[TV orNotTV] Ray Rice Press Conference

[PGage]

Rice gave a 17 minute press conference this morning, to which the immediate reaction on ESPN was overwhelmingly positive (so far I have seen two former players almost crying, and a female columnist, both seemed impressed).

I was much less so. Rice spent most of the time talking about how the real victim the night he punched his then girlfriend (now wife) and dragged her out of an Atlantic City hotel elevator was himself. While he refused to talk about whatever damage he imposed on her, he talked at great length about the pain he will now have to suffer living with this, and how much the thought that his now 2 year old daughter will one day find out about it on Google (Hint: Ray, you might want to tell her about it before she googles it).

He said repeatedly that his wife "can do not wrong" - a phrase which in my experience is a red flag, since it often marks an overreaction learned "in counseling" to an initial tendency to blame the victim for the violence. 

An even larger red flag was his reference several times to the Biblical model of the husband being the head of the family. This is code in fundamentalist Christianity to a doctrine known as "male headship", which teaches that women must submit and be subordinate to the absolute authority of their husband. Many observers believe that this doctrine actually increases the probability of domestic violence, as men who subscribe to it tend to believe that it is their right and responsibility to punish both children and wives (there is little difference in their view between the two) for any perceived disobedience or imperfection. OTOH, many fundamentalists are aware of this problem, and have begun trying to counter it with the message, heard in Rice's comments this morning, that his responsibility "as a Man" (which means, as the head of and leader of the family) is to exercise his power and leadership without violence. This of course is better, but in my observation can lead to troubling kinds of emotional and psychological manipulation and control.

I did not hear anyone ask him if he agreed with the apparent stand of the NFL, that smoking marijuana was a more serious offense than punching a girlfriend. He did say that he was never going to appeal the punishment, even if it has been 4 or 6 games.

Lurking behind this case is the likelihood that the reason Rice was not convicted of any crime, and not given a more serious penalty from the NFL, was that his girlfriend/wife took responsibility for the violence, refused to press charges or testify against him, and told both the court and the NFL that she has been intoxicated and maybe even initiated the violence by hitting him. At least twice Rice condemned "domestic violence" in general, and then specified "especially man on woman violence", which I take as a remnant of an earlier argument that he made that most of the violence that night was "woman on man", and that he was just defending himself.

It may be true that she was behaving badly and started the violence (this happens fairly often) and it is also true that often it is not true, but women say it because they have internalized the abuser's propaganda that the violence was her own fault for being less than perfect. In either case, Rice's apparent fixation on this is troubling, as it is a less obvious but still serious attempt to shift responsibility for the violence away from himself (his repeated and ostentatious explicit taking of responsibility can be read as more of a principled responsibility, in which he as head of the family is responsible for all bad actions. His wife can "do no wrong" because as a subordinate woman in the relationship she is not a responsible actor). All of this can make repeated violence more likely.

Ray Rice has a baby face, and comes across as a nice, likable guy - which he probably is. Popular culture has made "domestic violence" into such a stigmatized crime that it is difficult to imagine nice, regular men as perpetrators of it, which is a problem. All kinds of men hit women - some do it only once, others do it several times a week for years. I was raised with a strict boys-do-no-hit-girls imperative, which is probably not a bad rule; a more accurate rule would be that stronger and bigger people should not his smaller and weaker people. Assuming this really was the first time Rice hit a woman, he may not be a horrible person; he may really have made a really bad "mistake", and there may be a good chance that he will never do it again.

However nothing I saw this morning reassured me about him, and if the "counseling" he referred to was some kind of religiously based service rooted in the fundamentalist assumption that men are the rightful heads of their families to whom wives owe obedience and submission, then I am much, much more worried about him. 

http://espn.go.com/blog/baltimore-ravens/post/_/id/11317/baltimore-ravens-preseason-live

[do...@flids.net]

"I did not hear anyone ask him if he agreed with the apparent stand of the NFL, that smoking marijuana was a more serious offense than punching a girlfriend. He did say that he was never going to appeal the punishment, even if it has been 4 or 6 games."

See, this is what I don't get (and why I'm not commenting on any other parts of your message): what are people expecting him to do?  If I get arrested and go before a judge and he gives me some suspended sentence and puts me on parole for a year, why on earth would I tell the judge "oh, no, your honor...that's not right.  I should do at least a few months of hard time"?????

Whatever Ray Rice and his wife did to each other is now over.  They settled it to the satisfaction of the judicial system and (at least as importantly) they settled it between themselves.  We as the public should be done with Ray Rice, and I couldn't possibly care less about his opinion on the matter.

