business to break into while you're raising two kids. So she is really doing everything she can for her daughters. And Robin does start working a bit as a kid. She occasionally modeled. She was like in seventeen magazine, and she does a little bit of acting. But the thing that gets a lot of attention in pieces about her at the time is that she's incredibly smart.
She went to private school. There's like a People magazine article in eighty seven that mentioned she had a three point grade point average, and she finishes high school at fifteen and enrolls at Sarah Lawrence College. So she is legitimately like a I think, a genius maybe. And she's one of the youngest people ever to enroll at Sarah Lawrence and she graduates in nineteen eighty four at nineteen, when a lot of people are just getting to college.
So that is like a big part of how people think about her in relation to Mike Tyson, because there's a lot of assumptions made about his intelligence. He doesn't graduate from high school, so that's something that gets talked about a lot. When she graduates from college, her mom really wanted her to become like a professional. Her mom didn't really see acting as a real job, which I mean I can relate to that. My mom wouldn't have seen that as a real job. And she enrolls in
classes at Harvard. It's unclear if she's like taking some pre med classes to eventually go to medical school, but in her book and she says she never applied to medical school, but she was taking some classes to eventually do that.
Okay, how does a person who's graduated from Sarah Lawrence at nineteen is like maybe enrolling in medical school go on to be with Mike Tyson.
Well, there's a long journey to get there. So while she was in college in nineteen eighty four, she books a guest role on The Cosby Show. Okay, and Bill Cosby, who at that time was also one of the most famous men in America, becomes her mentor. Oh wow, Bill Cosby just pops up into the story, and the reporting at the time is that he convinces her mom to let her drop out of Harvard, and he says to her mom, if she doesn't get a job in six months,
then I'll pay for her to go back later. Like, he takes a real interest in her and convinces her mom that acting is a real option for her, and Ruth agrees and they move across the country to La and move into Bill Cosby's home, which I have a lot of questions.
About his real life home, not the Cosby How No.
No, I mean there was no yeah, it was like a set.
Yeah.
No, they moved into his real life home. WHOA Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've questions that that, knowing what we know now about Bill Cosby, but I don't have any answers for you on that front. And he helps her get an agent and acting does work out. A couple years later, in eighty six, she is cast in this sitcom Head of the Class that I mentioned, and she stays for the full five year run and it's a successful show.
And I seem to remember that it wasn't just Mike Tyson she dated. She had dated a lot of famous men, and that sort of gets used against her, I think, but who was that?
Yeah, later on, when there's like all this sort of coverage of her as this like conniving gold digger or whatever, it gets mentioned a lot that she dated Eddie Murphy when she was in college. She met him at a comedy club. She was sixteen, and he was just starting out in Saturday Night Live, so I think he was nineteen or twenty at the time, so not that much
older than her. Although sixteen is pretty young to be dating a guy who's like a full time cast member on Saturday Night Live, you have to imagine that that was a bit wild. She calls him her first boyfriend, so that was a real relationship and they continue to be friends to this day, I think. But she also briefly dates Michael Jordan, who was not nearly as famous as he would become in the nineties, but another sort of like very famous black man.
This is then you use.
But also the sense that she's like targeting these like successful black men, which I don't know, is that targeting I want to date really successful cool people too, Like isn't that just what everybody wants? Like is that like some sort of scheme? I don't know. But and then she meets Mike Tyson and that becomes kind of the defining relationship unfortunately, I think from her perspective of her life, although she will, luckily for her go on to much healthier relationships later on.
Okay, Mike Tyson, I mean he was huge in this era. I feel like the thing that I remember most is him biting that guy's.
Year off, Yes, Evander Holyfield.
Which maybe happen in the nineties.
Yes, it happened much later, much later than Okay.
Yeah, So who is Mike Tyson at this point?
So he is twenty years old when they meet. He has become the youngest heavyweight champion of the world, which means I had to look it up because I didn't know exactly what that meant. That he's the boxer who holds world titles from all of the major sanctioning organizations simultaneously. So he's like won a lot of fights, I guess,
is what it means. He's a multimillionaire. He's reportedly worth fifty million dollars when they meet some from his fights, Like a lot of that money actually is prizes from the fights. But also he has a Pepsi deal, and he has this really popular Nintendo game called Mike Tyson's punch Out.
