Mike Tyson: How I Was Sexually Abused As A Child

Mike Tyson has revealed he was sexually abused by a stranger when he was a child growing up in Brooklyn.

The 48-year-old said during a radio interview on Wednesday that the molestation took place when he was seven.

'He snatched me off the street,' the boxing legend said during a visit to SiriusXM's Opie Radio show. 'I was a little kid...[he was an] old man.'

'[He] bullied me, sexually abused me and stuff,' said Tyson. 'Never seen him again.'

The father-of-eight said he managed to escape, and claimed it was a one-time incident.

Tyson said he never told anyone, including the police, about the abuse.

'I just went on with my life,' he said.

When asked by the interviewer whether the event changed him, Tyson answered: 'I don't know if it did or not.'

He added: 'I don't always remember, but maybe I do but I don't. I'm not ashamed or embarrassed by it.'

Tyson opened up about his difficult childhood in his 2013 autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth.

Born in Cumberland Hospital in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1966, Tyson never really knew his father. The man on his birth certificate, Percel Tyson was a man he never met.

And the man his mother, Lorna Mae, told him was his ‘biological father,’ Jimmy ‘Curlee’ Kirkpatrick Jr was an infrequent presence in both their lives..

By the time Tyson was seven his mother had lost her job as a matron at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, and she and her clutter of children had been evicted.

As a seven year old, small and nimble he began a career of petty crime – clambering in windows of houses through which older boys were too large to fit to steal whatever he could get his hands on. 

His early boyhood took on a relentless rhythm of crime sprees, being hauled in by police only to be taken home and brutally beaten by his despairing mother.

By the time he was 12 he was a ‘zonked out zombie’ on Thorazine and a regular attendee of reformatory school, or ‘special-ed crazy school.’ There are not many light spots in the childhood that Tyson recalls. But one that stands out happened during a stint in the Reformatory school of Sporford.

He recalls: ‘We watched a movie called “The Greatest” about Muhammad Ali. When it was over…

we were shocked when Ali himself walked out on that stage, ‘ he says. ‘I thought, I want to be that guy.’

He didn’t want to be a boxer. He wanted to be great.