Janay Rice is looking back on a shocking time in her life. The wife of disgraced NFL player Ray Rice sat down with Matt Lauer for a new interview, which aired on the Today show on Monday, Dec. 1.
Janay, 26, spoke to Lauer, 56, with her mother Candy Palmer sitting on a couch next to her. Palmer comforted her daughter as she spoke and became emotional, reflecting on the domestic abuse incident that made her as famous as her former Baltimore Ravens player husband.
Mrs. Rice opened up to Lauer about the two security tapes that made their way to the public and showed the athlete, 27, beating his wife in an elevator of Atlantic City’s Revel Casino.
“I saw the first one,” she said of the tape of the exterior of the elevator, adding that she didn’t see the video before it was made public via TMZ. “We just knew about it… we knew that it was gonna happen. We didn’t know exactly when it was gonna happen, but there was no preparing us for that at all. When I saw that, it was horrible. You can’t make excuses for anything, but we were highly intoxicated and in the moment, you’re not thinking about, ‘Oh my god, I’m on camera in an elevator.'”
Janay noted that she has not seen the second, more graphic tape, explaining, “I refuse. I’m not going to let the public bring me back there.”
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After the full video of the horrific incident went viral, Ray was dropped by the Baltimore Ravens after six years with the team, and indefinitely suspended by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who attempted to distance himself and the league from the violent incident.
Before the second video made its way online, the Rices sat for a press conference this past May to comment. Janay raised eyebrows when she apologized for her “role” in the fight; Ray apologized to his team and the fans, but was not shown apologizing to his wife.
“I apologized for the part that I took in this, and I apologized because for one, this press conference was something the Ravens put together…” Janay explained. “I was ready to do anything that was going to help the situation… Help the way we looked in the media. Help his image. Help obviously his career. So, you know, they told us earlier that week we would do the press conference.”
“They suggested it,” she added, explaining that the Baltimore Ravens thought it would be a good idea for her to apologize for the abuse. “They basically gave us a general script. Yes. And that was frustrating for me, because obviously people took it as, you know, I’m taking light off of what Ray did. In no way. I was basically… not doing what I was told… but at the same time I didn’t think it was completely wrong for me to apologize, because at the end of the day I got arrested, too, so I did something wrong, too. Not taking any light off of what Ray did because I agree with everybody else. He was wrong.”
Janay added that Ray had already recognized that he was “wrong,” privately taking responsibility for his actions numerous times when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“He apologized to me more than once,” she said. “Countless amounts of times. I’m sitting there next to him, so I wouldn’t be sitting there next to him if I wasn’t the first person to get an apology. There’s no way. But the whole thing was awkward. We were just doing what we had to do to get it over and done with.”
The NFL wife told Lauer that the now-famous elevator altercation was an isolated, one-time-only nadir in their relationship.
“No… no… no,” Janay said of whether there was any prior or ensuing violence. “There’s no way. He knows what he would have to deal with if this was something… I’m not gonna sit there in silence and let something happen to me — and God forbid, in front of my child. Just like, let it happen? There’s no way.”
The couple’s daughter Rayven Rice, 2, is another person that Janay is going to have to answer to in the future. She told Lauer that she will tell her daughter the truth about what happened.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be prepared until that moment,” she said of explaining the abuse to Rayven. “But we’re gonna be honest with her. You know, we’re gonna tell her what happened. Let her know things like this are not okay. It’s not something that she should tolerate. You know, let her know that people make mistakes and it’s how you learn from them.”
“People forget that these people are human,” she added. “Everybody makes mistakes… everybody makes mistakes.”