Oh wow, okay, I remember, yes, yeah, that game was very popular. Okay.
And to give you an idea of just like how quickly he's risen to this fame and fortune.
Yeah, because he didn't come from money.
No, I mean, he did not come for money at all. But he literally went from making five hundred dollars for his first professional fight when he was seventeen to just three and a half years later making twenty million dollars for a fight. So you just sense that it's just been this really fast paced success. So he is incredibly successful and famous, but he hasn't really adjusted to that yet, right, He doesn't have this machinery that a lot of people
who have that kind of wealth have around them. It's all still kind.
Of right the agents.
Yeah, it's all just like really hectic, and there's all these people sort of coming in and out of his life. He's still trying to kind of adjust to this new life.
And he, if I remember correctly, had a pretty traumatic child yes.
Like a very traumatic childhood. So he was born and raised in Brooklyn, mostly in this neighborhood, Brownsville, which is pretty rough and tumble, and it was the center of race riots and police violence. There was a lot of poverty in the sixties and seventies there. His mom was an alcoholic who died when he was sixteen. He didn't know who his father was. There's a man who was on his birth certificate, but a different man is the
man he refers to as his father. And what he says about that man is that he was essentially like a neighborhood pimp, and that's sort of who he knew to be his father figure at that time. He essentially kind of grows up in the streets. He's like a pickpocket. He's involved a lot of petty crimes. He's a street fighter. You know, if you heard Mike's voice, so Tyson's voice is he has this little speech impediment that he still has. It's like a lisp that gives him almost like.
A yeah he does. He has it's like a soft spoken quality to it.
Yeah, it's like a childlike quality. And he's often teased for that. And he wears glasses, so he says he started to fight to defend himself because he would get teased. Also, a thing about Mike that's often discussed is that he
raised pigeons from a very young age. He's like really obsessed with pigeons in particular, but birds in general, and it's used in profiles to depict him as this kind of gentle giant, right, And he has said that the first fight that he was in was because an older boy killed one of his birds, and he like avenged the bird and it felt so good to like beat the shit out of this bigger kid. And that's when he realized that, you know, he could fight, like really fight.
And by the time he's twelve, he's been arrested thirty eight times. So it's yeah. I mean, really he really leans into the fighting. Another thing that he's just recently talked about publicly is that also during this period, he experiences a sexual assault, and we don't know a lot about that. He doesn't, you know, really want to share a lot of details about it, for understandable reasons. But he's only really talked about that since he's turned fifty,
So it's a fairly recent thing that he's admitted. But I think his childhood was rough every.
Measure, okay, And so how does Mike go from being like a street fighter to boxing professionally.
So when he's fourteen, he gets sent to a juvenile detention center because he has stabbed someone. So at the juvenile detention center, he meets a trainer who teaches him to box and then eventually introduces him to this pretty well known boxing coach named Cus Tomato, who really takes him in. He becomes his mentor, he becomes his father figure. He moves in with Custom Otto and his family.
Cus teaches him to read and write, and then he he didn't know to read and write.
He didn't know how to read and write at that time, not really, And he sends him to school. He does eventually drop out of high school his junior year, but for a couple of years he goes to school because Cus and his wife really taken interest in him, and that is what fundamentally transforms his life.
You can see they couldn't come from more different backgrounds.
Yeah, I mean they grow up in such different ways. Right. She is definitely sheltered, right, she is like protected. Her mother is very careful what Robin and her sister Stephanie are exposed to.
Mike is the opposite.
So Robin Gibbons and Mike Tyson are living these really different lives. How do they actually meet?
So they meet in nineteen eighty seven, and at that time, Mike is a little bit on his own custom otto. Who is this man who is essentially his father at this point?
Yeah, like father, manager, coach.
