Actress Robin Givens says she’s a better person following her violent marriage to Mike Tyson.
“I would like to believe I’m a better person for it… more compassionate, more loving,” she says in a candid interview on “The Wendy Williams Show”. Givens filed for divorce eight months after their February 1988 nuptials claiming the volatile boxing champ was prone to violent rampages and had threatened to kill her.
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The backlash hit Givens hard with the press describing her as “the most hated woman in America” and “the woman who destroyed Mike Tyson” for speaking out against the abuse she suffered at the hands of a powerful man.
According to host Wendy Williams, Givens’ accusations were ahead of her time, making her a pioneer of the #MeToo movement.
“Somebody told me what you said, somebody said, ‘You were like ground zero of #MeToo,'” she says. “I pray that anything I’ve gone through, however difficult it was for me, helped somebody else.”
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In a shocking resurfaced 1988 interview with Barbara Walters on “20/20”, Givens describes her three-month marriage to Tyson as “torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine” — in front of the cameras, all while her husband sits next to her.
After Walters asks if Tyson hits her, Givens responds with, “He shakes, he pushes, he… swings. Sometimes I think he’s trying to scare me. There were times that it happened that I thought I could handle it, and just recently, I have become afraid. I mean, very, very much afraid.”
Following their divorce, Tyson would go on to be convicted of raping 18-year-old Miss Black Rhode Island Desiree Washington, serving less than three of his six-year sentence and becoming a registered sex offender.
