Ray Rice’s wife broke her silence on Tuesday, a day after video surfaced showing her being knocked unconscious by her husband inside an Atlantic City hotel elevator.
In a post published on her Instagram account, Janay Rice defended her husband, who was cut by the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the NFL on Monday, and criticized the media’s coverage of the episode.
“I woke up this morning, feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend,” she wrote. “But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare itself. No one know the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret everyday is a horrible thing.”
Her Instagram account is private, but a screenshot of the post was published on Twitter by Jeff Zrebiec, a Ravens beat writer for the Baltimore Sun.
The post can be viewed below.
The surveillance footage from February that was obtained by TMZ showed Ray Rice punching Janay Rice, then his fiancee. Previously, the only footage that was publicly available showed the aftermath of the incident, which led to the player’s indictment by a grand jury and a two-game suspension from the league.
The couple married a day after the indictment.
They appeared together at a press conference in late-May and, on the same day, a tweet sent from the official Ravens Twitter account indicated that Janay Rice took some responsibility for the incident.
The tweet re-emerged on Monday after the new surveillance footage was released, sparking even more outrage at the team. By late afternoon, the Ravens deleted the tweet from the account.