Yeah, basically has died in nineteen eighty five, a couple of years before Mike became the heavyweight champion of the world, which I think is something you know that it is hard for him and he's sort of surrounded by a lot of people who are making their living off of him, managers and trainers. So that's kind of where he is
when they meet. He sees her on television, he sees her on head of the class, and he asks to meet her, and I guess someone gives him her mother's contact information, and so he repeatedly leaves messages with her mother,
Ruth's assistant. Interesting, and Ruth ignores it initially, you know, for all these sort of rumors afterwards that Ruth is like targeted Mike Tyson and is trying to Like she initially does not see Mike Tyson as a serious prospect for her daughter, Like she wants her daughter to marry like a doctor or a lawyer. You know, She's not looking for some street fighter, whether or not he's the
most famous man in the world. So she ignores the calls for months, and then finally I guess she decides to just mention it to Robin.
Oh, she hasn't even told Robin at this point.
No, she doesn't even tell Robin initially that these calls are coming in. But it's so persistent and goes on for so long time. She's just like, I guess I should just mention this, And Robin defies her and is like, no, I want to meet him. I want to go on a date with him. And Ruth doesn't love that, but she agrees to set it up. And then when they go on their first date, I just think this is the funniest detail. She brings her mom and her sister
and like her agent and publicist with her. That's like this sort of like summit meeting or something.
Right.
Then when they finally meet, it's kind of this sort of wild coming together.
So I assume that dinner goes well.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I read Robin's book. She wrote a book in two thousand and seven, long after this called Grace Will Lead Me Home, And at times it's quite harrowing, but this section she describes it as this whirlwind and magical romance. You have to remember she's like a twenty two year old girl, right, and Mike sweeps her off her feet. She loves how much it feels like a fairy tale. She describes it as
so exciting. She tells a story about how one night they go out for dinner and Sylvester Stallone walks into the restaurant, who's just like this huge star, and he comes over to say hi to them, and Mike says to her, like, see, I'm a star to the stars, you know, and you can see how that would be so exciting.
Yeah, so you can see the appeal someone whose life has been very controlled. This is very enticing.
And one thing she talks about in the book a lot is that her father abandoned her as a child. She didn't really have a relationship with him after the divorce, and that feeling of being rejected leaves her craving this kind of attention that Mike is giving her, and this sense that he's strong so he can protect her and care for her. There's something in that that feeds something
in her that she feels she's been missing. And he's a little dangerous right when you're twenty two, that can seem run and exciting as opposed to, you know, vaguely terrifying. So that's kind of where they are when they meet.
So at what point does the relationship get serious.
It seems like it gets serious pretty much right away. The way she describes it, he is just a full court press from that point forward. He's calling her, he wants to see her all the time. There's just this kind of like what we would now describe as love bombing, I guess, but that's what happens and at the same time, what she will reveal in the book a bunch later is that in these first few months, it's also the first time he hits her. They have this fight she
describes in detail. He's not listening to her, she's trying to leave his apartment, and he hits her, and she is stunned by it, and she immediately runs to a friend's house, but can't bring herself to tell the friend what's happened. And she describes a set of emotions that now we've come to expect from someone who's suffering from domestic violence, this shame and also this belief that she
must have done something to deserve it. And she also has this naive, twenty two year old belief that she can somehow heal him right, like she can somehow fix him of him right, because he is very vulnerable with her. He tells her what a messed up childhood he has, and he actually, very explicitly, at different times early on in their relationship, asks her to take care of him or to promise she'll never leave him. So she doesn't,
and they're married ten months later. So in February of nineteen eighty eight, and a lot will eventually be made of the fact that there is no pre nup and he is twenty one and she is twenty three at.
That point, Oh, he's younger than he.
Yes, he's a couple years younger than her, which also is often pointed out as if twenty three and twenty one are like thirty and twenty one. You know what I mean, She's not like some sophisticated woman of the world, but she presents a real sophistication. I think there's something naturally really sophisticated about her, and so I think that's also really drawn as a contrast between them.
And so the marriage, as I understand it, is really tumultuous from the start.
Yeah, it only lasts eight months. You know. This relationship that will go on to kind of bef for both of them for the rest of their lives is over in less than a year, and these allegations that he's abusive and cheating on her start to trickle out in the press. I mean, he's not doing a lot to cover up his activities and.
Meaning he's hitting her in public.
