Written By: Rose La Rue
Edited By: Lina Djail
Photo courtesy of Steve DiMatteo, image licensed by Unsplash
A man is dragging an unconscious woman out of the elevator. His muscular two-hundred-pound frame is tugging at her limp body, pulling it towards their hotel room. He’s no stranger to her, or to the security guard who just stumbled across the jarring scene. The man is none other than Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens running back and the victim’s then-fiancée. Moments earlier, the famous football player had punched his fiancée in the face, sending her stumbling towards the elevator’s metal handrail. A two-game suspension, some hours of court-mandated counselling, an FBI investigation into the NFL’s cover-up of the elevator footage, and roughly nine years later, Rice is met with a standing ovation during his celebration as the honorary Legend of the Game during a 2023 Ravens game. Twelve years later, Ray Rice and the infamous elevator footage remain at the forefront of discussions of violence against women (VAW) in the NFL.
Following the Rice controversy, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell updated the Personal Conduct Policy in charge of punishing off-field misbehaviour like domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, and more. Under the new guidelines, first-time offenders, like Rice, would receive a mandatory six-game suspension. The average NFL season has 17 games. Ten years later, this promised systematic punishment is rarely applied. Rather, the ones punished are victims of VAW whose stories are systematically erased from NFL-backed media narratives. The NFL’s financial interests influence sports media to sanitize their enabling of violence against women, allowing athletes accused of misconduct to maintain marketable public images while victims’ experiences are marginalized. While there are independent news organizations that do offer thorough, honest, and invaluable reporting on athletes’ misconduct, they are drowned out by entertainment-focused fluff pieces by major media conglomerates. This mass-gaslighting by the league enables violent athletes, like Rice during his 2023 Legend of the Game celebration, to be welcomed back and embraced within the sport by teammates, coaches, and fans.
Media Entanglements
Major sports media outlets, like ESPN, Fox Sports, and Sports on Prime, are deeply entangled with the league, and long gone are the days of league-independent sports reporting. In January 2026, the NFL gained 10% ownership of ESPN. In return, ESPN received two of the NFL’s signature shows. Last August, Fox Sports announced it would keep its $3.3 billion deal with the league until the end of the 2030 season, claiming their relationship with the league was “incredibly positive.” Paired with the jarring normalization and legalization of sports gambling, the financial power the league has over sports broadcasts, journalists, and insiders has never been stronger.
In a sport like football where violence is worshiped on the field, it would be unreasonable to believe athletes do not carry over their aptitude towards violence off the field, and yet this is the idea the league promotes. If athletes are penalized for VAW, like with a six-game-suspension, the league misses out on several key pieces in its billion-dollar war cosplays. It comes down to the pitiful monetary value women have for the league. The only way to disrupt the football media monopoly is by changing its dedicated, passionate, loyal, and paying fan opinions. If fan perception towards franchise players becomes unfavourable, this will directly translate into lucrative media packages being cancelled or $10,000 Super Bowl tickets idling unsold. This existential threat is mediated through its chokehold on media narratives. We must remember what these men did, even as they are defended by head coaches, teammates, fans, and even women working within the media. For the censored victims, however, there’s no defence or accolades from audiences; there’s only erasure and injustice systematically repeated.
Deshaun Watson
“Is that skepticism fair?” sports journalist Taylor Rooks asks Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson on the topic of the nearly thirty sexual assault lawsuits filed against him, “Fair? Of course—to me—I’m going to say no, but you know, life isn’t fair.” This quote from the nicknamed “sex-pest,” aired as part of a redemption-sympathy piece in Prime’s pregame show. Any mention of the content of those lawsuits was omitted from the five-minute-long segment. Even worse, the YouTube description of the segment reads: “after a lengthy suspension and multiple surgeries, the veteran quarterback faces a critical season.” To really understand the level of censorship here, we must discuss the cases leading to this “lengthy suspension.”
In 2021, 22 lawsuits were filed by massage therapists against Watson alleging sexual and physical abuse. In 2022, two more women, a massage therapist and a cosmetologist, filed lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and assault. In 2024, a 25th victim sued for sexual assault following a date she had with Watson. The plaintiff had to hurl a piece of furniture at the six-foot-three Watson to escape. In total, there are 27 separate lawsuits against Watson as of the fall of 2026. Despite these active suits against Watson, the Cleveland Browns traded for Watson in 2022 and welcomed him with the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history at the time, worth 230 million dollars. Those nearly thirty separate women suing Watson landed him a five-million-dollar fine. That’s 2.2% of his historic contract, or four million dollars short of his pay-per-game. Goodell handed Watson an 11-game suspension—again, a season has 17 games. This is only a sample of the content, the voices, the sources of critiques, etc., strategically omitted by major media broadcasts to prevent fans, viewers, and all those paying for NFL products from reconsidering their spending.
Jameis Winston
During the 2025 Super Bowl LIX pregame coverage, Fox Sports hired New York Giants quarterback Jameis Winston as a special correspondent. Winston and his “goofball” persona were inescapable in the broadcast for the biggest sports event of the year. He was such a big hit for Fox that they invited him back as a digital correspondent for their coverage of the 2026 World Cup, successfully disseminating their “man of the people” propaganda to the masses. What’s lost in this comedic narrative are his multiple sexual and physical assault allegations.
In 2012, while attending Florida State University, Winston’s classmate reported to university officials that the Seminoles quarterback physically assaulted and raped her. In the victim’s lawsuit, she alleges campus police—whose lead investigator was employed as a private security officer by a firm operated by FSU—pressured her not to pursue charges. The victim accused Campus Police of pressuring her by claiming her life would be miserable in a football town like Tallahassee if she continued to discuss her trauma. Meanwhile, FSU investigated Winston for another alleged sexual misconduct case after another student sought counselling after a sexual encounter with Jameis. In 2017, a year after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers drafted Winston first overall and vouched for his “good guy” character, he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman while working as an Uber driver by forcibly touching her vulva. Winston was subsequently banned from using Uber services, but not from the NFL. He received a three-game suspension. The media is erasing this past of violence to push a hilarious, absurd, silly guy personality, dubbing this comedic portrayal the “Jameis Winston experience.” Meanwhile, those who have experienced the true “Jameis Winston experience” are omitted and robbed of their own truths. Flattened and sanitized, the women and their victimization are erased from the media, and subsequently from social consciousness. In other words, more money for the NFL, and no threat to the great cult of football.
MVP: Most Valuable Publicity
Whether through footnoting their abuse or by painting them as “too goofy” to have criminal intent, the media achieves the same goal: to systemically erase victims from the narratives. Media reporting censors victims and independent reporters through their mass manufacturing of favourable player profiles, hereby hiding victim stories deep down the internet search results. This is what makes the media’s propaganda, guided by the league’s financial incentives and entanglements, so insidious and critical in enabling structural VAW in the NFL. There is no doubt this is an issue across sports, especially men’s sports. However, the cultish following and deep cultural roots the NFL has fostered within American media, politics, and society make it uniquely susceptible to influence not only how viewers treat athletes committing VAW but how they view VAW as a whole. By recognizing and critically interacting with sports media content, we can advocate for victims by holding media companies and sports owners accountable and by continuing to unconditionally stand in support of victims.