Our attention at this point should be the NFL and Roger Goodell's "punishment" (air quotes to indicate snarkiness) and anybody who tries to defend it on its face.  It's really pointless to try argue that the 2-game suspension makes it a less serious offense than marijuana.  Nobody gets suspended for smoking pot, per se...they get suspended for violating the league's substance abuse policy.  And to get any suspension at all, they have to have already been busted multiple times for violating that policy.  No, the NFL doesn't say that smoking weed is worse than domestic abuse; the punishments for substance abuse are mandated by the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players' union, so the NFL doesn't hand those suspensions out based on the severity of the crime. You get busted once, you go to rehab. Twice, you get a 4-game suspension.  Three, and you're out for a year.  It's not a commentary on how serious they consider the problem, especially as compared to other offenses.

Doug Fields

Tampa, FL

[PGage]

I am not understanding your first point I guess; the question I pointed out that was not asked was not about his legal penalty, but about the NFL punishment, which the rest of your post seems to suggest you agree was inadequate. I did not suggest that Rice should have requested a longer suspension from the NFL, just that he should have been asked about whether he thinks a 2 week suspension was appropriate. If asked, Rice should have said whatever he believed to be true. As I tried to explain in my initial post, I suspect that the reason the NFL (and Rice himself) think a 2 game suspension was appropriate here was the mitigating effect of his girlfriend's (dare I say "provocative") behavior.

I do disagree with your analysis of what the 2 game suspension means. It is not as if the players demanded in labor negotiations to be punished for pot smoking but not for punching their girlfriends. The marijuana policy is in the CBA because the NFL insisted upon it. The NFL has never insisted on any kind of serious response to domestic violence, this even though it has been documented for decades that there is a serious and persistent problem of NFL players physically assaulting their wives and girlfriends. Football is an extremely violent sport, and it is not at all surprising that it attracts men who are prone to physical violence and have difficulty learning when and how to inhibit that in their off-field behavior. This does not necessarily make them bad people, but it does place a responsibility on the league to make sure its players understand that no matter how violent they are allowed to be on the field (and the recent awareness of the long-term implications of concussions makes on-field violence itself a major concern) violence off the field is not tolerated at all. The NFL has failed spectacularly to live up to this responsibility, and the Rice incident is just one vivid example of that.

I will acknowledge the validity of part of your critique, and revise the formulation: The NFL is saying that smoking marijuana twice is twice as bad as punching your girlfriend. I think all fans have a legitimate interest in expecting the NFL (along with its players) to re-think that priority. 

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[do...@flids.net]

I'm writing on the fly from work. Maybe I can take another swing at it later, when I can organize my train of thought a little better and make a little more sense. :)

[PGage]

[NOTE: I think I sent this earlier just to Doug - I meant to send it to the list. Apologies if it gets sent twice]

Deadspin published a take on the Ray Rice affair which pretty much summarizes what I have been assuming has been going on for some time: http://deadspin.com/does-the-nfl-think-ray-rices-wife-deserved-it-1612138248

To clarify my post from this morning, by suggesting that he be asked about the discrepancy between his punishment and that for a two-time MJ offender, I did not mean to imply that Rice somehow should have volunteered for an extra two weeks. I meant basically that he should have been pressed harder on whether he thinks the severity of his assault on his girlfriend/wife is legitimately mitigated (as the 2-week suspension clearly indicates) by violent acts first initiated by her? The NFL was probably encouraged along these lines by both seeing video the public has not seen in which the woman apparently hits Rice several times (Rice then slugs her, causing her to violently hit her head against a railing and loose consciousness). When the DA saw this video, they reversed their original "no harm no foul" call, dropped charges against her and filed felony charges against Rice. However later, after Rice married the woman in question and she talked with the authorities, he was allowed to go into a diversionary program, which, if he follows through on the requirements (which BTW include mandatory counseling, something I did not hear noted this morning when the ESPN folks were congratulating Rice on his decision to go into counseling) will most likely mean the charges will be either greatly reduced or dismissed next year. The NFL was apparently greatly influenced by its meeting with Rice's wife, who seems to have claimed responsibility for the incident and asked for leniency for her now husband. This, again, is one source of my concern while watching the press conference this morning; it is not uncommon for women to accept the "Male Headship" theory and conclude that if they get abused it must have been their fault. I suspect the legal authorities were less persuaded by that theory, and more by the loss of their complaining witness. They could have gone forward even without her, but the chances of a conviction were significantly reduced, which is probably why they agreed to the diversionary program. Someone should have explained to Goodell that he was not similarly hampered.

