Was this "new" Ray Rice abuse video really needed for all to know that something terrible happened in that elevator?

Janay and Ray Rice

"Both the Ravens and the [NFL] said they had not reviewed the footage from inside the elevator prior to Monday. 'We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including the video from inside the elevator,' the NFL said in a statement early Monday. 'That video was not made available to us and no one in our office has seen it until today.'

"In a later statement, the league indicated the league's revised punishment stemmed from the new video footage."

-- from Mark Maske's washingtonpost.com report,
"Baltimore Ravens cut Ray Rice in wake
of latest domestic violence video"

"[A]s our relationship and the abuse became more serious, Hank told me that he only hit me when he had to. 'Sometimes, baby,' he'd say, holding me tight, 'something you say makes me feel like our love is threatened. And I couldn't live without you. I couldn't.'

"Why did I fall for that line?"

-- the anonymous author of "Why I Married
My Abuser," on The Frisky

by Ken

With regard to the appalling video that was circulated yesterday by TMZ.com, I suppose that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we have to believe the the NFL's insistence that "no one in our office has seen it until today," and the Baltimore Ravens organization's similar insistence. Still, the new video didn't just materialize out of nowhere. Somebody has seen it, and perhaps a lot of somebodies.

And as the NYT's Ken Belson reports today ("N.F.L. Still Faces Scrutiny Over Ray Rice Video"): "The league still declined to say whether any of its investigators had seen the video, and why it had not requested the video from the hotel." And Barry Petchesky's Deadspin post is titled bluntly "Someone Is Lying About Whether The NFL Saw The Ray Rice Tape." Barry harks back to July quotes from Sports Illustrated's Peter King and ESPN's Chris Mortensen indicating that their sources not only knew there were videotapes from inside the elevator but knew what was on them -- exactly what we finally saw yesterday.

In terms of the extent of the embarrassment to the NFL and the Ravens organization, this matters. If NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's original punishment of a two-game suspension was made with this knowledge, it's going to be awhile before he or the league hears the end of this. Ditto the Ravens organization, with their response of closing ranks and standing steadfast alongside their guy. This would be just unimaginably awful for both.


WHICH STILL LEAVES THE QUESTION --

Did we really need to see what happened in the elevator to know that it demanded to be taken a lot more seriously than the NFL did?

An awful lot of people who were quiet before yesterday, or openly supportive of Ray, including the Ravens organization and his teammates, have belatedly come to their senses, but what on earth do they know now that they didn't know before? Were they imagining that Janay Palmer -- Ray's then-fiancée, now wife -- got into the shape she was seen in, being dragged out of the elevator, as a result of a lightning strike inside the elevator? Or that she, you know, slipped and fell? Or that she and Ray squared off in Marquis of Queensbury-style combat?

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson frames it ("What the Ray Rice Video Really Shows"):

We’ve known for months that Rice had hit Janay Palmer and left her unconscious; there had been a video already, of him dragging her inert body out of the elevator in a hotel in Atlantic City. And yet, somehow, the video from inside the elevator was not what some purportedly well-informed observers expected. The N.F.L. had investigated the incident, after all, and only suspended Rice for two games; that didn’t fit with the pictures on the screen. But what did people think it looked like when a football player knocked out a much smaller woman? Like a fair fight?

"An appalling thought," Amy goes on to write, "is that plenty of supposedly responsible people did see that video tape, and saw in it only what they wanted to see -- the willful rationalizations that sustain domestic violence." And she proceeds to describe it "what the video does show":

Palmer and Rice in the hotel hall, arguing; she swats her arm at him and walks ahead into the elevator. He follows, stands close over her, and either says or does something that causes her to recoil. She tries to push him away from her and then walks toward him, saying or yelling something (the video is silent). Her face is open to him. Rice punches her with a hard left hook, spinning Palmer against the elevator wall and handrail as she drops. It is a couple of minutes before she regains even a woozy half-consciousness. Rice, who was by then talking to a security guard, doesn’t offer any gestures of comfort, let alone tenderness; if what he’s just done is surprising or unfamiliar to him, he doesn’t show it. He does, at one point, push her legs together with a shove of his foot.