There are incidents where he does hit her in public. There's a particularly famous incident that I'll explain in more detail later where he chases her and her mom around a hotel lobby. Okay, but I think just in general, like there's a lot of scrutiny on them and there's all this tumult around them, and that it's hard for
them to keep that out of the press. And she confirms in the memoir also that he is cheating on her even in these early stages of their marriage, and that he doesn't even try to hide it from her. He's not really trying to hide it from the press either. He flat out tells her about it and taunts her about it.
Oh wow.
Yeah, he does not come off like a good man, and he is also prone to jealous rages. So while he's like cheating on her pretty openly, he's resemful of her career. He wants her to quit acting. He's pushing her to have kids right away. And there's this other piece that I think plays a really fundamental part and why there is so much being leaked to the press. So, as I've said, Cus Tomato, who is his original coach
and trainer, has died already. He has another manager who he's pretty close to, who dies right around this same time. And so those two deaths combined leave him really vulnerable to this whole host of pretty terrible men who are trying to figure out a way to make money off of him, including people you've heard of like Don King and Donald Trump. A whole host of bad men appure in this episode. Like we've already had Bill Cosby, now we have Donald Trump.
Yeah, this is so interesting.
Yeah, I mean Trump Entice it have been friends since late eighties. Around this time, Trump is trying to get him to have his fights at his casinos, trying to sort of become one of his promoters. And there's a particular manager, Bill Cayton, who really resents Robbin's influence right and her mother who comes with her. They are bringing more scrutiny to the kind of deals he has when they meet this guy Bill Kitten is taking a third of all his earnings and they renegotiate that down to
a quarter, which is significant. I mean, he really doesn't have anyone looking out for his interests. Now there is this woman who is smart and her mother who is shrewd, and they are just asking what seemed to me like very reasonable questions. But all these people around him who really would rather operate in the dark hate it, and a lot of the leaks in the press are coming from them, and she's kind of being depicted in the media as the Yoko No of boxing.
Which is like, oh wow, that's an actual.
Yeah, that's an actual quote. And you know, obviously Yoko Ona could be her own episode. Right. The way she's sort of depicted as the reason the Beatles breakup is ridiculous.
So okay, I see. So this is sort of where the like gold digger in it for the money, never signed a prenup influencing him narrative about Robin begins to take shape.
Hold yes, and you know, we're talking about a lot of money, right, Like, these guys have a lot of money in Steake. He's making twenty million dollars a fight, So if you're taking a third of that versus twenty percent, that's a huge amount of money.
What else at this point is the press saying about her.
The coverage of her in general is just scathing. She's portrayed as ambitious and greedy and also just daring to meddle in men's business. You know, the sports writers really come after her right away, and it's hard not to see kind of a racist undertone to it. It kind of feels like they're just one step away from calling her uppity, Like it's just like, how dare she think that she deserves to speak in this space or have an opinion about her husband's business?
Like, Right, it's so interesting too, because it's like, if she's uppity, he is kind of like this savage brute who people didn't expect more from in a way.
There's definitely racism in the way he's treated as well, Right, I think it's just this idea that like, what did she expect? Didn't she think he was going to be a thug? Like he's this kid Brooklyn. There is just racism weaved into a lot of the way they're both talked about at this time, and even in the way that her mother has talked about, right, because she's also described as really ambitious, and that is also made to
seem like something disgusting. And I think in general, this is kind of, you know, a thing we all experience as women. I remember once a mentor said to me, as he was trying to convince me not to take another job, that I was too ambitious. And I've never really understood that criticism of women. I feel like we just celebrate ambition in men, and yet somehow women are supposed to like sit quietly and temper Wait, I don't know, it's very weird.
Well, that's the whole Cheryl Sandberg thing, right, however you feel about Cheryl Sandberg. Yeah, she made the point, which was correct, that we rarely common too ambitious because ambition men is the default. But in the eighties we certainly didn't have that context, right.
And also, I think the coverage really focuses on her mom's ambition. That's also kind of playing into this stereotype about her because her mom is young and attractive, and that makes people really suspicious of her.
Oh so the mom actually gets kind of dragged into the negative press coverage, Yes, very much. Okay, so this is all happening super fast, and they haven't even done the interview yet, right.
Yeah, This sort of all happens in rapid succession. So they get married in February, and a couple months later, in April, Givens becomes pregnant and that is made public.
