Broken Play: Ray Rice and What the NFL Says It Never Saw

The NFL suspended Ray Rice two games with one video in hand. It suspended him indefinitely once a second video went public. The league says the second video changed everything it knew. A law enforcement official told the Associated Press the league already had it.

The First Video

On February 15, 2014, Ray Rice and his then-fiancee, Janay Palmer, were both arrested on assault charges following an incident in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. A video surfaced showing Rice dragging Palmer’s unconscious body out of the elevator, though not what happened inside it. Rice avoided jail time that May through a pretrial intervention program.

The Two-Game Suspension

On July 24, 2014, the NFL suspended Rice two games and fined him $58,000. The punishment was immediately criticized as too lenient given what was already publicly known. ESPN’s Outside the Lines later reported that Ravens executives, including owner Steve Bisciotti, had urged Goodell toward exactly that outcome. Facing mounting criticism, Goodell revised the league’s domestic violence policy on August 28, instituting a six-game suspension for a first offense and a lifetime ban for a second, a change that applied going forward but not retroactively to Rice.

The Second Video

On September 8, 2014, TMZ released a second video, this one from inside the elevator, showing Rice punching Palmer and knocking her unconscious. Within hours, the Ravens terminated his contract and the NFL suspended him indefinitely. Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti wrote to fans that the team should have pursued its own investigation more vigorously. Goodell told CBS the league had requested footage from the casino but was never granted access, and that as far as he knew, no one at the NFL had seen the video before that Monday.

What the NFL Says It Didn’t See

Two days later, the Associated Press reported that a law enforcement official said a DVD copy of the surveillance footage had been sent to an NFL office in April 2014, and that a woman at the league office had confirmed its receipt in a phone call. The NFL denied the account. Facing a credibility crisis, the league announced an independent investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, overseen by two owners who are also attorneys.

Mueller’s report, released January 9, 2015, found no evidence that anyone at the NFL had received or viewed the in-elevator video before it became public, based on a review of internal records, emails, and text messages. The report also concluded that even without the video, the league had enough information from the arrest and initial reporting that it “should have taken additional steps to obtain all available information,” in the report’s words, about the incident.

The Arbitration

The NFL Players Association appealed Rice’s indefinite suspension on his behalf. On November 28, 2014, arbitrator Barbara Jones, a retired federal judge, overturned the suspension and reinstated Rice, ruling the league had effectively punished him a second time for the same underlying conduct without any genuinely new information justifying a harsher penalty than the one already imposed in July. Rice did not play in the NFL again.

Why This Case Matters

Every institution in this franchise so far has failed differently. The Aaron Hernandez installment was about a documented risk overridden by talent evaluation. This one is about an organization with the investigative resources to know more than it acted on, choosing the minimum standard of inquiry until public pressure removed that option. The Mueller report’s finding on the video’s origin gets most of the headlines. Its finding that the league should have done more with what it already had is the part that describes an actual institutional choice, not a disputed fact.