"That is what it looks like," she concludes, "when a man beats up a woman."

BUT, BUT . . . JANAY MARRIED THE GUY

ThinkProgress's Tara Culp-Ressler notes, in "You Shouldn't Ask Why Janay Rice Stayed":

Janay, who has since married Rice and taken his last name, has indicated that she regrets the “role” she played in the now infamous incident. On Tuesday, she posted a statement on Instagram criticizing the unwanted attention from the public and declaring that “we will continue to grow & show the world what true love is.”Her decision to remain loyal to her husband has confused a lot of observers — including several Fox News hosts, who claimed that women like Janay and singer Rihanna are sending a “terrible message” by remaining with their abusive partners.

Yes indeed, girls and boys, at the indicated link you'll find Judd Legum's ThinkProgress report of a couple of Fox Noise wags responding to the new video:

Fox host Brian Kilmeade on Monday blasted the victims of domestic violence, criticizing Palmer (now Janay Rice) and other women who don’t break up with their partner after a domestic violence incident, saying they send a “terrible message.”

Kilmeade then proceeded to provide mocking advice to Palmer, quipping, “I think the message is, take the stairs.” Co-host Steve Doocey gamely joined in, “The message is, when you’re in an elevator, there’s a camera.”

I trust that by now both of these geniuses have blown their brains out. What, after all, do they have to live for, now that surely neither of them will ever be allowed on the air again, right?

"WHY  I MARRIED MY ABUSER"

In fact, since the incident became public, there has been a fair amount of "blame the victim" puling. Which shows yet again how primitive our understanding of domestic violence is. Tara does a fine job of exploring a number of the issues, but the piece that really hit home for me is an understandably anonymous post today on The Frisky from a woman who has been there, done that: "Why I Married My Abuser."

"My ex-husband was the most romantic person I've ever met," Anon writes. "He also hit me on the day we got married, while I was wearing my wedding dress." And having experienced what she has experienced, she's pretty upset about the motives attributed to Janay Rice. Even after seeing the new video, she says, "I wasn’t surprised that she was now his wife." And it has nothing to do with being "all about the money," or her "not car[ing] about taking a punch," -- "and it's especially not that 'she is telling all women it's okay for your man to beat you.' '

I’m not an expert on what makes women stay in abusive relationships or even marry their abuser. But I did both of these things and I can speak to my particular story.

It's a story you really have to read for yourself, but here's a sample. Anon, a girl "from a very conservative Christian background, describes the spring she spent being swept off her feet by this man she calls Hank, who "seemed like God's gift to my life" there in the small town where she was living after dropping out of Bible college because she couldn't afford to continue. Among his infinite attentions "to make sure it was clear he wanted me" were cards he often mailed to her apartment, "even though we lived less than a mile apart" -- cards that "came heavily scented with his cologne," which brings her to "the part of my story that is much harder to tell."

One Saturday afternoon a few months after our first date, I opened one of the cards and then smelled it as he beamed on proudly. I sniffed and joked “like a woman” because he was the first man I ever knew to send a scented envelope.

I know it’s a cliche, but if I close my eyes, I can still see that moment in slow motion. His face changed from beaming to furious. And suddenly, I was on the floor. It wasn’t until he extended his hand down to me saying, “Oh baby I am so sorry! Why did you have to say that? I’m so sorry!” that I realized I was on the floor because his fist had put me there. I actually thought for a second that a piece of the ceiling must have fallen down. Surely Hank couldn’t have hit me? That was something that happened to other people.

Hank dove into what I now know is the cycle of abuse, but what then just seemed like a cycle of passion. He ushered me to the couch and got an ice pack for my face. He kissed my forehead. He had this strange yet very convincing way of talking about how he had hit me: he spoke in passive voice, as if the violence just happened, as if he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. “Oh, so sorry you’re bruised up,” he said to me that night.

