Ravens Owner to Fans: You Deserve an Explanation

In an open letter to Ravens fans made public Tuesday, the NFL team’s owner Stephen Bisciotti said the team should have pushed harder to see the full video of Ray Rice’s attack on his then fiancée.

“You deserve an explanation,” Bisciotti begins, before launching into a detailed timeline of when and how the team learned details of the original incident, which took place in February this year.

Bisciotti describes first learning that Ray Rice and his wife had been arrested at an Atlantic City casino and both charged with “simple assault.” He tells of learning details of the incident little-by-little in the months that followed. He did not, he insists, see the full video of Rice’s attack on his now-wife Janay until the video was made public Monday by the celebrity gossip site TMZ.

“Seeing that video changed everything,” Bisciotti writes. “We should have seen it earlier. We should have pursued our own investigation more vigorously. We didn’t and we were wrong.”

The decision to remove Rice from the Ravens team came swiftly after the video of the attack came to light, Bisciotti said.

“Ray had earned every benefit of the doubt from our organization. We took everything we knew and decided to support Ray Rice until we could not,” he writes.

“We hope that Ray will continue to work to be the best husband, father and person he can be, and he will turn this awful situation into something positive. We also have learned a great deal and will continue to strive to be an organization and team you and Baltimore will be proud of. I am sorry we let you down.”