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*UPDATE: Josh Brown has been placed on the Commissioner Exempt List making him inactive with pay
Remember when the NFL laid out an entirely new guideline on how to handle domestic violence and their players that included an automatic 6 game suspension for the first offense? It'd be understandable if you forgot all about it because apparently the NFL did too. Either they didn't remember it or they disregarded it anyway when it came time to punish Giants kicker Josh Brown for his arrest for domestic violence.
Now that controversy just got a whole lot worse. Josh Brown was arrested in May of 2015 for domestic violence, one of several different times where he was accused of abusing his then-wife Molly. After a 10 month (!) investigation into the matter, the NFL concluded that the right punishment for Brown was a one game suspension at the beginning of this year.
That's right folks, not the 6 game ban that they literally had just announced would be the case for first time offenses of domestic violence but only 1 freaking game. That was already bad enough when it was announced, but now that the case has been closed the King County Sheriff's office has released more than 150 documents to the public regarding the arrest. It's not pretty.
The documents released show that Brown had physically abused his ex-wife more than 2 dozen times and included a letter written by Josh Brown himself admitting to "physically, emotionally, and verbally" hurting his ex-wife in a letter to friends and family dated from the year 2014. That letter is believed to have been part of therapy between the couple, therapy that obviously didn't work if a year later he was arrested again for domestic violence.
That the NFL took 10 months to investigate this and didn't manage to uncover enough information to conclude the MANDATORY 6 game ban for domestic violence wasn't warranted is absolutely absurd. The NFL says they attempted several times to get information from the police on the situation but were rebuffed.
That may be true, however the King County Sheriff says that the NFL never identified themselves as the people seeking information and never spoke to him directly for him to have been able to give some extra information about the case.
"I would have said exactly the same thing, 'We cannot release the case file,'" King County Sheriff John Urquhart said to Seattle radio station KIRO. "But since this is a hot-button item in the NFL, since it's the NFL, we probably would have told them orally a little bit more about what we had. I don't like to get pushed around by a bully."
In what should have been a pretty clear cut, mandatory 6 game ban that would have made this situation a lot less ugly for the NFL, they instead decided to only suspend Brown 1 game leading towards this huge controversy now. The NFL says they care about domestic violence, but their actions continuously show otherwise.
Not only was Brown not punished properly, the New York Giants re-signed him this off-season despite the allegations and admittance from Josh Brown that he did indeed abuse his wife. You'd think that would have been enough to jettison the kicker, the one that already didn't have a contract with the team anyway mind you. It wasn't then, but how about now?
"We are not going to turn our back on Josh," Giants coach Ben McAdoo said when questioned about this ugly situation with Josh Brown after landing in London for his team's match at Twickenham stadium against the Rams.
No, they won't turn their back on their woman abusing kicker. In refusing to do what's right, they are instead turning their back on all of the victims of domestic violence who once again watch as a team in the NFL looks away at the abuse of women from one of their players.
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