Everything changed for Ray Rice this Monday.
Last Sunday, Rice was an NFL star, an elite running back for the Baltimore Ravens. The past few months had been rocky after a domestic violence scandal: In February, Rice knocked his fiancée unconscious in an Atlantic City casino elevator. But on Sunday, as Rice served the first game of his resulting two-game suspension with the full support of his team and coaches, that scandal must have seemed firmly in his past.
On Monday morning, however, TMZ leaked security camera footage of the incident itself. The act of violence spread like wildfire across social media, generating huge cries of protest for Rice’s light sentence. This public pressure forced more decisive action from the Ravens and the NFL: The Ravens cut Rice’s contract, and the NFL handed him an indefinite suspension. In all likelihood, Rice will never again play a down of professional football.
The question is not whether Rice deserves this severe punishment. As anyone who has seen the video (and that describes every football fan in America) can attest, Rice’s act of cruelty was horrifying and deserved a severe consequence. But the NFL knew it had been horrifying before the release of the video. So what changed its mind on Monday?
“[The video] is something we saw for the first time today. All of us,” said John Harbaugh, head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, on Monday. “It changed things, of course. It made things a little bit different.”
But what did it really change?
The released footage was shocking, but it changed none of the facts, which have been undisputed for months. On Feb. 19, leaked security footage from the casino (also from TMZ) showed Rice dragging the unconscious body of then-fiancée Janay Palmer (the two are now married) out of the elevator. The rest of the story came to light over the next few days: The couple had a heated argument which turned physical, and Rice threw a punch. Although he was charged with aggravated assault, Rice avoided trial by enrolling in an intervention program for first-time offenders. Before the release of TMZ’s second video, counseling and a two-game suspension were all the consequences Rice would have faced for knocking out a woman he claims to love with a punch to the head.
Harbaugh says the video “changed things,” but Harbaugh is fudging: In reality, the video changed one thing only. The security footage released on Monday did not make Rice’s heinous act more disgusting. It only made it impossible to ignore.
In one day, TMZ’s video blew away the smokescreen of blame projected by Rice, the Ravens, and the NFL since February.
In May, the Baltimore Ravens tweeted out that “Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.”
In his press conference, Rice apologized to his team, his coaches, and his fans (notably missing from that list is the woman he abused) for “this situation that me and my wife were in.”
To cap it off, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell handed Rice a two-game suspension, which has been widely noted as half the regular duration of a first-time suspension for marijuana possession.
So while the video released Monday changed no facts in this case, it did remind everyone of one very important thing: The “situation” that Rice and his wife were in, and that Janay Rice deeply regrets, was a two-second span in which a man who bench presses 400 pounds clobbered a woman who fell, hit her head on the elevator railing, and then lay unconscious for minutes on a casino floor.
The video simply left the NFL — now facing a complete PR meltdown — with no other choice but to cut ties with Rice completely. In doing so, the NFL displayed not a commitment to stamping out domestic violence, but shrewd business sense.
Goodell has admitted that the league should have taken a harsher stance on Rice from the beginning, and the NFL has significantly toughened its punishments for domestic abuse in the future. They had no other choice, given the public outcry.
But the delay between crime and punishment, and the fact that Rice only really received justice after TMZ’s second video went viral, is a stain on the integrity of the entire NFL, which cracks down harder on players who use steroids to score touchdowns than on players who use their honestly-gained muscle to beat their wives.
The penalty which Rice received Monday night may not have been too little but it was certainly too late, and the NFL, already rocked by concerns about player endangerment and crime, will have a hard time overcoming this latest blow to its integrity.
“One thing I can say is that sometimes in life, you will fail,” Rice said in a particularly poor moment of his conference. “But I won’t call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.”
America has finally seen Janay Palmer get knocked down and not get up, but the failure rests firmly on the shoulders of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens, and the National Football League.