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Ray Rice Reportedly Will Argue TMZ Video Was Unfairly Edited
By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 21, 2014
Modified Sep 21, 2014
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 21, 2014
Modified Sep 21, 2014
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Disgraced professional football player Ray Rice is planning to appeal his indefinite suspension from the NFL by arguing that the leaked video of him punching his then-fiance was unfairly edited. ESPN reports that RIce's lawyers will argue "the TMZ tape of Rice hitting his then-fiancee was a cleaned-up, whittled down and condensed version" of what happened at the Atlantic City hotel on Feb. 15th. TMZ responded by calling this the "dumbest defense ever."
Unless there's yet another version of the video of the incident which hasn't been leaked to the public, it seems Rice is hoping that he can use a technicality to get back into the NFL. TMZ however was upfront about the problems with the initial video, which they put online anyway when they released the harrowing edited version. In fact, TMZ was widely praised for the way they edited the video to make what happened in the elevator abundantly clear.
TMZ writes of the video:
He's right. We did edit the video ... and we made that point crystal clear in our original post -- the same post where we also INCLUDED the raw unedited version showing Rice KOing Janay Palmer.
As we initially reported, the original raw video was jerky -- in that it would move forward and then in reverse every couple of frames ... so we removed the reverse frames.
In case you missed it, ESPN's Outside The Lines also published an exhaustive report on the entire Rice/NFL fiasco late on Friday, in a piece that suggests Ravens executives purposefully tried to keep the elevator video from becoming public.
Tagged
editing
football
nfl
punch
ray rice
suspension
tmz
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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