It was the early 90s, Desiree dreamed of competing in the Miss Black America pageant. There she will meet Mike Tyson, a legend at the time, but with an already sulphurous reputation with girls. On the eve of the Indianapolis competition, the champion will take him into his limousine through insistence and empty promises. Not to tour the Grand Dukes, but in his hotel room, where he will throw himself on her and rape her.
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Heavyweight, featherweight
Desiree filed a complaint. Frail victim facing the best heavyweights of the time, crowned with unfailing notoriety, surrounded by lawyers richly paid by his manager Don King. In these times before #MeToo, the case was indeed not won. The victims’ words did not have the same weight in public opinion, and therefore in the grand jury courtrooms.
It is therefore this story, which will lead to the conviction of Mike Tyson, that Frédéric Roux tells us, the Bordeaux writer now well established in Pau, who has made boxing his almost exclusive literary universe. We cannot accuse the writer and former amateur boxer, author of a biography of Tyson, but also of the monumental “Alias Ali” of opportunism. Certainly, Iron Mike is back, and certainly, the Mazan rape trial, like the #MeToo wave, has been there. But the author says it himself, he started his book in 1992, once the conviction was pronounced. “At the time, I had rejections from publishers, people didn’t necessarily want to hear about this story. I would also like to ask them if they would do it today,” confides Roux with a smile.
Other times, other customs
“Other times, other customs,” our elders already said. Roux reworked his text this year, and it was published by the very select Éditions Allia this Friday, January 10. And if he talks about Mike Tyson, Frédéric Roux first tells a story of rape. He recalls how much pressure the victim, Desiree Washington, will face, from the media, from Tyson’s lawyers, but also from public opinion reluctant to see their idol collapse. At the end of a resounding trial, as the Americans know how to conduct them, and as Roux knows how to tell it like a boxing match, it was nevertheless he who ended up on the ropes.
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The short virtuoso text also evokes, with a certain gift for prescience, the beginning of a shift in judicial and public morals vis-à-vis sexist and sexual violence. He recalls in particular that just before Tyson’s conviction, two trials, again with great spectacle, that of William Kennedy Smith accused of rape, and that of Judge Clarence Thomas, accused of harassment, had ended in acquittals.
Mike Tyson will not slip through the cracks. As if he hadn’t seen the end of the glitzy and scandalous 80s coming. “The era of triumphant vulgarity, when yuppies in red suspenders and Turnbull & Asher shirts were considered knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Cindy Crawford as the Immaculate Conception and Julian Schnabel as a great painter, was closed,” writes Frédéric Roux. The turning of a world, in short.
As Mike Tyson attempts another comeback, Desiree has disappeared, but this book does her justice a second time.
“Desiree” by Frédéric Roux, Ed. Allia, 95 pages, 7 euros.
