He might have done something bad, that can’t be confirmed and is a matter of supposition. He struck back at someone who had hit him. According to the poster a few posts up, both parties were arrested. If she hit him, then after a further non-violent altercation, he hit her, that could be assault. If he hit her as a reflex action in immediate response to her assault, or to subdue her as she continued her assault, I would say he didn’t do anything bad at all.
It’s not a question of whether she did something bad, but whether her actions effect whether he did something bad. Certainly they mitigate what some want to characterise as an unprovoked battering on his part, at the very least, and therefore her actions are entirely relevant, and not a dodge of any proportions whatsoever.
Why all the cynicism? Do you completely discount the possibility that she honestly believes what she apparently said to Goodell and perhaps has decided she bares an insubstantial amount of responsibility in the matter?
What are you taking about? Clearly, there is a LONG history of domestic violence committed by men against women. Either way, I was not arguing that anyone be given impunity to assault others. That was the entire point.
I agree. Did you misread by post?
What the fuck are you talking about? How does this relate at all to what I said?
What I wrote was very straightforward. It’s ludicrous to think a suspension was going to ruin Rice’s image. His image was ruined by video footage of Rice beating his wife insensible. If this is what she said to the NFL, they should hire her.
But it’s not just the charge that’s from years in the past, it’s the coverage. All the recent results for her name are about this that’s happening now, I only turned up the theft charge because I included “hit” in my search, and she was apparently intending to “hit a club” in her stolen gear. And I myself, were I to be considered a “fan” of someone who appears to be an American Football player, would regard that as the second greatest insult to which mortal man can be subject.
I just mention it because establishing a history of poor character and criminality make it more likely that she is also more likely to initiate acts of violence. Possibly she has been habitually abusing this chap, and he finally snapped. Possibly not. We’re playing percentages at this point.
No, the apparent fact that she initiated the assault is what changes everything, and the character assassination isn’t happening, unless it is orchestrated by DuckDuckGo’s search algorithm.
What is par for the course is the complete focus on the female “victim”, even if she is herself at least as much sinning as sinned against.
How do you know he did something fucked up, or the extent to how fucked up it was? Again, we would not even be talking about this if Ray Rice was a woman (like Hope Solo), or his “victim” was a man. It’s not really a dodge at all; that is the crux of the matter. Ray Rice isn’t viewed as a wife beater and isn’t vilified for knocking a man who attacked him unconscious. He might not have even been arrested. We are far more likely to entertain mitigating circumstances when it isn’t a man hitting a woman. I get the history and logic behind that, but it doesn’t make it fair to mete out punishment on that basis.
The evidence we have is that both parties were arrested at the time and that charges will almost certainly be dropped. I think we can safely assume that the video we have not seen is not of Ray Rice brutally accosting her with no provocation. I cannot see how he would have avoided charges if that were the case. I also can’t see how she was charged if she was not clearly participating in the physical altercation. Why the need to view what he did as more “fucked up” than what any other athlete who has gotten into a fight has done? Why is his situation more worthy of punishment?
Well, going back to the OP, whether this Smith’s statements were justifiable. He was saying that women should take responsibility for provoking an attack. Some people have interpreted this as an equivalent of saying women in short skirts are asking to be raped, when in fact in this case the provocation was a violent assault, and I must agree that women wishing not to be beaten should refrain from committing assault, and women losing fights they have started should take some responsibility for their actions.
Yet he has been punished and reprimanded for his statements. Meanwhile, no-one is being punished or reprimanded for defending the other violent party in this case, or for demanding punishment or heavier punishment for the apparent victim of the original assault.
That is the inequity here. A woman fending off an assault will be seen as a hero. Even a premeditated murder can be excused with claims of batter woman syndrome. Even Lorena Bobbitt just claimed her husband had tried to rape her and got off, although it was untrue. The Smith referenced in the OP only stated that a woman should take a part of the responsibility for assaulting a man and he is suspended from his job.
Not at all. I mean, I don’t know that that isn’t the case here – Stephen A. Smith is a on-air douchebag, and I have no problem believing that this was all said after Ray Rice called him and said “Hey, yo, do me a solid and drag this bitch down.”