Imagine for a moment that Rice had engaged in the exact same scenario not with his girlfriend, but with a male fan who was 100 pounds lighter and much weaker? The somewhat drunk fan asks for an autograph, Rice refuses, the fan obnoxiously but ineffectually flails at Rice a few times, Rice responds with a devastating punch that renders the fan unconscious; Rice then drags the limp and unconscious body of the fan out of the elevator and down the hall a ways. Does anyone think for even a moment that there is a chance in hell Goodell would have given Rice only a 2 game suspension, regardless of what the legal authorities did? I doubt it. The difference here is that there is a lingering patriarchal assumption that the man in a romantic relationship has a right to "discipline" his woman when she "gets out of line". 

I think Sal Palentonio, to his credit, was trying to get at this with his question about the details of what happened in the elevator, but Sal and the other reporter who posed a similar question in a more pandering kind of way let Rice get away with an avoidance filibuster. 

A few excerpts from Deadspin:

*****************************

"Why would Goodell—an authoritarian who loves to both wield the hammer and pander to a certain kind of right-thinking sentiment among the public—suddenly go soft on Ray Rice? Or, to put it another way: How the fuck was an NFL player who got caught on video dragging his unconscious fiancée out of an elevator suspended only two games?"

"The likeliest answer...Goodell doesn't see Rice as being entirely culpable, but rather as having responded to physical attacks on his person. Elements of provocation, one might call them."

"All but absolving Rice with a mere two-game suspension for knocking his unarmed fiancée unconscious and dragging her out of elevator necessarily requires Goodell and the NFL to subscribe to a specific kind of philosophy in which Rice's actions are absolvable—one in which he is a nearly passive agent, reacting to events in an understandable if unfortunate way."

"For the NFL's actual reasoning to be that Palmer pushed for the fight, and Rice merely finished it, sounds almost unbelievable...In fact, things are almost certainly as they seem, following a line of reasoning that sees Palmer as having "provoked" the "wrong actions," thus mitigating them. There's something bitterly funny about that. In the end, Stephen A. Smith got suspended a week from ESPN for recapitulating the essential logic of Ray Rice's suspension."

*****************************

[Joe Hass]

Roger Goodell also faced the media today, and effectively said the punishment was "consistent with other cases", which leads to the spectacularly obvious question of "Did you consider that, perhaps, the other cases were also wrong?"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2014/08/01/roger-goodell-ray-rice-suspension-baltimore-ravens/13468921/

There is one thing that always jumped out to me as the worst part of the whole thing. Peter King reported the day the punishment was announced that one of the things that made a key difference in the leniency of the punishment was a meeting that took place in June. That meeting involved the following people:

* The Commissioner of the NFL, whose office the meeting was held at (Ray's employer's employer)
* The Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the NFL (Again, Ray's employer's employer)
* The Senior Vice President of Law and Labor of the NFL (Still, Ray's employer's employer)
* The President of the Ravens (You should be detecting a trend here)
* The General Manager of the Ravens (The phrase is "stacking the room")
* Ray Rice (the accused)
* Janay Palmer

I can't find the right word in the English language to describe how fucked up that is. To put someone who was reportedly abused in a room with not just the accused, but five other people who are the employers of the accused, and expect anything resembling honest answers from the victim is delusional and goes against every fiber of how to handle an investigation, much less how to treat a domestic violence victim. When that piece of information came to light, simply put, it destroyed any value in the league's "investigation".

I found it very, very interested who *wasn't* in that room: anyone from NFL Security. I don't know how well the board knows about professional sports team's security departments. They're basically FBI-level people, with an acute knowledge of how the criminal and legal worlds work. I've met a couple of them in past lives, and they are not to be trifled with (aside: every pro sports team in the US/Canada begs their players to always, always, call the head of team security if they're ever in a situation that's possibly weird, and the players very rarely do so) To not have that department involved says volumes about how the NFL thinks, behaves, and should be shamed.

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[Brad Beam]

From: tvor...@googlegroups.com [mailto:tvor...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Joe Hass

>I can't find the right word in the English language to describe how fucked up that is. To put someone who was reportedly abused in a room with not just the accused, but five other people who are the employers of the accused, and expect anything resembling honest answers from the victim is delusional and goes against every fiber of how to handle an investigation, much less how to treat a domestic violence victim. When that piece of information came to light, simply put, it destroyed any value in the league's "investigation".

 

Keith Olbermann has been riding this track since Monday. (See #6, at 4:17.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26-4dkzHfMM

 

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