In finally coming out to discuss the Josh Brown situation, Giants owner John Mara defended his team’s handling of kicker Josh Brown, saying they did enough research to make them have a degree of trust in their kicker.
And in doing so, he suggested there was enough conflicting information to make it a complicated decision.
“A lot times there’s a tendency to try to make these cases black and white, they are very rarely black and white, very rarely have a Ray Rice video,’’ Mara said, via Paul Schwartz of the New York Post. “There are allegations made, you try to sort through the facts and try to make an informed decision. That’s what we did here.’’
The absence of a video also allows a lot more opportunity for leniency than Rice ever received, and Brown’s one-game suspension is well less than the six-game baseline the league had previously mandated.
Brown was initially charged with domestic violence in 2015, but charges were later dropped. His ex-wife accused him of more than 20 acts of violence against her and her teenage son. There were also incident reports from New Jersey saying she kicked him in the ribs, but no charges were filed there.
The very nature of the he-said/she-said allegations gave Mara pause, and he said that contributed to him waiting this long to speak.
“I’m not going to get into whether they were valid or invalid,’’ Mara said. “We did do some due diligence on this. We had a number of conversations with a number of different people. Again, we’re comfortable with the decision we made.
“That’s one of the reasons I hesitated, quite frankly, in addressing all of you because you get into discussions like that, and I don’t think it’s fair or appropriate. There are privacy issues here. There are sensitive, emotional issues that affect families, and it’s very difficult to discuss things in public and make a situation even worse than it already is.’’
But it’s clear that Mara had a degree of doubt about what he heard from the other side of the family.
“One thing that you learn when you’re dealing with these issues is that there’s a big difference between allegations and convictions, or indictments,” he said. “It’s very difficult sometimes to sort through all that and make informed decisions. We attempted to make an informed decision here. We’ll live with the results of that decision and we move forward.’’
And they’ll do so with Brown, once he serves his one-game suspension.
