Long before there were Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, there was Robin Givens (right). The actress was once a popular tabloid subject, especially during her troubled one-year marriage to boxer Mike Tyson. She also was portrayed as a gold digger — remember those unfounded rumors of an affair with Michael Jordan? “I never heard that one,” Givens, now 42, told us when we sat down with her last week. “That’s so ridiculous.” Givens writes candidly in her new book “Grace Will Lead Me Home.” She said she had to muster the nerve to discuss not only her abusive marriage to Tyson, but also the history of abuse in her family. “I had no desire to just deal with [Tyson],” Givens told us. “For me, what was interesting about my situation was, ‘How did I get there?’ My grandmother was in an abusive relationship. Then my mother was in an abusive relationship. There’s this sense of repeating a cycle. You don’t want to be cliched, but I married a man very much like my father. There’s this sense of working to fix something that my family has been trying to fix for a long time.”
———
[email protected] Terry Armour co-hosts “The Stan and Terry Show” weekdays at 11 a.m. on WCKG-FM 105.9. Personals was compiled by Alan Leo from Tribune news services and staff reports.