N.F.L. Shows It Doesn’t Really Care About Domestic Violence

[Nïçkî Mínág]

Television ratings for the N.F.L. are down 11 percent this season, and league officials have been grasping for possible explanations.

To some extent, they blame the presidential election. Some fans have tuned out football, they theorize, to tune in to a political race in which sexual assault and the treatment of women have been front and center, thanks to Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee who has bragged about groping and kissing women without their consent.

Those issues are important to some people, like — and this is just a guess here — women. And anyone else with even a sliver of decency.

But how important are those issues to the N.F.L.? Yet again, in the case of Giants kicker Josh Brown, the league has shown that it could not care less about women and really, really doesn’t want to call out its players for doing bad things to them.

Brown was arrested in 2015 and was charged with assaulting his wife at the time, Molly. Police and court records documented that Brown had assaulted her nearly two dozen times, including at least once, Molly Brown said, when she was pregnant.

The league investigated the matter for 10 months, sending in its crack investigative team, whose stated goal is to dig and dig for the truth. In the end, Brown was suspended for one game. One. A mere hiccup in the season. Apparently the N.F.L.’s investigators didn’t find much, and after the fact, the league blamed the victim. Brown’s wife had failed to cooperate, the league said, and that’s why its investigators couldn’t get to the bottom of what he had done.

If the N.F.L. has studied domestic violence cases at all since the Ray Rice debacle two years ago, it should know that putting the onus on an abused woman to make the case against her abuser — to the abuser’s employer, no less — is not exactly considered best practice.

The sheriff in charge of Brown’s case, John Urquhart, even rebuked the N.F.L. on Thursday for its feeble attempt at getting the facts in the case.

Photo

The Giants co-owner John K. Mara said that the team knew Brown had abused his wife before they re-signed him, but that the extent of the abuse was unclear. Credit Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press
He told KIRO, a Seattle radio station, that the N.F.L. never officially asked for documents. He said that two people he considered random — but who he subsequently learned worked at the league — had made document requests, which were denied. But had Urquhart known it was the N.F.L. asking, things would have turned out differently, he said.

“Since this is a hot-button item in the N.F.L., since it’s the N.F.L., we probably would have told them orally a little bit more about what we had,” he said.

But even if you move past the N.F.L.’s track record in investigating and punishing players accused of violence against women, you would think that the Giants might have cared about Brown’s background enough to do some digging themselves. Turns out, though, they didn’t have to. The Giants knew about Brown’s past, even before they re-signed him before the season.

“He’s admitted to us that he’s abused his wife in the past,” the Giants co-owner John K. Mara said Thursday on WFAN in New York. “And I think that’s what’s a little unclear, is the extent of that.”

So Mara decided it was O.K. for a player to abuse his wife just a little bit?

Now the N.F.L. is backpedaling once again. After details of the case were made public this week, the league said that it was reopening Brown’s case. Some of the details the N.F.L. now can see in black and white are these: Brown, in journals he kept, admitted abusing his wife and viewing her as his slave.

“I have controlled her by making her feel less human than me,” Brown wrote.

He added, “I have disregarded my stepsons’ feelings, and they have witnessed me abusing their mother.”

The league’s new and so-called improved domestic violence policy calls for a six-game suspension without pay for a first-time offender, and for a more severe penalty if “the act was committed against a pregnant woman or in the presence of a child.”

Now, just as in the Ray Rice case, the eyes of the public are on the N.F.L. to see what it does to make things right. So far, its actions haven’t matched its words.

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SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY
Instead, its inaction once again has forced others to take a vocal stand. Even some players’ mothers, for goodness’ sake.

Annie Apple, the mother of Giants cornerback Eli Apple, took Mara to task for treating domestic violence lightly.

“As a domestic violence survivor, reading these Mara comments makes me sad, angry and completely baffled,” she wrote Thursday on Twitter. “He just doesn’t get it. This is sad.”

And then there’s Melissa Mark-Viverito, the speaker of the New York City Council. She is a casual sports fan upset about the way local professional teams have treated players accused of domestic violence — players like pitcher Aroldis Chapman, whom the Yankees acquired last December even though he was being investigated for domestic violence. They traded him in July. By then, Mark-Viverito had decided to do something about it.

Over the past several months, she spearheaded a public service campaign, #NotAFan, featuring top athletes and coaches, including Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, speaking out against domestic violence. The campaign’s videos were shown at Citi Field before the Mets’ wild-card game, and they will begin appearing in New York City taxis Monday.

Nearly every big-time local team agreed to participate, but two did not. The Giants and the Jets, Mark-Viverito told me, refused to take part.

“The buy-in was pretty immediate from most teams,” she said. “I don’t know why they declined.”

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COMMENTS
The N.F.L. does so many things that are inexplicable or inexcusable. But the way it treats women and the men who abuse them is on top of that list.

The N.F.L. has proved that it simply doesn’t care.