The full CBS interview of Commissioner Roger Goodell, televised at 7:00 a.m. ET and disseminated via transcript by CBS, contained a post-script that was televised an hour later.
In the extra piece, Goodell was asked what he learned from his pre-discipline meeting with Ray Rice and his wife, Janay.
“He indicated what he and Janay are doing as a couple to try to address their issues,” Goodell said. “It’s a very difficult issue for families. What I’m learning about this whole issue of domestic violence is that it’s very complicated. Very difficult on families. There are victims, there are family members that are impacted by this. And we have to have the resources necessarily to try to help them. And what we wanted to do was make sure they understood, ‘You have resources.’ And we still do that. We’ve been in touch with the family to make sure they have resources, in the last 24 hours.”
Technically, Goodell responded to the question, because that’s one of the things Goodell learned during the meeting. But to the extent that the evidence of what occurred in the elevator was ambiguous, it would be nice to know exactly how Rice and/or his wife contributed to that ambiguity, possibly by not telling Goodell the truth about what happened.
And that’s the real question moving forward. Now that we know the NFL didn’t see the video before Monday and that the NFL made a shamefully weak effort to get the video before Monday, what did the NFL truly know about what happened in that elevator -- especially since the original criminal complaint (presumably based on a review of the video) alleged that Rice did precisely what the video showed?
