Steve Bisciotti, owner of the Baltimore Ravens, knew in February that the team’s star player had struck his fiancee in a casino elevator, and that Atlantic City police had a copy of the surveillance footage.
Bisciotti said he simply wasn’t curious enough to ask for the tape.
“I lacked a whole lot of interest,” he said Monday in a news conference at Ravens headquarters. “Zero desire to see that tape.”
That, the owner said, was the “big fail” of the Ravens — not that they misled anyone but that they weren’t aggressive enough to obtain the Rice footage, at the heart of one of the biggest scandals in the 94-year history of the NFL.
The Ravens called the news conference to dispute claims made Friday in a 7,000-word story by ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” a detailed report that said the Ravens had a specific description of what happened in that elevator within hours of Rice’s knocking out Janay Palmer, and that Bisciotti and team executives pressured NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell into giving Rice a lenient, two-game suspension.
“Their accusations didn’t jibe with what we know is fact,” said Bisciotti, who said he expected Rice to be suspended four to six games.
Despite a video of Rice dragging his unconscious wife-to-be out of the elevator, Goodell suspended him for two games. Six weeks later, after TMZ released video from inside the elevator, the commissioner extended that suspension indefinitely, and the Ravens terminated Rice’s contract.
“We did not do all we should have done, and no amount of explanation can remedy that,” said Bisciotti, who rarely speaks to the media on the record. “But there has been no misdirection or misinformation by the Ravens.”
Dismissing the ESPN report, Bisciotti said the information for it was provided by anonymous sources close to Rice who are “building a case for reinstatement.”
ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., who wrote the investigative story with Kevin Van Valkenburg, said Bisciotti was making a “false assumption” that most sources were tied to Rice.
Minutes before Bisciotti’s news conference, the Ravens released a lengthy statement taking issue with specific elements of the ESPN report.
“We have stated what we knew and what we thought throughout — from the original report of the incident, to the release of the first videotape, to the release of the second videotape, which revealed a much harsher reality,” Bisciotti said in the written statement.
“As we said in our response to ESPN questions on Friday, it was our understanding based on Ray’s account that in the course of a physical altercation between the two of them [Rice] slapped Janay with an open hand, and that she hit her head against the elevator rail or wall as she fell to the ground.”
Although ESPN reported John Harbaugh wanted to release Rice after the first videotape surfaced, the Ravens coach denied that in Monday’s release.
“I did not recommend cutting Ray Rice from the team after seeing the first videotape,” Harbaugh said in the release. “I was very disturbed by that tape, and I told people that the facts should determine the consequences. When I saw the second videotape, I immediately felt that we needed to release Ray.”
Bisciotti said he has no plans to fire anyone for the handling of the Rice incident.
“The people in my organization did their jobs,” he said. “Nobody’s losing a job here. Very confident of that.”
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