Over at The Stacks, we've reprinted Pete Dexter's 1981 profile of Jim Brown, written 15 years after the legendary running back retired. Much of the profile is concerned with Brown's romantic and personal relationships, including those that earned him a reputation as an abuser of women.
From the profile:
A week before, a 20- or 21-year-old girl had talked to him about 10 minutes and suddenly said, "I'd like to go with you tonight, but if your thing is, you know, beating up women ...." He had laughed.
"People meet me," he'd said later, "they don't know what's goin' on. They're always waitin' for me to jump up and down and kick somebody's ass."
[...]
In a period of three months in 1965, Brown was accused of beating and sexually molesting two teenage girls. One dropped the charges, the other one went to court and lost. She filed a paternity suit then and lost that, too.
People who know Brown say that if he had done what she said, he wouldn't have gone to court and lied. "There's been lies written about me," he says, "there's been some truth, too. I'm no angel, but what I do, I tell the truth about."
In June of 1968, he was arrested and charged with assault with intent to commit murder when his girlfriend, a 22-year-old model named Eva Bohn-Chin, was found semi-conscious beneath the balcony of his Hollywood apartment. The neighbors had heard an argument and called the police.
You can read the entire feature below.