On May 23rd, the Baltimore Ravens made the highly-regrettable decision to live-tweet the joint press conference held by Ray Rice and his wife Janay.
Four months later, on September 8th, the Ravens have deleted multiple tweets from that day, including most notably this quote from a victim of domestic abuse.
And that’s not all, the video of Ravens fans giving Ray Rice a standing ovation at training camp has mysteriously disappeared from the team website.
What changed in those four months, you ask? Video emerged of Ray Rice knocking Janay out in an elevator with a swift and forceful blow.
Back in July, when the Ravens were doing everything they could to tout the character of Ray Rice and say what a good guy he was, we called them a PR dumpster fire. That, obviously, was much too kind. It’s turned out to be one of the worst PR disasters in modern times.
To sheepishly delete that tweet now, and only after video of the knockout blow has emerged, only after the franchise cut Rice, speaks of a level of shame that was previously unknown by professional sports franchises.
Do the Ravens actually think deleting that tweet will accomplish anything? Do they actually believe the public will forget about their months of victim shaming and full-throttled effort to repair the public image of their star running back? It’s a laughable reaction to try to stem the tidal wave of justifiable outrage aimed at the team and the league.
What’s most shameful in all of this is the fact that if TMZ never releases that videotape, the Ravens never cut Rice, nor do they delete their live tweets from the Rices’ press conference. That’s the depressing reality that exists here. The Ravens only care about their months-long asininity because you know what Ray Rice really did inside that elevator.
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