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

It was March 1995 when Mike Tyson was released from a prison in Indiana, having served less than three years of a six-year sentence handed 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 under federal law, is required 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 yet more 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 set for his biggest boxing payday yet. Thanks to streaming giant Netflix, he will this weekend step into the ring for an $80m live-streamed bout with YouTube star Jake Paul.

All of which begs the question, in 2024, seven years after the #MeToo movement grew 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 conviction, he has certainly never shown remorse.

“I just hate her guts,” he said of Washington in 2003. “She put me in that state, where I don’t know. I really wish I did now. But now I really do 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 eliminate any potential uncertainty – four or five things worse than rape.

It was the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s brutal and predatory behaviour 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 he will likely die there. But were that to change, it is impossible to think he could rebuild his career.

In 2022, Bill Cosby spoke of touring again after his sexual assault conviction was overturned and he was released after three years in prison. He has yet to do so.

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

Tyson, by comparison, has not only been forgiven, he has reaped increasing rewards. In his first fight after leaving prison against Peter McNeeley – a considerably less appealing opponent than Tyson had long been accustomed to fighting – he was paid a then career-high $25m.

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

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

To put it a different way, many who will watch on Saturday – and Netflix have invested considerable amounts of money to be broadcasters – will have been born after Tyson’s release from prison and will be tuning in primarily for Paul. But there are many others who will be there to see Tyson, well aware of his conviction and continuing to romanticise their recollections of him at his intimidating and consistently entertaining peak.

Tyson’s wider rehabilitation was helped in no small part by his cameo role in 2009’s unremarkable comedy The Hangover. That followed the 2008 feature film documentary Tyson, in which he struggled 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. One headline from 2009 even described him as “cuddly” and a “changed man”.

One of the narratives of the ongoing Tyson mythology surrounds the extent to which he has suffered. He was born into and raised in the most difficult of conditions in Brownsville, Brooklyn; he was bullied as a child; in 2014 he spoke of how he was sexually abused at seven years old; as an adult, he was manipulated and taken advantage of by the villainous boxing promoter Don King.

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Observers of Tyson’s career often question how that career may have looked had D’Amato lived to guide him, or had he not fallen into the Machiavellian clutches of King.

In the same way that Tyson couldn’t possibly have been prepared for everything else the world was going to throw into his path, there’s similarly no way that Washington could have been prepared for Tyson. Nor is there any way her attempts to recover from her trauma could have been helped by Tyson continuing to insist that she has never been raped.

In his memoir, Undisputed Truth, published in 2013, he recounts the lead-up to his trial.

“I spent most of the six weeks between my conviction for rape and sentencing traveling around the country romancing all of my various girlfriends,” starts the prologue. “It was my way of saying goodbye to them. And when I wasn’t with them, I was fending off all the women who propositioned me. Everywhere I’d go, there were some women who would come up to me and say, ‘Come on, I’m not going to say that you raped me. You can come with me. I’ll let you film it’.

“I later realized that that was their way of saying ‘We believe you didn’t do it’. But I didn’t take it that way. I’d strike back indignantly with a rude response. Although they were saying 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.”

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

On the undercard of the fight between Tyson and Paul, 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 legitimise the ill-advised main event that will nevertheless 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 accusing Tyson of raping and assaulting a woman more than 30 years ago. The claim – denied by Tyson – was initially filed in January 2023, before there was any suggestion of a fight between him and Paul and a bumper payday.

Paul is a successful business operator and identified Tyson as a marketable opponent, which raises 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, then what does that say about the fans and the broadcasters who are willing to bankroll such an event?