Ravens Terminate Ray Rice Contract After TMZ Video Released

By Elizabeth Janney (Patch Staff)

Hours after TMZ Sports revealed a video showing Ray Rice assaulting his then-fiancee in an Atlantic City elevator, the Baltimore Ravens have cut Rice from the team.

The Ravens said that Rice’s contract was terminated Monday afternoon, in an announcement on the Ravens website.

Ravens Coach John Harbaugh plans to address the media at 8 p.m. on Monday, following practice.

The NFL has indefinitely suspended Rice, according to NFL spokesman Greg Aiello.

Earlier in the day, Rutgers football coach Kyle Flood made a statement about the situation during his regularly scheduled Monday morning press conference.

Calling it a sad day for Rutgers football, Flood said Rice will always be part of the program’s family, but called the video “difficult to watch.”

“The video I saw this morning was difficult to watch,” Flood said. “As a husband and as a father, there’s nothing that could justify what I saw on that video.

“Family is family but at Rutgers we hold ourselves to an extremely high standard and we expect a lot out of our players and we expect a lot out of the coaches and the staff that we have here in the Hale Center which we expect a lot out of our alumni. I think because of those expectations, this is a sad day.”

Rice appears on a video montage of Rutgers football players who have gone on to play in the NFL between the first and second quarters of home games. When asked if the University would remove his image from those videos, Flood said he wasn’t involved in that decision making process and that was a decision that would likely be made later in the week.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Rice for two games, a penalty that would have ended after this Thursday’s game against the Steelers. NFL officials said in a statement Monday that its personnel had not seen the video during their investigation and that despite requesting all materials from law enforcement, they had not seen the footage “until today.”

In late August, the NFL changed its policy on domestic violence after being harshly criticized in the wake of Rice’s sentence; going forward, players face six-game suspensions for first-time offenses and a lifetime ban for second offenses. Despite the one-time offense in Rice’s case, the NFL was reportedly suspending him indefinitely after Monday’s video released by TMZ.

TMZ Sports released footage Monday morning showing the assault that took place Feb. 15 in which Rice knocked his then-fiancee Janay Palmer unconscious in an elevator at the Revel Casino in Atlantic City.

Previously, the public saw video from the aftermath of the fight, in which Rice could be seen pulling Palmer, who appeared unconscious, from the elevator.

Rice was admitted to a pretrial intervention program in New Jersey for the assault charge and reported that he and his wife (he and Palmer were married the day after he was indicted) were undergoing counseling.

Rice had been with the Ravens for seven years and was a three-time Pro Bowler drafted in the second round in 2008 out of Rutgers University. He signed a five-year contract extension with the Ravens in 2012 worth $40 million, according to ESPN, after the team won the Super Bowl.