Personal Life
In 1971, two months after they met, Griffith married Mercedes (Sadie) Donastrog who was a member of the dance troupe, Prince Rupert and the Slave Girls at the time. Griffith adopted Donastorg's daughter.
After retiring from boxing, Griffith worked as a corrections officer at the Secaucus Juvenile Dentention Facility.
In 1992, Griffith was viciously beaten and almost killed on a New York City street, after leaving a gay bar near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He was in the hospital for four months after the assault. It was not clear whether the violence was motivated by hatred of gays.
Griffith was quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying "I like men and women both. But I don't like that word: homosexual, gay or faggot. I don't know what I am. I love men and women the same, but if you ask me which is better... I like women."
Today, Griffith requires full time care and suffers from pugilistic dementia.
Read more about this topic: Emile Griffith
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)