In May.
A lot is made of the fact that they purchased this fancy country estate in New Jersey for more than four million dollars and that Mike has asked Ruth to pick it out, like in a lot of ways, that uses evidence that Ruth is like manipulating him when he's just asked her to do this because he has something he needs to be in I think Japan for and he's always fantasized about living in these big English manners
that he saw as a child. So that is the first time that Ruth becomes involved in his finances, as does Robin, and it's when they begin to realize what all the sort of financial arrangements are with his managers. So that is like a first moment of real tension around that. And then in June, Tyson has this huge fight with Michael Spinks in Atlantic City that gets a lot of coverage. It's a twenty one million dollar fight.
And to give you an idea of how much Robin is disliked going into this fight, there are a number of articles about their relationship and how it might have destroyed him and whether or not she's ruined his ability to fight, whether just her sheer presence in his life has sapped him of his like mojo or something like that. It's so insane and yeah, like she's this Jezebel who's
like stolen his skills. I don't know. It's the craziest thing, right, And then when she's introduced at the fight, the crowd boos her. Wow, she just like must have been awful for her. And just FYI, he knocked out Spinks in ninety one seconds. It was around so like she has not destroyed him in any way, shape or form. If anything, he's working on destroying her. Right later that month, she miscarries.
And okay, so they don't have so they don't have any children, and is Zap reported then in the press. Ye, like all of this is public, that she's pregnant, that she miscarries.
It feels like everything that's going on in their life is public in ways that don't seem to be in their control. Just like there is no way for them to operate without this enormous spotlight on them. And we say this a lot on this show. It's like reality TV. Before reality TV, I think, before we had this kind of access into people's lives, there were certain figures that became stories that got followed as if their lives were fictional.
Every little movie.
Yeah, where like their humanity almost gets lost, and they just become like a fun narrative to follow, like no one's really paying attention that this is like a real thing that's happening between two people.
And so is the abuse consistent throughout this time?
It seems pretty consistent. I mean, another thing she talks about in her book is that after this big fight, they throw a big party in New Jersey at their mansion, and to give you an idea of just how famous they are, the first guest to ribe or Oprah and her longtime partner Steadman, and they're there for a parade the town has arranged in his honor, and Mike doesn't show up to the parade, and so Robin and Oprah go to lead the parade, and then he finally shows
up and they go back to the house and with all the guests downstairs, Mike just goes upstairs and she follows him, and obviously out of sight of all the guests, he slaps her and grabs her by the throat. So it seems like that's just a consistent thing that's happening in the background, and she's just consistently kind of trying to pretend like it's not happening, and putting on a happy face.
And the other thing too, is he struggles with real mental health issues as well.
Is that right, There is a lot of mental illness, but at that point he hasn't faced that yet. They'll eventually be a diagnosis and some conversation around that, but at this point, this fight takes place in June, and she says that by early September, Michael is completely unraveling. He's staying up all night, he's depressed, he's manic. He threatened suicide because he thinks Givens is ignoring him at times.
And then there's this huge tabloid incident, which is that one day he hits her and she flees to They have an apartment in New York. She goes to New York and he keeps calling to convince her to come home, and when she doesn't come home, he essentially says he's going to do something drastic, and he takes her BMW and drives it into a tree.
Oh wow, See it's so interesting how I don't remember so much of this story. So is that a suicide attempt?
I mean, it seems very much like it's a suicide attempt by any sort of objective measure of what that is, although he does deny that afterwards. It's essentially, I think, an abusive cry for attention. Right, He's not getting what he wants from her, and he's like, I'm going to make you pay. And the way he does it is this accident I guess we'll call it. And this gets a ton of coverage obviously. I mean, he's one of the most famous people in the world. He's gotten into
this terrible car accident. There's ambulances and police and she rushes to be by his side. But even then, the way it's portrayed in the press is that he's like insecure when it comes to her that somehow she's like to blame for him having done this thing. There's like a subtle.
And places sick he drove his car into a.
Trap, right, Like this implicit sort of blame on her, Like he's not an adult who's in control of his actions. He's just so enamored by her. It's almost like she's like a witch who's put a spell on him or something.
