Okay, so I was just chilling the other day, thinking about old-school sports figures, and Mike Tyson popped into my head. Heavyweight champ, face tattoo, the whole deal. Then I started wondering, who was his first wife? I remember there being a lot of drama back in the day, but the name was fuzzy.
So, I did what we all do. I grabbed my phone and just started searching around. Typed in something like “mike tyson first wife name”. Pretty simple stuff.
Took like two seconds, and the name came up: Robin Givens. Yeah, the actress! I remember her. Okay, so that’s who it was.
Digging a Bit Deeper
Then I got curious about what actually went down. My search showed they got married pretty fast, like February 1988. Seemed like a whirlwind thing, you know? Famous boxer, famous actress.
But man, it didn’t last long at all. Things went south super quick. By June of that same year, just a few months later, the news was full of stories.
- Givens and her family started talking publicly.
- They were making some serious claims about abuse, saying Tyson was violent.
- It got really public, really fast.
I even read somewhere that Givens went on TV, on ABC I think, and straight up called the marriage “torture”. Imagine that being broadcast everywhere. Crazy stuff.
Around the same time, Tyson was also having big problems with his manager, Bill Cayton. Trying to break contracts, accusations flying around about money. Seemed like his whole world was blowing up in 1988.
The End of It
So, no surprise, the marriage ended. They divorced after like, only a year. A really short and explosive marriage.
And yeah, there was money involved. From what I saw, Tyson ended up paying Givens a hefty sum. One figure I saw mentioned was like $15 million. A huge amount back then, still huge now.
So yeah, that was my little dive into the past. Started with a simple question and found this whole intense story from the late 80s. Wild times for Tyson back then. He obviously got married a couple more times after that, but that first one was definitely a big, public mess.