Before a wedding could take place, Hank's violence had landed Anon in the E.R. twice. When she suggested delaying the wedding to seek counseling from the pastor, he "imploded" -- she was betraying their love. In fact, everything she did, like seeing family or friends, or thinking of going back to school, was a betrayal of their love. In all of this, he was the victim.

[A]s our relationship and the abuse became more serious, Hank told me that he only hit me when he had to. “Sometimes, baby,” he’d say, holding me tight, “something you say makes me feel like our love is threatened. And I couldn’t live without you. I couldn’t.”

With misgivings, she goes ahead with the wedding. After all, she thinks, "This is what passion looks like." She picks a white dress for the small ceremony.

As he smoothed my gown over my shoulders he said, “I don’t know that white is the right color for you.”

I joked back, “You aren’t exactly Mr. Purity yourself.”

And he hit me so hard in the chest that I bent over, gasping.

“Don’t cry baby,” he said, “you’ll smear your makeup.”

I know. I know. I know.

I should have ripped off that dress and ran away screaming. But the truth is, by the time that moment came, I felt so lucky to be with him, this man who claimed to love me so much he had to hit me, and so confused and so frozen that running away didn’t even remotely seem like a choice.

Anon wants us to understand that of course she knew it was wrong for her to be smacked around.

It’s beyond silly to say that any woman who is getting smacked around thinks it’s acceptable to be smacked around. No one knows better than a woman who is being abused that it is wrong.

But not leaving, she insists, "isn’t the same as consent."

I stayed because I was traumatized and isolated. I believed that Hank really loved me and that no man with less passion/anger (those words were conflated for me) would ever love me like him.

She's similarly astonished that "people act surprised that men who beat their romantic partners are charming."

[Y]ou’re not going to have a romantic partner to beat if you’re not charming at some point. The drama and romance are often an important part. Violent and manipulative partners are not being horrible around the clock; something else draws us into them. What women would fall in love with a man that smacked her on the first date?

WE REALLY MUST DEAL WITH THIS WHOLE
MATTER OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

I've quoted a lot more from Anon's story than I intended, because it's so compellingly set out. But I've still left out a lot, and you really should read the whole thing. And while you're at it, you might take a look at Alexis Okeowo's "Freedom Fighter: Why slavery persists in Mauritania" in the September 8 New Yorker, because it turns on much the same issue. The country's authoritarian Muslim government denies that slavery even exists there, but it does, even though it was -- finally -- made illegal in 1981. Women are at the heart of the country's slave population, and their purpose (surprise!) is to serve men, in all the ways that men need serving, emphatically including the sexual.

What makes it so insidious is that slavery survives in Mauritania with the blessing of its particular branch of Islam, according to which the Koran explicitly sanctions the practice. As a result, the humbly burgeoning anti-slavery movement (if it can be called a movement) is burdened with automatic accusations of heresy -- the anti-slavery activists are attacking the holy Koran! (This in spite of the fact that officially there is no slavery in Mauritania.)

Here's just a glimpse, and for all the differences, see if this doesn't sound eerily familiar:

Mauritanian slaves are not restrained by chains; slavery is in large measure an economic and a psychological institution. Slaves are denied secular education, and religion permeates the culture. Because Islam is perceived as endorsing slave ownership, questioning slavery is tantamount to questioning Islam. When slaves are told that servitude in this life brings reward in the next one, some believe it. No one in their community who looks like th em has ever known another way of life. One former child slave told me, "In the village, when a slave says he does not want to be a slave anymore, people will ask, 'Why? Who are you? Your mother was a slave; your grandmother was a slave. Who are you?' " Their masters, on the other hand, are the embodiment of Allah's likeness. "To the slave, his identity is his master," ["freedom figher" Biram Dah] Abeid said. "The master is his idol, one he can never becvome, and he is invincible."

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