Mike Tyson is willing to publicly admit he was molested as a child, but the champion boxer won’t openly discuss the details for a simple reason.
“It was nobody’s business to know,” Tyson tells ESPN’s “E:60” Monday, July 24. “People just don’t talk about it because to some people, they believe it’s [emasculating] them.
Tyson said a man once tried to snatch him and take him into a building, but it’s not something he likes to discuss.
“I like to keep that where it was — in the past. But I was molested as a child,” Tyson says when asked for details. “It made me have to be tough for the world I lived in.”
After admitting he “probably” felt shame because of the incident, Tyson says he “learned that it doesn’t make you any less of a man because it happened.”
Although Tyson said he never told anyone about what transpired, he mentioned he was molested during an interview with SiriusXM’s Opie Radio in 2014. The now-51-year-old said he ran away after an old man in Brooklyn, N.Y., violated him in a one-time incident when he was 7.
