Bengals cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones has been charged with assault after an altercation with a woman outside a Cincinnati bar, and now security camera video of that altercation has surfaced.
Unfortunately, the video really doesn’t show anything conclusively, other than that Jones had some kind of altercation with a woman at a bar, which is what led to the assault charge and which he has already acknowledged.
Cincinnati radio station ESPN 1530 has the video, which the radio station describes as showing “self defense” after the woman “hits Jones across the face with a beer bottle.” If you’re predisposed to take Jones’s side in this, that’s the way you’ll view the video.
But the video is not as clear as ESPN 1530 suggests regarding what the woman did: She may have hit Jones across the face with a beer bottle, or she may not have. It looks to me like she and Jones spent a couple of minutes arguing and that she then poured beer on Jones. She was in the wrong for pouring beer on him, and Jones would have been absolutely justified if he had complained to the bar’s security or the police, but Jones responded by hitting the woman, which seems like an overreaction.
It’s also worth pointing out that the woman was inside a barrier in the bar’s outdoor dining area, while Jones was outside the barrier on the sidewalk. If Jones had wanted to walk away from her at any time, he easily could have. Instead, he appeared to argue with her for a couple of minutes and chose to stay there while the incident escalated. If Jones was, as he claims, just “protecting myself,” why didn’t he simply walk away?
At the end of the video, it appears that a friend of Jones’s was trying to grab him to pull him away from the incident, and that Jones initially wanted to go back at the woman before deciding to leave. That’s a decision that he should have made a couple minutes earlier.