Slowly but surely, the truth is coming out regarding the Ray Rice investigation. Sort of.
With the league office avoiding, evading, and otherwise minimizing the question of whether the notorious elevator video could have been obtained from Ray Rice’s lawyer (who had it), Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti admits that he didn’t ask Rice for it -- and that if Bisciotti had demanded the video from Rice, Bisciotti would have gotten it.
“Of course we knew that there was other video and our security did the steps that they normally would,” Bisciotti told James Brown of CBS. “They called the casino and they would not release it. They called the Jets and the Giants and said, ‘Do you have any influence, is there any way that you can help us?’ They called back and said, ‘No, that they would not release it.’ The prosecutor said yesterday that would have been illegal. If I had said to Ray [Rice] and his attorney, ‘I can’t keep you on this team until I see that tape,’ I would have seen the tape and I would have sent it to Roger [Goodell] and said, ‘You have to look at this tape before you render your decision.’”
For reasons still not known, Bisciotti didn’t ask for the tape. No one asked for the tape.
While some would suggest that it’s easy to argue that Bisciotti and/or the league should have demanded the tape in hindsight, most had assumed before Jay Glazer blurted out on The Dan Patrick Show that the league had the tape. Why wouldn’t the league have the tape? Why wouldn’t the tape be the most important piece of evidence in the case?
Bisciotti and the league didn’t ask because they knew what happened. They didn’t pause to consider just how ugly what happened would look.
