“I did what he told me to do, yeah.” That was Mike Tyson’s entire explanation when Andy Cohen asked if he really handed Diddy’s handwritten pardon request to President Trump.
The former heavyweight champ made the admission on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live. According to Tyson, the request came during a phone call with the jailed music mogul, who asked him to get a letter to the president.
Tyson didn’t stop at the letter. He also took aim at how prosecutors built their case, telling Cohen, “They used a 110 year old rule to get him.”
He was talking about the Mann Act, a federal law passed in 1910 that makes it a crime to transport people across state lines for prostitution or “immoral purposes.”
Prosecutors used that statute to convict Diddy on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. The jury acquitted him of the heavier sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
To Tyson, reaching back more than a century to secure a conviction looks like a stretch. Prosecutors would likely see it differently, since the law is still on the books and a jury agreed it applied.
That tension has followed the case since the verdict, with supporters calling it overreach and critics pointing out that a conviction is still a conviction.
The letter itself was meant as a final push for presidential clemency. It didn’t work.
In January 2026, Trump confirmed he had received the pardon request and turned it down. He brought up the criticism Diddy aimed at him during his first term and described the mogul as “half-innocent,” a phrase that managed to sound like a partial defense and a dismissal at the same time.
So Tyson kept his word to a friend, and the man on the receiving end simply said no. It’s a rare look at how celebrity loyalty plays out when the stakes are federal prison time and the person deciding holds a grudge.
Diddy is currently at FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey. He was sentenced on October 3, 2025, to 50 months behind bars, plus a $500,000 fine and five years of supervised release.
Things have gotten worse for him since then. His release date was recently moved from January 21, 2028, to March 2, 2028, after reports claimed he was getting special treatment inside.
Those reports alleged that other inmates were cooking and cleaning for him and giving him massages. There were also claims about contraband alcohol and cellphones being smuggled in.
Even an eventual release won’t close the book. Diddy is facing more than 70 civil lawsuits across the country, and with the pardon route shut down for now, Tyson’s phone may not be the last one he calls.
