Most people seem to agree that NFL officials are either lying when they say they did not see the Ray Rice elevator video or are telling the truth because they made minimal effort to obtain it. The claim that the NFL did not have access to the footage gets harder to believe by the day. Another tidbit from Adam Schefter on Monday made it seem even more bogus.
During an appearance on “Mike and Mike in the Morning,” Schefter revealed that there were NFL players who had access to the video of Rice knocking his then-fiancee Janay Palmer unconscious “a week or two” after the incident took place.
“There were players who were in Las Vegas a week or two after this incident and I know one player said, ‘You want to see the videotape of what happened?'” Schefter explained, via Deadspin. “So there were players who could see the videotape, yet the Ravens, many of the Ravens, claim they couldn’t see it.”
And yes, Schefter specified that it was the second TMZ tape and not the first, which only showed Rice dragging Palmer out of the elevator.
The Baltimore Ravens and the NFL claim law enforcement officials did not make the footage available to them. TMZ somehow got the tape, but we are supposed to believe that one of the most powerful organizations in America didn’t have the resources to track it down.
“You would have to think at some point somebody here will be in trouble over this,” Schefter added. “The security guy clearly knew exactly what was going on. Leadership, management, did what it could to conceal and push it through. I think that Ray Rice’s track record helped him here, that they cared about him. They wanted to believe that it was an isolated deal but they knew.”
The NFL has to be lying. It also sounds like Roger Goodell was lying when he said Rice gave him an “ambiguous” account of what happened on the elevator. We should believe hardly any of what we hear at this point, but that doesn’t mean any of it should surprise us.
H/T Deadspin
