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15 February: In an elevator at the Revel casino in Atlantic City, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punches his fiancee, Janay Palmer; her head strikes a railing, and she is knocked unconscious. He drags her inert body from the elevator and is approached by hotel guards. Security cameras capture the incident.
16 February: New Jersey police arrest Rice and Palmer, and charge both with assault.
19 February: Celebrity gossip site TMZ posts video from outside the elevator, which shows Rice dragging the unconscious Palmer, prompting outrage against Rice.
20 February: Robert Klemko of Sports Illustrated reports that police have video from inside the elevator, and notes that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is expected to suspend Rice.
Source says police have yet-to-be-released video of Ray Rice knocking fiancée unconscious before dragging her. Expect a suspension.
— Robert Klemko (@RobertKlemko) February 21, 2014
21 February: Ravens coach John Harbaugh defends Rice to reporters, saying: “I haven’t seen anything that would remotely make me think” that Rice would not play with the team in the 2014 season.
“There are a lot of facts and a process that has to be worked through in anything like this. There are a lot of question marks. But Ray’s character, you guys know his character. So you start with that.”
5 March: Harbaugh says: “Ray has told me his side of it, and everything we’ve seen so far is very consistent with what he said.”
27 March: A grand jury indicts Rice on a charge of third-degree aggravated assault, and the assault charge against Palmer is dropped.
28 March: Rice and Palmer marry.
1 May: Prosecutors offer Rice a plea deal, which Rice rejects, seeking to avoid prosecution by entering an intervention program that includes court-supervised counseling.
20 May: Janay Rice declines to testify against her husband, and Ray Rice is accepted into the intervention program. Atlantic County prosecutor Jim McClain says in a statement: “After considering all relevant information in light of applicable law it was determined this was the appropriate disposition.” According to the Baltimore Sun, “authorities say [the incident] was caught on video by a security camera.”
23 May: Ray and Janay Rice address reporters at a Ravens press conference, and both apologize for the event, though as many observers note, Ray Rice does not apologize directly to his wife. The Ravens, tweeting throughout, post an instantly infamous (and now-deleted) tweet about Janay Rice’s apology.
.@Ravens: You can delete a tweet, but you also can’t really ever delete a tweet: pic.twitter.com/IHl1XN3w9t
— Justin Sablich (@JSablichNYT) September 8, 2014
“I love Ray, and I know that he will continue to prove himself to not only you all, but [to] the community, and I know he will gain your respect back in due time,” Janay Rice says. Her husband had earlier said: “When all of you [saw] this come upon [us], this thing [that] happened with me and my wife, everybody questioned what happened. One thing I can say is that sometimes in life, you will fail. But I won’t call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down; it’s not getting up.”
16 June: Goodell meets with the Rices in New York to discuss the case. A league spokesman tells the New York Times that Goodell “took his cue in the investigation in part from law enforcement officials who had access to more information than the league”.
24 July: The NFL suspends Rice for two games, with Goodell saying in a statement: “We simply cannot tolerate conduct that endangers others or reflects negatively on our game. This is particularly true with respect to domestic violence and other forms of violence against women.”
28 July: Rice receives an ovation from Ravens fans at a practice.
29 July: ESPN suspends broadcaster Stephen A Smith for a week over comments about domestic violence and his suggestion that women not “provoke wrong actions”.
31 July: Rice apologizes again: “We have to explain [to my daughter] what happened that night. … I own my actions … I don’t condone any of my behaviour.”
1 August: Goodell defends the suspension to reporters: “I take into account all of the information before I make a decision on what the discipline will be … In this case, there was no discipline by the criminal justice system. They put him in that diversionary program.”
28 August: The NFL toughens its policy on domestic violence offenders, and Goodell writes a letter to league owners in which he says of his decision on Rice: “I didn’t get it right.” NFL employees who violate the policy are now subject to suspension without pay for six games, and a second offense results in a lifetime ban, subject to appeal.
8 September: TMZ posts the security footage from within the Revel elevator that shows Rice punching his then-fiancee. The Ravens cut Rice from the team within hours, and the NFL suspends him indefinitely. NFL sources tell ESPN’s Chris Mortensen they did not have access to video from within the elevator, in line with a league spokesman’s statement that “no one in our office has seen it until today” and a league statement describing it as “new evidence”.
NFL: Ray Rice video was not made available to them,despite requests to law enforcement. Nothing on whether NFL had account of what happened
— Chris Mortensen (@mortreport) September 8, 2014
Ravens coach John Harbaugh says in an evening press conference that the video “changed things, of course”.
10 September: A law enforcement officer claims to have sent the elevator of Rice knocking out Palmer to NFL officials “five months ago”, according to the Associated Press. The unnamed official’s account undermines the league’s professed ignorance, and the NFL announced that former FBI director Robert Mueller, “overseen” by NFL owners John Mara and Art Rooney, would investigate how the NFL handled evidence. Goodell reiterated “We asked for video, but we were never granted that opportunity.”
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