In this May 23, 2014, file photo, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice pauses as he speaks during a news conference at the team's practice facility in Owings Mills, Md. A new video that appears to show Ray Rice striking then-fiance Janay Palmer in an elevator last February has been released on a website.Pat Shea was suddenly a very busy woman late Monday afternoon. The president and CEO of the Nashville YWCA, Shea was sought out for television and newspaper interviews following another senseless act of domestic violence.
She has seen it too many times to count over her 55 years on this earth. But almost never had such a despicable crime wound up on a video vividly showing an NFL veteran knocking out his fiancee (now wife) by punching her in the face inside an elevator.
Yet there it was for all to see, thanks to TMZ. The entertainment and gossip website released the video at 4 a.m. Monday. Within 12 hours the repugnant running back Ray Rice had been cut by the Baltimore Ravens and indefinitely suspended by the NFL.
"I didn't want to watch it," Shea said. "It's awful. But it's good in starting an important conversation. Some people don't quite believe those things happen until they see the evidence for themselves. What they saw in that elevator happens every day within the privacy of someone's home."
It's certainly a conversation worth having regarding both the Ravens and the NFL. Maybe the pure horror and shock of that knockout punch stirred a new anger and shame in the Baltimore brass and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell that previously had not been there.
Maybe. But it shouldn't have taken that video. From the moment TMZ released a video earlier this year showing Rice dragging his unconscious wife out of the elevator as if she were a duffle bag, we've all known, deep down, what happened. He knocked her out. It was common knowledge even then. The police simply refused to release the tape.
And sadly, wrongly, so very, very wrongly, Rice apparently got a free pass because no one saw that punch. The NFL suspended him two teeny-weeny games. His girlfriend Janay -- the mother of their daughter -- became his wife. Everyone appeared to be moving on: See no evil, believe no evil. The Ravens fans even gave the bum a standing ovation before an exhibition game against the San Francisco 49ers last month.
Now you wonder if Rice isn't the only one who should lose his job because of this, beginning with Goodell, who handed out that weak two-game suspension -- which would have ended after this Thursday's game against Pittsburgh -- though some believe Janay Rice's story that she provoked the attack initially softened the penalty.
To his credit, Goodell later admitted, "I didn't get it right," after public condemnation of Rice's penalty. He swiftly changed the league policy going forward to six games for a first offense and a lifelong ban for a second offense.
But it shouldn't have taken criticism to wake up Goodell, who is a husband and a father of twin daughters. Whether he'd seen the video of the punch before Monday -- and he claims he hadn't -- he saw Janay Rice's body being pulled from an elevator by her future husband. He was told that a video from inside the elevator showed Rice punching her. Anybody smart enough to rise to commissioner of the world's most powerful sports league is surely smart enough to connect those dots.
Shea sees a bigger problem, a problem that must be solved sooner than later.
"Domestic violence is a result of sexism, of objectification of women, of viewing women as property, as if they're something less than human," she said. "Most men are good, but we need those good men to start holding the bad ones accountable for their actions."
To help such a goal along, she helped form "A Call to Coaches" in the Nashville area. It asks coaches at every level of every sport to begin to talk to their athletes, whatever their ages, about respecting women.
One of the speakers at her first symposium was former Tennessee Titans wide receiver Chris Sanders. During his turn at the microphone, he recalled arriving home as an eighth-grader to find his sister's boyfriend beating her.
After pulling him off, he asked the attacker why. According to Sanders, the man said, "Nobody ever taught me [how to treat a woman]."
Added Sanders in the video of the event available on YouTube: "Too many of our men are losing today because they don't have a coach to teach them the fundamentals of how to treat a woman."
Maybe they don't have a coach, but they should have a conscience, that inner voice that almost always knows right from wrong. Or maybe there are more guys out there than we realize who disturbingly see the opposite sex as less than human.
For proof, merely turn to an ESPN roundtable discussion Monday evening that included former NFL defensive back Eric Allen.
As the segment wound down, Allen said that when all the attention on this winds down, the Ravens players need to reach out to Rice and say, "Hey, man, we need to make sure that you're going to be OK."
Wouldn't it be nice if one day macho males such as Allen became man enough to deliver a similar message to the victim?
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.