Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti met with the media on Monday, roughly 15 minutes after the Ravens disseminated a thorough, detailed response to the ESPN report accusing the Ravens of mishandling the Ray Rice case.
The press conference would have been a lot more efficient if the release had come earlier. At one point, Bisciotti reminded someone off camera that Bisciotti had suggested sending it out sooner.
As to the Rice situation, Bisciotti said plenty of things. Most importantly, he said that no members of the organization will lose their jobs as a result of the Rice investigation.
He also attributed much of the ESPN report to sources with ties to Rice, and the agendas that naturally flow from it.
“The majority of the sources are people who work for Ray,” Bisciotti said. “It’s Ray’s attorney, it’s Ray’s agents, and Ray’s friends.”
Bisciotti attributed the comments to a simple motivation.
“They are building a case for reinstatement,” Bisciotti said. “The best way to build a case for reinstatement is to make everyone else make look like they were lying.”
Bisciotti also pointed out that ESPN worked on the report for 11 days, but gave the Ravens only a couple of hours to respond to ESPN’s questions before publication. He questioned whether ESPN was even concerned about the team’s position, claiming that co-author Kevin Van Valkenburg teased a “bombshell” report on Twitter before the report was published.
Bisciotti also disputed the notion that he offered future employment to Rice as “hush money” aimed at getting Rice to go along with the notion that Rice had lied to the team about what he did.
Bisciotti vowed that changes will be made if/when future situations like this arise in the future, and that he harbors no animosity toward the league for its handling of this situation. But he said that, if the league handles a similar case in the same way in the future, he’d lose faith in the league’s ability to address such issues.