The most heart-wrenching part of Monday’s publication of the video of NFL player Ray Rice’s violent assault of his fiancee wasn’t the stomach-churning punch that knocked her unconscious. It is that it took this horrific visual evidence for the league and Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, to finally punish Rice for it.
As Amy Davidson, executive editor of newyorker.com, put it: “But what did people think it looked like when a football player knocked out a much smaller woman? Like a fair fight?”
NFL officials, including Commissioner Roger Goodell, had not previously seen the video, which was posted Monday by the website TMZ, league spokesman Greg Aiello said on Twitter. Hours after TMZ posted the video, the Ravens announced the team had terminated Rice’s contract. Shortly afterward, Goodell, who was loudly criticized — including by Gov. Paul LePage — for suspending Rice for just two games when he was arraigned on an assault charge in May, suspended Rice indefinitely.
Why did Goodell and the Ravens act so hastily when the video became public yet assess little or no punishment (in the case of the Ravens) when a grand jury, presented with evidence describing the assault and a video showing its aftermath (Rice dragging his unconscious fiancee from the elevator), decided Rice had committed a crime, punishable by up to five years in jail?
Were they, as Davidson wrote, waiting for evidence that Janay Palmer, now Janay Rice, deserved to be violently attacked that February night in Atlantic City?
In May, the Baltimore Ravens tweeted that Mrs. Rice “deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.”
It wasn’t until the video of the assault was posted Monday that the team removed this tweet from its feed.
This insidious thinking pervades much of the discussion around domestic violence. It is a major reason that domestic violence remains so common, accounting for half the homicides in Maine.
As long as there is a belief that a victim deserves to be brutally attacked, victims won’t come forward, won’t testify against their abusers and perpetrators will too often feel they can get away with the abuse.