“What the hell is Janay Palmer thinking?”
It was the question asked by nearly everyone who saw “that video,” the one that clearly showed Palmer’s then-fiance, former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, knocking her unconscious on an elevator, then dragging her limp body off it. She’d stayed with Rice after that, married him even. And she publicly apologized at a press conference and then publicly defended him when he was dropped by his team and indefinitely suspended by the NFL.
For domestic violence survivors it was textbook behavior. For those who had never been abused, it was baffling. Was she doing it for the money? Did she grow up in an abusive home and that this was normal? Was she a “classic victim” of domestic violence? How will she explain staying to her daughter someday?
These were just the start of the questions, and finally Janay Rice has publicly answered them (and more) in an interview with ESPN’s Jemele Hill, which was published on Nov. 28, preceding a much-hyped two-part TV interview with Today’s Matt Lauer, which airs Monday and Tuesday mornings this week.
There is no question about the timing of these print and TV interviews. On Friday, Ray Rice’s indefinite suspension from the NFL was overturned, making him eligible to play again. Rice—and his wife—are on a de facto apology tour to clean up Rice’s image and make him less of a PR nightmare to potentially interested NFL teams.
Janay Rice’s account to Hill doesn’t quite do the job in this sense, though she does try hard—too hard even. Many parts of her interview come across as too sanitized, too “handled” by a crisis manager that taught Janay Rice how to spin a story instead of telling it plain.
Janay Rice earnestly talks about her husband’s community service and the amount of counseling they received, She conveniently doesn’t recall what they fought over on the night that she was knocked out and says she was completely uninjured after receiving that blow to the face that left her unconscious. In fact, Janay Rice says she felt, “perfectly fine.” She might as well have said, “See my husband’s not a bad person, the punch didn’t even hurt.”
But even the neat version of Janay Rice’s story can’t cover up what she ultimately is: a domestic violence victim--though she doesn’t consider herself one--blaming herself and defending her abuser. She repeatedly talks about her bad attitude on the day she was knocked unconscious. She describes how she agitated Ray Rice by reaching for his phone and that’s why he spit on her, as if that is a reasonable response. She claims she’s never experienced domestic violence before (or since), but it took only hours for her to forgive her man, who she also never considered leaving.
Here are the top revelations from Janay Rice’s ESPN interview:
She doesn’t remember much.
Janay Rice: “We got into the elevator and what happened inside is still foggy to me. The only thing I know—and I can't even say I "remember" because I only know from what Ray has told me—is that I slapped him again and then he hit me. I remember nothing else from inside the elevator.
“The next thing I do recall is being in the casino lobby, surrounded by cops .... The cops tried to tell me what happened and I refused to believe them .... There were no marks on my face or body, and I felt perfectly fine.”
She forgave him the next day.
“Ray accepted responsibility from the moment we left the police station .... At first, I was very angry, and I didn’t know what to say. This came out of nowhere. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I knew it wasn’t him.
“But as angry as I was, I knew it was something that we could move on from because I know Ray. I thought about our daughter. When she comes in the room, it’s like nothing is going on. We knew it was definitely going to take work, and we knew we had to be by each other’s side. I just needed to get away from him for a little while and spend a few hours taking my space to get my thoughts together.”
She never thought twice about marrying Ray Rice.
“We were married March 28, the day after he was indicted for aggravated assault. We didn’t choose that day because of the indictment. It just happened to be a Friday and a time when our families could attend our wedding without having to interrupt their work schedules. I didn’t understand why that was suspicious to some people. We’d been together seven years and had been engaged for two. What happened that night wasn’t going to change the fact that we were going to get married.
“If anyone knows me they know, I never have and never will be with Ray because of what he can do for me. I stuck with Ray because I truly love him.”
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