Hammer the Ginger Hammer
By Roger Goodell has said many things about the Ray Rice affair that are false. Which is probably for the best, because when he tries to explain what he’s actually thinking it’s outright appalling:
On Thursday, an anonymous NFL owner explained to The Wall Street Journal that Goodell was quick to drop the incident because Janay told him (during a meeting with six male NFL executives and the man who hit her, as Deadspin notes) that she felt she was partly to blame. He also accepted that she was knocked out when she fell, not from the punch. While that’s a textbook response from a victim of domestic violence, supposedly Goodell felt it would have been “insensitive” to question her story.
Even if the video had corroborated the boldfaced claim…what? Yes, clearly someone suffering further injury when falling down after being punched in the face by a professional athlete is completely unforeseeable, and the puncher should not be held accountable for these injuries. Ye gods.
Thus, the NFL is retroactively claiming that the reason it came down with a universally-derided two-game suspension in the first place is that it ignored hard evidence in favor of a first-person account given by the person accused of committing domestic violence. This is the league’s actual excuse!