Ravens RB Ray Rice just had a press conference addressing the incident in which he dragged his unconscious fiance out of an elevator after apparently knocking her out.
I don’t think i’ve ever seen a bigger failure of a press conference, and i say that as someone who already has a rather cynical, jaded view of the sports apology.
It’s all the usual apologies, “working to become a better person,” etc., etc., etc. He also says:
At a press conference where he’s talking about knocking his fiance (now wife) unconscious, that’s pretty awesome word selection!
He had to keep going back to his phone to see what he needed to say. It was beyond awkward and embarrassing; it was a train wreck. He let his wife have about a minute at the end, and part of her contribution was:
Yeah, my jaw got right in the way of his fist. And then i made it hard for him to get me out of the elevator by slumping into unconsciousness.
Sheesh, what a fucking disaster. I hope the Ravens or the league have the balls to suspend him.
ETA: You can see the whole thing here. It was live-tweeted by the Ravens’ Twitter feed.
I was going to say something sarcastic about the utter stupidity of having a press conference like this and the NFL’s ongoing ‘we don’t have a wife-beating problem, now buy our pink crap’ campaign. But that’s actually pretty frightening as a battered wife syndrome type of moment.
Whoever coached Rice on his speech should be fired first. Whoever wrote his wife’s statement “I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night” should resign from the human race.
That was my first thought on seeing the interview.
These sorts of things are usually carefully prepared and stage-managed. They don’t just send the lunkhead out there and tell him to say whatever pops into his head. They have their PR people prepare a carefully-worded statement, custom designed for the particular circumstances of the case.
They didn’t even give him a piece of paper, or notecards, with his talking points, He used his phone, and on a couple of occasions he lost his place and had to scroll through on the phone to find what he wanted to say. It made what was already an awkward occasion into a total farce, and pointed up how fake these things are.
It could be, i guess, that Ray Rice is just too useless to pull off something like this. I haven’t watched him give press conferences before, so i don’t know if his performance was about up to his usual standard. In terms of presentation, at least, his wife did much better, although, as you say, that line about regretting her own role in the incident was staggering in its tone-deafness. No way was that her choice of words, i’ll bet. She looked unhappy through the whole thing; i’d love to know what she really thought of it all.
I guess that’s possible, but man, it feels like every time there’s a thread about an athlete being accused of attacking a woman, you accuse the woman of wanting money. It’s a troubling pattern.
I think “troubling pattern” is generous. His claims in the Jameis Winston case were completely unfounded, completely offensive, and completely repudiated by investigations into the case. His contributions in that thread were the type of apologism that you’d expect from some football booster slut-shamer. It was almost embarrassing to read.
I was trying to be understated and probably went too far. It’s regular as clockwork, and in this case it’s not even relevant. OK, pretend she married him for his money. It’s his money and his choice, and what does it have to do with the NFL’s joke of a suspension? Still, thank goodness there’s someone willing to defend rich, powerful, popular men from any woman who dares say a bad word about them.
And the Ravens organization celebrates that by posting about the standing ovation he got on their website.
One of their P.R. guys writes about what a great guy Ray Rice is, not allowing any questions at their press conference, and their coach says the suspension isn’t a big deal.
Not that any of this is a surprise from the team who celebrate someone who helped his friends get away with murder as their best player, but damn they don’t have to make it this easy to hate the Ravens.
I’m done with football. I was almost sure to quit this season anyway, but this is a nice shove out the door. Like the constant flow of brain damage stories and the attempt to fuck their own retirees wasn’t bad enough, they’ve decided they’ll soft-pedal a guy who beats the crap out of his fiancee and the team’s fans just eat it up. That’s revolting.
Yes it is- but apparently, not revolting enough to prevent Rice’s fiancee from marrying him anyway.
Ray Rice is a creep. That goes without saying. Any man who beats a woman is.
But he’s in some kind of twisted relationship. Any normal, sane healthy woman would have left Rice after the first time he hit her. She didn’t.
Any normal, sane healthy woman would have friends and family to step in and get her as far from Rice as possible. SHe eiher doesn’t have such support, or those people have completely dropped the ball.
There’s some kind of sick dynamic here that I can’t and don’t understand.