I also have no problem believing he was aware of the claims that she had hit first, but for whatever reason was holding off on that, and he was annoyed at the selective chivalry that a woman physically attacking a man is only kinda-sorta bad, but the man who hits back is a horrible brute.
I could also believe that he’s a guy that spends a lot of time around pro athletes, is sympathetic to their side of things, and knows a lot of stories that never get reported, and knows the stories behind the stories about a lot of the ones that do, that he has a much more informed and cynical take about the kinds of women pro athletes tend to consort with, and that he was frustrated at seeing another case where people looked at the case through the lens of their presuppositions and based on what they read in the paper instead of waiting to learn the facts.
Heck, it’s possible that Smith was pissed off to see an African-American man whom he knows and considers a good guy painted as a violent thug, and while he held off on saying it, his real concern was the racial imagery at work here.
I can think of all kinds of reasons for him to say what he said, and I have no idea which ones are true. If I had to guess, it’s mostly #3, with a heavy emphasis on the sympathetic part. But that’s purely a guess, and as I noted, I’m not a fan of the guy in general. Hence, I’ll focus on the actual words he actually said, not any “well, what he really means is” mindreading.
I think a year-long suspension might have “ruined” his career and image. The vast majority of people will never see the tape or hear about this incident. I guarantee even modestly coherent FF players will draft Rice not knowing he won’t be playing for 2 games. A year long suspension (or even 8 games) is a MUCH bigger deal financially and reputationally. The point I think she was making was not so much that the situation up until that point was neutral in terms of his image, but rather that further punitive action would aggravate things considerably.
For there is no such footage. There is, apparently, footage of him taking her unconscious from the lift in which the altercation took place. Possibly that might damage his image, but I don’t see that it would necessarily damage it more than a suspension. If there really was a video of him mercilessly pummeling his wife, that would be different. The optics there would be worse. But that video exists only in your imagination.
I’m not sure what effect getting beaten up by a girl would have on his image. But that’s not strictly relevant, as he seems to have won.
There is such a long history. There is an equally long history of women abusing men. Literally equally long, in the sense of stretching as far into the past, and also equally prevalent in the present day.
You said it was “fine” to believe a man should not hit a women under any circumstances, whether in self-defence, or if she is raping a child and you wish to stop her, or if you are Jack Bauer and there is a nuclear bomb with a ticking time bomb on it. Just to pick three every-day situations where hitting a woman is fine.
I suppose it’s possible that hitting someone who has hit you could be assault, but in a situation where someone else is “hitting” you the situation is clearly ongoing and striking to bring about a cessation of violence on the part of the other party would therefore not fairly be characterised as assault.
When you type Ray Rice’s name into Google, here’s what you get:
Ray Rice video
Ray Rice wife
Ray Rice suspension
Ray Rice news
Granted that that’s after the suspension, but you’re wrong about public awareness of the beating.
Again, this sounds like the reasoning Palmer and the NFL would use: he beat the shit out of his wife, there’s video of it, it’s all over the internet… but don’t suspend him for too long because it might hurt his image.
We are truly through the looking glass here. Anyway weren’t you saying earlier that there was footage of her hitting him first?
I’m not sure why you said this, but it does sound a little like you’re cheering for the guy.
Re: 1 and 2, unless it turns out on the full tape that she had a weapon of some kind and Rice’s action were influenced by real fear of serious injury/death, these don’t mitigate things for me. “He/she started it” didn’t work in elementary school, and it doesn’t work now.
Re: 3, as I understand it if the fiancee/wife doesn’t want to cooperate, the prosecution has to take what it can get.
Re: 4, there’s all sorts of motivations for why this might have happened, and under most of them I wouldn’t take it as a point in his favor.
Re: 5, I can see this and give it some credence. It’s the major reason that I’d be at least okay with four games. If there was a history of violence here, repeat offense, whatever, I think we start talking about 8 games pretty quickly.
I’m pretty consistent on this in that I wish there would be more suspensions for basic assaults as well, particularly when we have video (rather than having to rely on “he said/he said”). But domestic assaults tend to have other psychological and behavioral factors involved, which does make them qualitatively different.
