NFL’s Baltimore Ravens Cut Ray Rice After New Video Surfaces
A leaked video of the altercation between football star Ray Rice and his then-fiancee Janay Palmer that took place earlier this year has led the Baltimore Ravens to terminate Rice's contract.
The NFL says Rice has also been suspended indefinitely.
The newly released video shows the couple in an apparent argument before Palmer collapses after being hit in the face. It emerged early Monday, days before Rice's two-game suspension over the incident had been set to end.
Update at 2:40 p.m. ET: Ravens Cut Rice From The Team
"The #Ravens have terminated RB Ray Rice's contract this afternoon," the team's official Twitter account announced. The team says it will hold a news conference about its decision tonight at 8 p.m. ET.
The NFL says it had not previously seen the video that emerged today:
"We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including the video from inside the elevator. That video was not made available to us and no one in our office has seen it until today."
We've updated the top of this post to reflect the news.
Our original post continues:
Rice and Palmer married earlier this year, one day after the running back was indicted on an assault charge over the incident.
When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced in July that Rice would be suspended without pay for two games and miss an additional paycheck, many criticized the move as too lenient. Goodell acknowledged as much a month later, when he announced the league's new policy for domestic disputes.
But now the questions center on whether Goodell and the NFL had access to the security camera video of the incident that took place in an Atlantic City casino's elevator in February.
The video was released today by the website TMZ; in it, Rice delivers what looks to be a savage blow to Palmer's head, sending her into the elevator's side railing and onto the floor. We'll note that the video's quality is a bit rough; TMZ says it "cleaned up" the raw footage. The combination of the blurriness and the speed at which things apparently happened make parts of it hard to decipher clearly.
The NFL says it hadn't seen the video before today, according to Baltimore Sun reporter Jeff Zrebiec.
But TMZ reports that a former employee of the hotel (at the recently closed Revel casino) says the NFL had seen the footage from inside the elevator. And USA Today notes that two reporters who cover the league, SI.com's Peter King and ESPN's Chris Mortensen, mentioned the same video this summer. Speaking about the video Monday, King says the league never refuted that version of events before today.
Previously released footage from that February night had shown only the scene from outside the elevator, as Rice dragged an apparently unconscious Palmer out and into a hallway.
The new footage is emerging just days before Rice's team, the Baltimore Ravens, will play its second game of the season Thursday — a game whose end would have also signaled the end of Rice's suspension.
As the NFL noted in July, Rice faced neither jail time nor a fine over the February incident.