Hannity Guest says Ray Rice is the real victim here

[Gravekeeper]

Causality does not work that way.

Did you seriously just 9/11 the thread? ><

That is in no way comparable.

You seem to think that because he started it, there's really no line that can be crossed by people, the NFL, etc. where the only culpable person is Ray Rice. It's just odd honestly. I don't really feel like going another round about it... it's just wtf?

"You seem to think" is a bad starting point to begin with. What I am doing is laying the blame at the feet of the abuser where it belongs. The "people" are responding in kind. It was Rice and his awful PR people that called the press conference that really began to set shit off with "people". The "people" actually cheered Rice at practice.

This didn't all just happen at once. Hell it was near 6 months since he beat her unconscious, dragged her around like a sack of potato's and lied to everyone about it before he made that public apology / humiliating press conference. That conference did more PR damage than the first video did. And everyone knew the second tape existed and that the tape didn't gel with his story.

In a perfect world she would be mad that it took the tape for anyone to actually acknowledge she was a victim. But again, thats not how domestic abuse works unfortunately.

While spitting may be disrespectful and insulting, it's still considered assault. But she did more than spit at him. She also hit and scratched him.

Rice spat in her face. Twice. You can see it in the full video. He spits in her face outside the elevator as she walks by, which is what causes her to swat him. Then he spits on her again IN the elevator which is what causes her to whirl on him. He hits her once, which pisses her off understandably. Then drops her with the second harder swing.

Plus its not just the punch, its how he renders no first aid to speak of then callously drags her body out of the elevator like a sack of shit and tells everyone she's just drunk.

Also I would think there would be even more discussion if Ray Rice dropped his boyfriend in an elevator, dragged him like a sack of potatoes and lied to everyone about it. -.-

Domestic violence is domestic violence.

What's sad is Ray Rice probably will sue the hell out of the NFL. He was already suspended once for the incident, now he's getting suspended a second time? Hell no, that'll never hold up in court.

I wish him luck if he tries to take the NFL to civil court of all places. There's no way his contract didn't have 4 pages of legalese for something like this.

[HYHYBT]

As soon as it comes to blows, the option to not press charges should be thrown out the window.

...and then, once that becomes public knowledge, people become even less likely to call the police at all, making things overall worse than they are now.

[Hyena Dandy]

My concern is that events like this have a tendency to become too focused, on what Ray and Janay Rice did. It's possible that this was a time of extreme stress that never happened before or since and they've been trying for a long time to put it behind them. It's also possible that this is common and Janay has been living in fear the whole time. I started to get worried when I started seeing articles like "Janay says she just wants this over" because that's taking the conversation back down to one, particular relationship.

It's a frustrating pattern that something like this happens, and instead of talking about how to deal with things like spousal abuse and violence, it becomes a conversation about what that particular situation was. I feel that that minimizes the real issue, because Janay Rice is not all abuse victims, and also because the issue is not "Ray Rice hit Janay Rice," the issue is "Spousal abuse not adequately dealt with for people who are sufficiently famous/powerful." As long as the problem is Ray Rice, the solution is solved by getting rid of Ray Rice. But the problem is more than him. And the solution and conversation need to be more than him, too.

Janay did say she wanted people to stop talking about what happened, and I'm all for respecting her wishes in that respect. But I don't want to stop talking about spousal abuse.

[Kheldarson]

For some insight into why Janay may want this to go away: http://www.motherjones.com/media/201...ball-nfl-wives