An independent investigation led by former FBI director Robert Mueller is to look into the National Football League’s (NFL) handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence incident, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said on Wednesday night.
The probe, which is to conclude with a public report, will have the full cooperation of the league in obtaining records and interviews with league staff members.
The move came as pressure mounted on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell regarding exactly when the league first saw and obtained a video showing star Baltimore Ravens running back Rice knocking out his then-fiancee and now wife, Janay Palmer, in a hotel elevator.
The probe is to be overseen by two NFL team owners who are attorneys, Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers and John Mara of the New York Giants, and conducted by Mueller, who ran the FBI from 2001 to last year.
Mueller’s investigation will look into how the NFL handled its initial probe of Rice, which Goodell said did not produce the key video despite requests to law-enforcement officials, in part because it would have been illegal interference in an ongoing legal matter.
Rice avoided jail time for the incident by agreeing in May to a pre-trial intervention program. In July, Goodell, who has guided the NFL since 2006, imposed only a two-game ban on Rice, one that was to have ended today.
Last month, Goodell said that he had given too soft a punishment, and toughened NFL penalties for domestic violence.
Only after a video of Rice’s brutal left hook was revealed on Monday by celebrity Web site TMZ did the Baltimore Ravens fire Rice, a star rusher who helped them win last year’s Super Bowl, and Goodell suspend Rice indefinitely.
US lawmakers who oversee the NFL and its anti-trust exemptions regarding TV deals criticized Goodell and requested details on the NFL’s investigation of Rice.
US Senator Dean Heller, a Republican on a Senate Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over the NFL, pressed for details about how Goodell will “address the harm your league has inflicted on survivors of domestic violence going forward.”
“Commissioner Goodell must understand the scope and severity of domestic abuse acts,” Heller wrote. “Judging from his actions, it’s time for the NFL to step its game up on this important matter.”
“I am highly disappointed the NFL’s reaction was only heightened once the public witnessed the elevator video. By waiting to act until it was made public you effectively condoned the action of the perpetrator himself,” he added.
The leader of the US’ largest women’s advocacy group called for Goodell, the boss of the world’s richest sports league, to resign.
“The NFL has lost its way,” National Organization for Women president Terry O’Neill said. “It doesn’t have a Ray Rice problem. It has a violence against women problem. The only workable solution is for Roger Goodell to resign.”
Goodell maintained that no one at the NFL had before Monday seen the brutal video of Rice punching Palmer in an Atlantic City casino elevator in February.
“We did not see video of what took place inside the elevator until it was publicly released,” Goodell said in a Wednesday memo to executives. “None of the law-enforcement entities we approached was permitted to provide any video or other investigatory material to us.”
An Associated Press report, citing an unnamed law-enforcement source, said the video was in fact sent to the league in April and arrival was confirmed by a voicemail from an NFL telephone number.
“We have no knowledge of this,” the NFL said in a statement.
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