Toggle Menu

Ray Rice Is Not the First Domestic Abuser Tolerated by the NFL

The league treated Rice’s abhorrent behavior as a public relations issue, not a domestic violence issue.

Dave Zirin

September 9, 2014

The video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice brutally striking and dragging his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, in an Atlantic City elevator raises the question: Does professional sports have a domestic violence problem? Appearing on Democracy Now! this morning, Dave Zirin explained that the NFL has a history of condoning domestic violence, and that Ray Rice’s indefinite suspension was treated as “a public relations crisis, not as a crisis about the ways in which the violence of the game spills over into people’s families.”

—N’Kosi Oates

Dave ZirinTwitterDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.


Latest from the nation