I don't know.
It's the strangest way to talk about a grown man, but that's just part of the racism. That's part of this coverage, I think in a way right, and I think the way in which he's infantilized is certainly part of that, and the way that she's vilified. And we will talk about that more with Salami Shatillett, who, as you know, is a writer for The Times, and will get into some of those details. But here there is this kind of sense that he can't be expected to be in control of himself.
It's so interesting how the press has really like taken aside early. But isn't there some trip to Russia that also occurs?
Yes, And to get away from all the attention, right, all this tabloid attention to his accident, he decides he's going to go with Robin to Russia, where she is filming a special set of episodes for Head of the Class, her sitcom.
And while they are there, they.
Get into some altercation and he is again violent with her, and he ends up chasing her and her mother around the hotel lobby in a very public way. And obviously there's press there because they're covering his visit to Russia, so that gets a lot of attention as well. And coming off of that, I think essentially she insists that he see a therapist of some kind, and he announces publicly that he is suffering from manic depression, which we
now call bipolar disorder. So he really starts to face the fact that he needs a psychiatrist, and he starts to take lithium.
Okay, and just to situate us. Basically, it's like all this stuff is leaking. She gets booed at this fight. He runs her BMW into a tree in maybe a suicide attempt. Everyone's like, oh, poor Mike, he can't be in control of his actions. This is all in the months leading up to the Barbara Walters interview. All of this is happening super quickly, right.
Yeah, I mean the car accidents at the beginning of September. By the end of September, he's publicly announced that he is seeing a psychiatrist. So all this drama is eventually what leads us to the infamous Barbara Walters interview.
Susie, before you walk us through the actual Barbara Walters interview, maybe it would help to give listeners just a little sense of what a big deal Barbara Walters was in nineteen eighty eight.
Yeah, she was a huge Celebrity's just absolute powerhouse in television news. She broke so many barriers for women, and her interviews always got a lot of attention. She was famous for these really intimate celebrity interviews where she would get people to cry. As The New York Times put it when she passed last year, at a time when politicians tended to be reserved and celebrities elusive, Ms Walters coaxed King's presidents and Matinee idols to answer startlingly intimate questions.
So she was really known forgetting those moments, and this interview certainly delivers on that.
So about the interview. It takes place at Robin and Mike's mansion in New Jersey.
Walk us through it. What happens the interview itself. This sort of infamous Robin and Mike interview is part of an hour of television, and it honestly kind of takes forever to get there that It starts with an interview of Mike alone where he denies being violent with his wife.
Then there's an interview with some random psychiatrist who does not factorat Mike Tyson, but who is asked to comment on whether or not him taking lithium will make it impossible for him to continue to box, which just reveals
how little mental health was properly understood. Then there's an interview with Ruth Robin's mother and Barbara asks her about whether or not she's controlling him and his money, and she denies it of course, like I don't know what the expectation is that she's gonna be like, yes, I'm
a monster. And then there is also an interview with his manager who I mentioned, Bill Cayton, and he essentially says he thinks that Mike is not mentally ill, he's not violent, and any medication he takes will take the spark in quotes, that's what he literally says, the spark out of Tyson and will mean that he can never box again. Just this idea that they need him to be whatever he is because they think any change might
impact the money they're making off of him. Right, if he's mentally ill, they would rather he go untreated, if the risk of him getting help is that somehow he becomes different in the ring, and so they're all really invested in not getting him the help he needs.
Okay, so it's an hour of television focused on Mike. All these people are interviewed. Then do we finally get to Robin.
Yes, we finally get to Robin. She's not interviewed alone. She's interviewed with Mike, which I think is an interesting choice. He sits beside her the whole time.
Yeah, I can picture them. And so they're side by side on this kind of floral couch. He's in this almost cosby like sweater.
It's very eighties.
She looks stunning and beautiful and poised. She's wearing this kind of eighties blue shoulder pad shirt. Yeah, and he is his arm around her. It's around her as they're talking together, and then it just kind of stays there.
Yeah, they're sitting side by side. And Barbara Walters asks her what has this rollercoaster of a relationship been like? And Robin responds with the other part of this interview that gets played over and over again. She says, it's been torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine. Every day is a battle, some kind of fight with managers, family, trying to hold on to your dignity.