I’ll give you “many” on the second part. Doesn’t mean it’s right or okay, or should be the default response. Of course, now we’re talking about bigger picture stuff like the culture of violence, particularly as it applies to athletes playing an extremely violent sport.
We cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, but the fact that she was also arrested certainly provides evidence to that effect. That and the fact that she ended up unconscious, which, if it had happened on an initial assault by the man, would have precluded the possibility of her retaliating. Therefore the only alternative to her provocation would seem to be that he hit her first, she hit him back, and then he laid her out, in which case her arrest would be unlikely.
On the balance of probabilities, in other words, we can say she provoked the attack, we merely can’t see it happen on video. Evidence militates in that direction and no other. We don’t know it to be the case, but we have reason to believe it and it is the most likely scenario.
On the other hand, even if we couldn’t say what happened in there at all that would still be insufficient grounds to punish the man in question, let alone to punish someone just for defending him, as happened with this Smith. Hence, if you wish to declare victory on this point it does demolish your entire argument. Perhaps she had a fainting fit and he is being punished for his heroic rescue, if we’re going to pretend not knowing what went on in there means we have no idea what went on in there.
We really cannot say any of those things. You are motivated to say or believe those kinds of things, I guess, but speculation would be a kind word for them. They’re all WAGs, or like I said earlier, shit you just made up.
As far as I’m aware there is only video of his taking her out of the lift. Presumably if you’re right about there being footage of the incident itself which is currently unavailable to the public then it would show what happened, which I think it most likely to be her initiating the incident.
I was just curious what the public responce would be. Judging by the cases with Hope Solo and Mary J Blige and Halle Berry’s ex it probably wouldn’t be sympathetic. Women get more sympathy for being violent than men do for being victims.
Actually it does. Legally, I mean. Provocation is a mitigating factor which would result in a shorter sentence. It doesn’t work in school because the adults are interested in order rather than justice, and because facts are likely to be hard to ascertain. Therefore her initiating the violence is, both legally and morally, a mitigating factor. If he’s in one of those “stand your ground” places he could probably have beat her to death and been fine, but around these parts he’d have to use the minimum necessary force to subdue her if he wanted to claim self defence. A single punch, albeit a hard one, might qualify. If not then the fact that he was only responding would still be a mitigating factor.
While it was clear a while back you went from impassioned defense to crazy town, there is no need to pretend the history of domestic violence is an equitable distribution between men and women. Such a contention is either mindbogglingly ignorant or willfully blind to the facts.
Fine meaning not meaning morally correct or appropriate, but rather well within one’s rights to do so. I clearly stated my belief that such a contention was illogical for some of the reasons you highlighted.
Which means nothing given that the only people who google “Ray Rice” are people who know who Ray Rice is, and who care about him. Do you even think 25% of people know who he is let alone have seen the video? How many posts are there about this incident on this messageboard? The videos of the incident on Youtube all have under a million views. There is a Hillary Duff video posted a day ago with almost 5 million views already. Have you seen that video? I sure haven’t, and I am not entirely confident I could pick Hillary Duff out of a lineup of similar looking people. Yes, he was and still would have been viewed as a dirtbag and a pariah by some without the suspension, but the longer he was out, the tougher it would have been to revive his career and image. His only chance to do that is to play well and be a model public figure and he cannot do that if the Ravens cut him, or if he can’t play for a full season (especially given his mediocre season last year).
No, I didn’t say that, and it’s not as if you couldn’t have done a search to confirm that if that was your suspicion. I did say it reasonable to assume she did hit him first given in the span of an elevator ride, she was knocked out and that she was charged with assault as well (among other things).
As far as I can tell, I’m focusing on what he said, too. He said was he’s sick and tired of men being vilified and accused of things, and he wants us to “dig in” to the victim. I believe him. I think that’s what he meant.
I do think that he doesn’t believe Ray Rice should have been vilified is the most obvious inference to draw, but sure, he didn’t explicitly say that. That’s why I asked well, why else was it relevant to Ray Rice’s suspension?