September 25, 2020

The Trump Files: When Donald Tried to Shake Down Mike Tyson for $2 Million

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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange but true stories, or curious scenes from the life of GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Donald Trump often promises to give money to charity, but he’s much better at handing out other people’s cash than his own. So it’s no surprise that Trump once tried to strong-arm boxing legend Mike Tyson into giving him $2 million, ostensibly for charity, in 1988.

That June, Trump hosted Tyson’s heavyweight fight against Michael Spinks in Atlantic City, New Jersey, holding it in an arena next to the Trump Plaza casino. It was part of Trump’s play to become a big-time figure in boxing, but his next move went even further. Less than two weeks after Tyson beat Spinks, Trump announced he was becoming a business adviser to Tyson. Any money he made from the arrangement, Trump claimed at a press conference, would go to charities for fighting “AIDS, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis” and “helping the homeless.”

Tyson’s life got increasingly chaotic after the fight. He told reporters he was “burned out” and announced his retirement at age 22. His marriage to Robin Givens was falling apart. (Givens later alleged that Tyson abused her while the two were married.) And he was in the middle of suing his manager, Bill Cayton, whom Trump helped push aside when he slid into Tyson’s circle. But despite the turmoil in Tyson’s personal and professional life, Trump wanted Tyson to fork over the payment for his expert advising services.

“As you are aware, I was very happy to beat Bill Cayton and reduce the ridiculous fees he was getting from you both on his management and personal service contracts,” Trump wrote in a letter to Tyson on October 21, 1988. “Not only was this time-consuming, but tremendous energies and knowledge were displayed—much as you display your energy and knowledge in the ring against an opponent. Over the course of your career, I have probably saved you substantially in excess of $50,000,000 and therefore, the $2 million contribution, all of which will go to worthy charities, is very reasonable. If you could ask your accountants to write a check to the ‘Donald J. Trump Foundation’, I will distribute the money in my name and yours and will let you have a list of the charities which benefited.”

It’s not clear whether Tyson actually made the payment. If he did, Trump might be the only person who benefited. According to BuzzFeed, which reviewed the Trump Foundation’s records in June, the $2 million donation never appeared.

But the demand clearly didn’t hurt Trump and Tyson’s friendship. Trump later publicly suggested striking a deal so Tyson could avoid jail time for rape, and Tyson, who is now Muslim, has even endorsed the GOP nominee despite his Islamophobic stances.

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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