Essence

Credit: Everett Collection Givens described her life as "hell" to Barbara Walters.

There was no prenuptial agreement. Tongues wagged. Givens bristles at the thought that she didn’t marry Mike Tyson for love. "Gold digger? I wish," says Givens. "It’s a word that I hate. I can support myself incredibly well. We can go through a lot of women who are married to men and they don't make as much as the men do. Eddie (Murphy) is a dear friend of mine. Look at his ex-wife. They were allowed to just be in love. Why not me?"

"I DIDN'T RECEIVE ONE DIME"
In an ill-fated move in the fall of 1988, the couple decided to talk about their relationship with Barbara Walters on the ABC prime-time news program 20/20. That one hour sit-down is now one of the most infamous celebrity interviews ever. The cameras were there in the couple's 30-room Revival mansion built in 1897 in Bernardsville, New Jersey, as Givens described her life as "pure hell." With Walters prodding her, the actress told a rapt audience of millions: "He shakes, he pushes, he swings. He—sometimes, I think he's trying to scare me. And just recently I’ve become afraid." Givens said Tyson was "manic depressive." Questions abounded. If he was sick, why wasn’t she standing by him? Givens says being in an abusive relationship is complicated, without easy answers. “When you love someone who can also do you harm, it’s confusing.” In retrospect, she says she would have changed some things about the interview, but she still doesn’t regret that she did it. "Do I wish I could take some things back? Absolutely," she says. "But I was trying to hold on to my sanity." What she didn’t tell us that night, but details in the book, was how he once punched her in the left temple and knocked her to the floor, held a knife at her throat, and choked her while she was filming ABC's television movie adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place. Two days after the interview with Walters, police were summoned to their home, where an explosive Tyson began throwing furniture out the window, while Givens, her mother, her sister and a family friend cowered in the laundry room. Givens says she had had enough: "I saw what I'd put my sister and family through and I couldn't allow it." And though she first retained a high-powered divorce attorney to represent her in their divorce, today she says, "I didn’t receive one dime."

"I WAS 'HOT' BUT I WAS HURTING"
By the time she left Tyson, Givens was damaged goods to the public. She was labeled The Most Hated Woman in America in the fall of 1988 by several outlets after a CNN NewsNight viewer poll reported that 93 percent of respondents said the couple’s divorce was her fault. The venom in the air against Givens was palpable. Once a woman walked up to her on the street and yelled, "He should have kicked your ass. I wish he would have killed you."

And yet Givens tried to put her career and life back on track. "I was a woman not wanting to be defeated," she says. "I didn’t want somebody to have gotten the best of me." In 1990, director Bill Duke cast her in the decidedly grown-up role of Imabelle, a charming minx, in his indie film A Rage in Harlem, an adaptation of the Chester Himes novel set in 1950's Harlem. Starring opposite Forest Whitaker and Danny Glover, Givens threw herself into the role. She followed up Rage with perhaps her best-known role as sexy cosmetics executive Jacqueline Broyer in Boomerang, former boyfriend Murphy’s glossy corporate love story. Givens arguably walked away with the movie, no small feat with a cast that included Halle Berry, Martin Lawrence and Grace Jones. Givens has never seen Boomerang, perhaps her greatest film triumph, in its entirety. She doesn't remember much of those days except that her agents were telling her she was "hot," while she was feeling "sad, confused and disconnected." She adds: "I was 'hot' but I was hurting. I chose to deal with my hurt."

Two years after Boomerang’s release, Givens moved to a small town just outside Hilton Head, South Carolina. There was much that was new in Givens’s life, including a son, Buddy, whom she adopted at the beginning of 1994. But old demons haunted her. Although she took on the occasional television or film role, Givens withdrew from public life. Instead of front-page headlines, her short-lived 1997 marriage to tennis instructor Svetozar Marinkovic (they separated after one day) was relegated to the tabloid news briefs. After the birth in 1999 of her second son, Billy, with White tennis player Murphy Jensen, whom she never married, she returned to television to host the talk show Forgive or Forget. Again, Givens made headlines, but insists that she had nothing to do with the ouster of TV personality Mother Love, the older Black woman who had created the show. Love didn't take the firing well. Petitions circulated to restore Love as host. Though Givens's ratings were decent, after a few months the show was canceled.

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Pick up the July issue of ESSENCE with Kerry Washington on newsstands June 9, 2007.

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