“What the hell is Janay Palmer thinking?”
It was the question asked by nearly everyone who saw “that video,” the one that clearly showed Palmer’s then-fiance, former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, knocking her unconscious on an elevator, then dragging her limp body off it. She’d stayed with Rice after that—married him, even. And she publicly apologized at a press conference and then publicly defended him when he was dropped by his team and indefinitely suspended by the NFL.
For domestic violence survivors, it was textbook behavior. For those who had never been abused, it was baffling. Was she doing it for the money? Did she grow up in an abusive home where this was normal? Was she a “classic victim” of domestic violence? How will she explain staying to her daughter someday?
