An Indiana attorney who successfully prosecuted boxer Mike Tyson on rape charges in the early ’90s slammed Donald Trump on his radio show for bragging about the endorsement from a “tough guy” like Iron Mike.
“Mike Tyson endorsed me, I love it! He sent out a tweet. Iron Mike,” Trump told an Indianapolis rally on Wednesday. “You know, all the tough guys endorse me, I like that, OK? But Iron Mike said, ‘I love Trump, I endorse Trump,’ and that’s the end. I’m sure he doesn’t know about your economic situation in Indiana, and that’s OK. But Mike, everybody, and I like it. When I get endorsed by the tough ones, I like it.”
On his WIBC show Thursday, Greg Garrison echoed Trump’s comments while recalling the trial.
“A tough one. Well, Mr. Trump, tough is one thing. A serial rapist is quite something else. A 17-year-old girl, her clothes ripped off of her, torn, all because in her naivete at 17 — the fact that her brother and her father were huge Mike Tyson fans made her feel that she would be absolutely safe with him, and boy was she wrong,” Garrison said.
“I’ve been thinking about this all night. Kept me up. You know how I feel about this election stuff. And I don’t want to throw rocks at anybody. I have my differences with Mr. Trump. Got a couple with Mr. Cruz. But this is where I want you to listen to me with both ears open,” the attorney continued.
“An absolutely lovely 106-pound 5-foot-6-inch girl. At age 17. Improvident — and I would ask Mr. Trump if I’d get to talk to him — you’ve raised daughters. I’m sure you didn’t have a daughter that didn’t do something improvident at some point. Or sons, for that matter. Daughters are special things. I raised six. And they make mistakes. Their naivete, their innocence, their adolescence are precious things. And Desiree Washington came to Indianapolis to compete in the Miss Black America contest. She was a very talented honors student, a Sunday school teacher… so she agrees to go out on the town with Mr. Tyson, who invited her to do so when he appeared at a rehearsal for their big shows in the competition. He called her back, she said ‘sure.’ What she got for her trouble was raped. Brutally, horribly raped. Tore her clothes, tore her body. Destroyed her life.”
After Tyson’s conviction, Trump told NBC News on Feb. 21, 1991, “It’s my opinion to a large extent that Mike Tyson was railroaded in this case.”
“You have a young woman who was in his room, in his hotel room late in the evening at her own will, you have a young woman who was seen dancing for the beauty contest, dancing with a big smile on her face, looked happy as could be,” Trump said.
Garrison mentioned the “news piece from some time back ago when Mr. Trump seems to suggest that it was her fault.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Trump, had that been your daughter those words would have never come out of your mouth and you would have never thought about it.”
Garrison then pondered what that says about Trump.
“I’m not going to heave him off the side of the ship, but the more I see of ready-fire-aim the more it worries me. The leader of the free world needs to be rid of that kind of stuff and maybe considered in his information before he speaks or ingratiates himself to the likes of a thug like Mike Tyson. The snake in the grass,” the radio host said.
“…Mr. Trump, I’m not going to throw you under anybody’s bus. But, goodness sakes. Politically, I go, in Indiana, really? Did nobody in that whole entourage of yours know that that snake raped a lovely kid in this town? I think I’d beef up my intelligence operation a bit. Things cavalierly fly off the top of his head. And I have to wonder, is that a person — a good commander in chief? The leader of the free world.”
Garrison added that Trump’s Indianapolis address included “a lot of things nobody can argue with.”
“But then he’s happy to have the endorsement of a convicted, vicious rapist. And those two rapes are not the only ones,” he said, after describing an alleged assault that happened six months after Tyson’s release from prison. “The way that he treated [ex-wife] Robin Givens — he said in one book that I read getting ready for his trial, ‘The best hit I had was the one where I knocked Robin Givens out.’ And we’ve got a party dealing with its image toward women!”
Campaigning with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in Indianapolis, Carly Fiorina said she doesn’t “consider a convicted rapist a tough guy.”
“And I think it says a lot about Donald Trump’s campaign and his character that he is standing up and cheering for an endorsement by Mike Tyson,” Fiorina added.
Tweeting a link to Fiorina’s comments, Trump ally Roger Stone said, “I knew @CarlyFiorina was an incompetent. I didn’t know she was a racist.”
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