Do you understand that tens of thousands of victims of domestic violence stay with their abusers? This is not exactly a unique situation here. And part of the reason that this continues is that so many people in society continue to blame the abused person for staying, rather than the abuser for abusing. Fear is a powerful motivator, and if the pattern in this relationship is at all similar to thousands of other cases of domestic abuse, then it’s likely that fear plays a part in her decisions.
Hell, i think it was unconscionable of the NFL to have Ray Rice and Janay Palmer come as a couple to meet with Roger Goodell to discuss the incident. Reports of the incident suggest that Palmer, at that meeting, accepted some of the blame for what happened, but it’s complete bullshit to put the victim in a room next to her abuser and then ask her to give her side of events. What the fuck do they think she’ll say, sitting right next to the 250-pound guy who has already knocked her unconscious once?
This incident has left me feeling a bit like Marley23. I’ve grown to love football since moving to the United States, and my team (the Ravens, ironically enough) have won the Superbowl twice since i became a fan. But this issue, combined with all the other bullshit that the NFL pulls, and combined also with the actions of the NCAA regarding college football (which is effectively the NFL’s unpaid minor league), i think i might ditch football altogether. I already watch more Premier League soccer games than football games anyway, and my wife would also be happy enough if the TV weren’t turned to football every Sunday afternoon.
I won’t lie: i may not be able to do it. I’ve always been a huge sports fan, and giving up things that i like is hard to do. And i realize that, even if i can do it, my leaving is just a tiny spit in the massive ocean of NFL popularity, and will have no real effect at all. But the only way an organization like the NFL will change is when their revenue is threatened, and the only way that’s going to happen is if people stop watching.
Yes, I DO know that. It chnages nothing of what I said.
I ALSO know that if I EVER hit my wife, she would call the police, get me arrested, divorce me, and make sure I never came near her or our son again. I would NEVER get a second chance.
That’s how MOST women would respond to battery.
Janay Rice wasn’t married to Ray when the publicized beating incident was videotaped (I’m SURE that wasn’t the first or only time he hit her). She went ahead and married him AFTER that!!!
She wasn’t a destitute ghetto Mom with nowhere to go and no other way to support herself. She had options. She coud and should have run (not walked) away.
Ray Rice is a bad man. He deserved worse than he got. But I remain convinced that his relationship with Janay is a sick one on both sides.
Once again, you’re showing your ignorance of how this works. You can’t simply extrapolate from your own experience, and castigate others for not doing what you (or your wife) would have done.
Yes, your wife would go straight to the cops and never give you a second chance, but that’s precisely because any domestic violence on your part would be a dramatic and sudden departure for her experience, and from the atmosphere in which she has lived for years and years.
Basically, your wife would do this stuff because she’s been raised and conditioned to understand that domestic violence is wrong, because she does not have a visceral fear of you, and because she recognizes that she is better off alone than with a partner who physically abuses her.
Women (and men, for that matter) who are the victims of domestic violence often stick around precisely because they lack these types of social and psychological background and conditioning. They were, in some cases, raised in households where abuse was common, and they often take up with partners who exhibit abusive patterns early on in the relationship.
Again, an incredibly simplistic “analysis.” Domestic abuse is not just a “ghetto” or working-class phenomenon. It happens behind the walls of plenty of nice houses in quiet, tree-lined suburbs. While economic insecurity does play a part in keeping some poor women in abusive relationships, similar factors are often relevant in many relationships where, you would think, the woman in question have somewhere to go, and some other way to support herself.
I agree that it would be great if every victim called the police, pressed charges, and left the abuser. And i’m sure that law enforcement get frustrated having to go back to the same house over and over because the victim won’t press charges and won’t leave. And i’m sure that doctors and counselors and social workers and friends and family are driven mad by the fact that apparently intelligent people will keep making excuses for their abusers, and will stay with them. But this doesn’t make it any more productive to rail against the victims.
Your whole argument basically boils down to, “Well, in her situation, i wouldn’t deal with it the same way that she did, and neither would the other people i know. Therefore, she has to bear some of the blame.” But that’s precisely the wrong way to think about domestic violence.
I should add, by the way, that, despite what i said above, there is also no guarantee that your wife would act in the way that you assume she would act if you did begin to abuse her. Plenty of domestic abuse victims seem, to others who know and love them, to be strong and independent people. It is not uncommon for people to be stunned that a friend or family member was a victim of abuse, and to be equally surprised that the person didn’t come forward to report the abuse.