Ray Rice and his wife Janay Palmer Rice opened up to Gayle King about the much-publicized domestic abuse incident that cost Ray his NFL career.
Ray and Janay discussed the incident with King in an interview on CBS This Morning that aired on Tuesday.
The former Baltimore Ravens running back lost his job after TMZ.com published a video that showed Ray violently assaulting Janay in a casino elevator in 2014.
Ray, 31, married Janay weeks after the incident, but his public image never recovered from the bad publicity.
Ray initially received a two-game suspension but the Ravens cut him loose after the public uproar in response to a second video published by TMZ in September 2014.
Ray appealed his termination and won his case, but no team will touch him. He is considering retiring from professional football.
“I’ll be the first one to say it. I don’t have to retire to tell you I’m done with football,” Ray told King. “The pressure I was under of being a star — that was the person I hated the most.”
Ray later revealed he doesn’t think he ever deserved the opportunity to return to the NFL after what he did to his wife.
He said he believes the NFL “is doing the work” to stop acts of domestic violence by its players.
When King asked Ray about his personal family history of domestic violence, he said he recalled seeing his own mother in dysfunctional relationships and he ended up “normalizing abnormal behavior”.
“I was a man at 11, and then at 21, I got drafted and became a boy,” he said. “When you get to the physical abuse, if it’s one time, that’s still one time too many.”
He added that he hates the person he was in the video, and Janay said she didn’t consider the violence to be abuse.
“It was never a thought whether I was going to leave or not because I knew that wasn’t him in that moment,” Janay added. “This is someone I’ve known since I was 15. I knew that we had work to do, and I was willing to move forward and put in the work.”
Ray and Janay viewed the now infamous video of former NFL player Kareem Hunt kicking and slapping a woman in a hotel earlier this year.
Although he hasn’t reached out to Hunt, Ray said he would talk to the now unemployed player to share his experiences and to help prevent future abuse against women.
