What Happens in a Casino Elevator Doesn’t Stay There—by Ayala Emmett

What Happens in a Casino Elevator Doesn’t Stay There
Ayala Emmett
September 9, 2014

A vicious assault on a woman in a casino elevator in Atlantic City took place in February 2014. Several months later on September 8, the attack in the elevator was on our TV screens: a woman treated like a punching bag, receiving a knockout and her unconscious body pulled out like a garbage bag. A Ravens’ star Ray Rice attacked his girlfriend Janay Palmer, knocked her down and mopped the floor with her limp body.

It was excruciating to watch, and all us who wanted to avert our eyes, flinching from the brutality, from Ms. Palmer’s suffering and her humiliation, could no longer ignore violence against women. We have always known about attacks on women, whether by intimates or strangers, but we have mostly refused to look at this violence as a civil rights violation. But nowadays with so many cameras and social media, turning away individually and collectively is no longer possible.

Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens, the NFL and the police all tried to ignore the fact that a horrific physical attack took place in an elevator; Rice lied to his teammates claiming a scuffle with the young woman (brazenly blaming the victim). The teammates chose, yes, chose to believe him and so did the NFL and the police. John Harbaugh, head coach of the Ravens said publicly, “It’s not a big deal.”

The NFL, the Ravens, the coach, team and the police who chose to believe Rice, all dissembled at best, colluding with the aggressor and hoping that a long tradition of favoring the powerful (and despising victims) would go on. It just didn’t happen this time. Social media has penetrated the shield that protected secrets of the powerful. What happened in an elevator in a casino has gone viral.

Elevators, unlike the home, are now public spaces with cameras. In the case of Ray Rice it recorded his violent assault on a girlfriend–now his wife. And people are asking why she chose to stay with Ray Rice. There is extensive research on why victims stay with and protect their attackers rather than protect themselves. But to be drawn into a debate on why a victim married her attacker allows us a diversion from what should be America’s focus: abusers who for so long could count on us, on our silence and complicity.

Rice’s assault has been bracketed in the media as “domestic violence” as though attacks in the household should be treated as anything but violence committed against a person. This bracketing of violence as “domestic violence” places it in a category by itself and makes it sound as though a woman in a relationship is a person of diminished rights. This very bracketing opens the gates for inflecting the attacks with intimacy rather than exposing their dangerous intimidation.

The raging public debate is now focused on the NFL, on when exactly did people see the video. The focus should remain on the NFL because it is a powerful American icon and should be accountable for its actions in this and other cases of players’ attacks on women. But a debate about the NFL is not enough. To leave it as an NFL business would be to ignore its American cultural context of simmering gender discrimination (in the workplace, maternity leave, equal pay, reproductive healthcare) that allows abusive treatment of women. The camera in a casino elevator in Atlantic City offers the rest of America an opportunity to decide what we need to do for equality and plain human decency within the NFL and nationally including the U.S. Congress, which still has to ratify equal pay for women.