communications. now, just days after an arbitrator lifted ray rice s pro football suspension, the world is now hearing from his wife. janay rice says her husband deserves a second chance in the nfl. nbc s today show aired her first interview since video emerged of her then fiance punching her in the face and earlier video showed him dragging an unconscious janay out after he hit her. she says it was an isolated ago of violence but won t happen again. was there ever any incident of violence in your relationship with ray or has there been any incident of violence since that no. elevator incident. no. no, there s no way. he know what he would have to deal w you know, if this was something i m not going to sit there in silence and let something happen to me and, you know, god forbid in front of my
very uncarrick rharacteristic o. i take responsibility. that was very uncharacteristic. he says it was one bad night and he takes full responsibility for what happened. this is something as a man you have to own and, you know, we re heartily sorry and i m heartily sorry for everything i have put my family through. i still have to live every day, go take my daughter to school. she s going to grow up and the way the internetworks now, she s going to google her father s name and the first thing that will come up is who knows what will come up. not the highlights from the field. not at all. that s the reality of it. and that s what i m more worried about fixing. i want my wife, my daughter, my family to we all just want to gravitate, we all want our lives back. he wants his life back, but
survivors across the country thousands of times a day who basically say this was a mistake or this happened once or this was under the alcohol and i want the person who did this to me to have a second chance. what is your reaction to hearing that? you know, i definitely was not surprised by janay rice s comments and statements. it s what we hear from many women every day at the national domestic violence hotline. we often spend time as advocates working through what their experiences are, what their abuser did to them, educating about the power and control dynamics that exist in a relationship. before someone reel really understands the complexities of a statement. i don t think it s surprising that the arbitrator ruled against the nfl. if you re mad that ray rice is allowed to play and it s questionable, be mad at roger
would never have been at that press conference and would you never have apologized? no. laura, there s janay rice saying they put her up to doing this apology and she wouldn t apologize if they didn t make her do it. within that statement, she says i got arrested too, so i did something wrong too. she said that to matt lauer. she was, in effect, apologizing within her retraction of the apology. yeah. and it s incredibly sad, isn t it, that she would do that. but i completely understand, because we live in this culture, in this society where we have this blameocracy where the team is writing a script. why wouldn t she feel some sort of responsibility or blame for that? it makes perfect sense. that s how everyone s telling
a whole country full of people who never made a mistake. i apologize for the part i took in this. did you want to be a part of that press conference? i was going to do anything that helped the situation. when you say helped the situation, help ray and his career? helped the way we looked in the media. helped his image. helped, obviously, his career. they told us earlier that week that we would do the press conference. and i was fine with it. did anyone at the ravens say janay, it would be really good if you issued some kind of an apology. they suggested it, yes. did they come up with the wording? not specifically. they gave us a general skrimts. i do deeply regret the role that i played in the incident that night. and that was frustrating for me because, obviously, people took it as i m taking light over what ray did.