Trump has never been shy about weighing in on Mike Tyson. Now he is doing it on camera, as part of a new Netflix series that revisits one of the most contested chapters in the former heavyweight champion’s life.
According to sources, the president appears in the third episode of “TYSON,” the documentary series premiering Tuesday that traces Tyson’s rise, fall and long public afterlife. Trump’s segment focuses on the 1992 trial that ended with Tyson’s conviction for SAing 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington. The encounter took place at the Canterbury Hotel in Indianapolis in July 1991.
Trump’s history with Tyson goes back further than the courtroom, though. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he helped promote several of the boxer’s matches, including bouts against Michael Spinks, Carl Williams and Alex Stewart, staged at Convention Hall in Atlantic City, adjacent to Trump Plaza. That relationship gives his commentary in the documentary a different texture than that of an outside observer, and it’s one reason producers sought him out for the project.
In the documentary, Trump zeroes in on a decision Tyson made that still gets debated among those who followed the case: taking the stand in his own defense.
“I think Mike shouldn’t have testified,” Trump says. Tyson spent 78 minutes on the stand insisting that his encounter with Washington was consensual, and prosecutors later pointed to what they described as inconsistencies in his account.
For his part, Trump frames the outcome less as a matter of guilt or innocence and more as a question of strategy, suggesting that Tyson’s directness may have cost him. “I’m not sure that he did a bad job in testifying,” Trump says. “But one thing with Mike, he’s very truthful. And I think the truth hurt him…in this case.”
Tyson’s own testimony, parts of which surface in the series includes a blunt account of what he told Washington he wanted that night: “I explained to her that I wanted to f*** her.”
Decades later now 60, Tyson still won’t budge from the position he took at trial. “She never said ‘no’,” he says in the documentary. “I didn’t cross a line.”
Not everyone around Tyson at the time saw the trial as fair. Dawn Milhouse, a friend of his argues in the series that he “never stood a chance” in an Indianapolis courtroom, pointing to what she believes was racial bias baked into the proceedings.
The medical and eyewitness evidence from the case gets its own airing too. Dr. Thomas Richardson, who was an emergency room physician at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis at the time, examined Washington the day after the encounter and found abrasions he said were consistent with SA. Separately, other contestants from the pageant circuit recalled Tyson approaching women to ask if they’d date him, with some saying they steered clear of him altogether.
Perhaps the most striking testimony came from Virginia Foster, who worked as Tyson’s chauffeur at the time. She told the court that when Washington returned to the limousine in the early hours of the morning, she looked dishevelled and seemed to be “in a state of surprise.”
Foster also alleged separately that Tyson had exposed himself to her in a hotel room on a prior occasion and made unwanted advances toward her another time.
Tyson was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison and ended up serving roughly three before his release in March 1995. The documentary doesn’t try to paper over the fact that he still rejects the conviction’s premise entirely, maintaining decades on that the encounter was mutual.
Trump and Tyson’s paths have crossed again more recently, well outside a courtroom or a boxing ring. The two appeared together at a Republican rally in New York ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, where Tyson offered Trump a full endorsement.
“There’s no way in the world I would ever be here if it wasn’t for a president like Donald Trump,” Tyson told the crowd, going on to call him “my president.”
The documentary arrives with its own footnote regarding Trump’s legal history. The series’ release coincides with renewed attention to the fact that Trump himself was found liable for SA and defamation in E. Jean Carroll’s civil case in 2023.