Wow.
And what's so interesting to me about this is that second part. Right, She's making it pretty clear that what she's saying is not that the relationship with Mike is pure hell, but that every day's a battle with all these people around him who are clawing at him. And instead, when this interview is replayed over and over again, it's just the first part that gets played that she said that being with Mike Tyson was torture, pure hell, worse
than anything I could possibly imagine. And it's one of the ways in which she's made to seem like a bitch, like how could she sit next to him and say that about him? But it's pretty clear she's saying that about all the men around him who are trying to control him, and that she's mad them, right, I mean they're leaking all these nasty stories about her. Of course that is hell for her. Yeah, And then what comes next is Barbara very flatly asks, he chased you and
your mom around Russia. He has a volatile temper? Is that true? And I'll let you just sort of listen to the rest of this.
Extremely volatile temper. I think people see that about every three months. He's got a side to him that's scary. Michael is intimidating, to.
Say the least. I think that there's a time when he.
Cannot control his temper, and that's frightening to me or to my mother and to anyone around. It's scary what happens He gets out of control, throwing, screaming, Does he hit you? He shakes, pushes, he he swings. He Sometimes I think he's trying to scare me. There were times that had happened when I thought I I could handle it, you know, and just recently I've become afraid, I mean very very much afraid.
For instance, Russia, I was afraid.
I just want to emphasize that watching this is so surreal, Like as this is happening, as she's saying this, they're side by side. His arm is still around her. But you know, at the start of this interview he has this sort of like plastic smile. It's like stays there. And then you watch as he's answering this question, his face, I don't know, it almost falls or it goes blank, and suddenly you start to see his chest go up and down, like his breathing is becoming something.
But it's very subtle. It's like he's obviously really trying to control his reaction, right, and he is disciplined like that is part of being a good boxer. Right.
It's fascinating television and it makes you wonder, like, from our perspective, was he prepped before ly? Did he know this was coming? And I mean my interpretation was that he absolutely did not, and that Barbara Walter's part of what she did so well was she just asked the question bluntly, like she just said the thing that people don't say, and that Robin answered truly authentically.
Yes. I think both of those things are true. I think he was definitely prepped. He's very much trying to stay in control of the situation. But it is also pretty clear to me when you watch Robin's face after Barbara Walters goes back to Tyson and asks him what it's like to listen to this interview to a situation in which I'm dealing with my illness and like basically like this was my wife and we're dealing with it.
There's this kind of moment on Robin's face where she looks kind of in shock, like she can't believe what she's admitted. She's not sure if she's gone too far. But one thing that's interesting is she did say later on they went out and celebrated after this, they thought this interview had gone oh well. So it's not entirely clear how much they are both processing this thing. In the moment. I think it's just kind of happening and
they're trying to make sense of it. It's pretty difficult when you're in those interviews, right when someone's got all these cameras in your face, you almost black out a little. I'm not sure they realized how far they'd gone until there was a public reaction to it later on.
And of course you never remember the soundbites that are going to be taken and replaced right.
Interestingly, now, when celebrities do these interviews, their publicists record them like they record them on their phones so that they know what happened, because it is very hard when you're in the heat of the moment to keep track.
That's such an interesting point because hearing these clips, you think it's so damning, but the fact that they went out and celebrated, and then later on in an interview, Barbara Walters asks again why she's doing the interview, and she basically is defending it, like she's explaining, and she doesn't want him to seem like a bad guy. And so maybe this is helpful context and understanding where they're
both coming from and his untreated mental illness. I mean, in some ways they are really breaking ground by talking openly about his illness.
Yeah, and she's saying very authentically it seems like he's been untreated. It got worse, you know, because it gets worse in your twenties. That's just how this particular disease works. And we're fixing it. And I think she really believes that right by all accounts and her own telling in her memoir, she's kind of naive about what's going on around them. And then the interview airs.
That actually feels like a really good place to leave it for today. So if you want to hear what happens after the interview airs, check out part two.
This is in retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can't stop the thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode. Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com, or find us on Instagram at in retropod.
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In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media. Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.
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