ALBANY — Attorneys for famed heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson are questioning a key date in a federal lawsuit accusing the former New York resident of rape, based on the woman’s inability to remember exactly which year the alleged incident occurred.
The civil complaint against Tyson, which was filed at the beginning of a year-long grace period that waived the statute of limitations normally attached to sexual abuse claims, had alleged the victim was attacked by Tyson in the early 1990s, with a vague timeline provided for the incident.
The case was then moved to federal court in the Northern District of New York, where an updated court filing pinned the year the incident took place as 1991.
But after reviewing dates with her sister, who was also deposed this summer as a witness, the victim sought to recant her testimony about the date of the alleged rape, placing it a year earlier on March 1, 1990.
Tyson’s legal team has now challenged the ability of her attorney to resubmit an amended complaint with the corrected dates — a legal scuffle that could pose serious roadblocks for the lawsuit against Tyson. A judge is expected to decide on the objection by Tyson’s legal team’s in the coming weeks, according to court filings.
The woman has accused Tyson of raping her in a limousine after they met at September’s, a now-defunct nightclub on Central Avenue that Tyson had been a frequent patron of for years. She alleges she was raped as they were traveling to pick up the her co-worker and friend. They were en route to a party at a State Street hotel, to which Tyson had invited the victim and her friend (The Times Union does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault without their consent.)
The civil complaint was filed under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which in 2022 suspended the statute of limitations on sexual assault allegations for a year, allowing the filing of lawsuits against individuals they have accused of sexual assault. In some cases, those lawsuits came decades after the alleged incidents.
In many cases, victims are unable to remember the specific dates of when they were abused, either because they were too young or because they waited years before coming forward with details of those incidents. That has aligned with a dawning understanding of trauma in the wake of sexual assaults, which experts have said can compel victims to suppress their memories of stressful or abusive situations for years.
But the matter has proved difficult to litigate. In New York, the Court of Claims, in reviewing cases under a similar law authorizing a year-long grace period known as the Child Victims Act, has been tasked with weighing in on whether the victims’ inability to remember the exact dates of their sexual abuse can jeopardize lawsuits they have filed against the state of New York.
State Attorney General Letitia James, whose office represents the state when public agencies or programs are implicated in Child Victims Act lawsuits, has argued that the Court of Claims should throw out dozens of cases where alleged sexual abuse victims, who were often young children or teenagers at the time of those incidents, cannot provide an exact date, time or location for the incidents.
The victim accusing Tyson is now 56, according to court documents, which would make her 22 at the time of the alleged incident. Tyson is 58.
In the request to amend the lawsuit, the alleged victim’s attorney, Darren Seilback of the New York City-based law firm Oddo and Babat, cited the “severe psychological trauma” she said the woman has faced for decades.
“As is common with abuse victims, it has been very difficult for plaintiff to relive this trauma and try to remember the exact details and facts surrounding the rape,” Seilback wrote in an October memo, citing the victim’s inability to remember how she got home the night of the rape as well as the confusion about the year. “Plaintiff’s decision to proceed with the date of March 1, 1991 was based on a good faith effort to tell her story as accurately as possible.”
But Tyson’s attorney, Daniel Rubin of the Albany law firm Girvin and Ferlazzo, has criticized the woman’s attorney for a “failure to evaluate” the evidence that led the victim to alter her timeline of the alleged incident.
That evidence includes logistical details based on her sister’s residence in New York, where the victim had been staying at the time of the incident.
“Plaintiff now claims that her attorneys simply allowed her to guess about the date of the alleged rape — rather than base the date on information which was clearly available to them through the plaintiff’s own records or by simply calling her sister,” Rubin wrote in a recent court filing “If true, this lack of diligence in the face of doubt as to the veracity of the allegation mandates denial of this motion. In essence, plaintiff and her attorneys are now saying that they knew plaintiff was allegedly unsure about the date, and rather than talk to key witnesses or review her own medical records, plaintiff made sworn statements about the date in the verified complaint and again at her deposition.”
Seilback declined to comment on the case and referred questions on the case to court documents. Rubin, Tyson’s attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.
In previous court filings, Seilback has said his firm conducted a thorough investigation into the allegations and determined them to be credible. He also referenced other allegations made against Tyson.
Tyson was convicted after a July 1991 sexual assault in Indianapolis in which he was accused of raping 18-year-old beauty-pageant contestant Desiree Washington. He spent three years in prison.
Tyson has long been a revered figure in upstate New York. Born in Brooklyn, he began training as a teenager in Catskill and spent significant time in the Hudson area in Columbia County. In 1985, he fought in his first match as a professional boxer at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany. That fight launched his prolific decades-long career.
