National Football League

Report details NFL's failed efforts to obtain Rice info before scandal

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 3:52 p.m. ET

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As the NFL conducts its two-day owners meetings in New York, the Ray Rice scandal has once again made headlines as a new report surfaced late Monday providing far greater details on the league's initial handling of the investigation.

Citing an account offered by chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, ABC News reported that the NFL claims to have made numerous attempts at obtaining information from an Atlantic City casino elevator the night Rice struck and knocked out his wife back in February, when the two were engaged.

"We reached out to multiple law enforcement agencies and a court, but were unable to come up with the video,” McCarthy told ABC. “With each of these efforts it was 'give us everything.' "

According to the report, those efforts included "a series of phone calls, written communications and in-person attempts to track down information about the assault and video evidence of the alleged assault." According to McCarthy, these failed efforts explain why commissioner Roger Goodell has continued to express his surprise when TMZ obtained and released a video from inside the elevator in early September.

Video of the aftermath of the assault, which occurred in the now-closed Revel Casino on Feb. 15, first surfaced four days after the assault, also released by TMZ. It showed Rice dragging an unconscious Janay Palmer out of an elevator.

In May, Rice avoided jail time and agreed to enter a pretrial intervention program. In July, the NFL suspended Rice two games, igniting a firestorm of controversy over the severity of the punishment. After TMZ released the video from inside the elevator on Sept. 8, showing Rice strike Palmer, who then hit her head on a railing in the elevator and fell to the ground, the Ravens released Rice and the league suspended him indefinitely.

In the month since, multiple reports have addressed exactly what the league knew, and when it knew it. The NFL maintains no one employed by the league saw the video from inside the elevator until after TMZ made it public.

McCarthy told ABC the league made its first attempt to get information Feb. 19, when Jim Buckley, an NFL security representative based in New Jersey, called the Atlantic City Police Department and requested the incident report. According to the ABC News report, Buckley was told he must file an open records request and that the documents that would be made available would not provide much beyond what was already reported by the media.

The next day, NFL representatives attended a meeting with New Jersey State Police for a review of secruity at the Super Bowl weeks earlier. At that meeting, McCarthy said, NFL security chief Jeffrey Miller and others “asked New Jersey State Police commanders for help, but they were unable to assist because they said they were not involved in the investigation."

A state police spokesman confirmed McCarthy’s statement to ABC but added the department has no official record of those conversations.

From that date until June 6, the NFL didn’t ask again, according to the report. But on that day, league officials made a final attempt to obtain information, asking the director of the pretrial intervention program "to supply any and all information, including video, about the case." According to the ABC News story, the league was told the police report was not available but a copy of the publicly filed March 27 indictment was faxed to the league.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller has since been hired by the NFL to lead an investigation into the league's handling of the Rice investigation, and McCarthy told ABC all of the details outlined to ABC would be in the Mueller report.

However, ABC News also reported that an assistant city attorney in Atlantic City found no record of communications between the NFL and either police or City Hall, and that both the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office and the New Jersey Gaming Enforcement Division, both of whom had copies of the video, have no record of being contacted by the NFL.

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