A jury was unable to see any wrongdoing in a video that arguably shows Jets receiver Brandon Marshall throwing a punch at a woman who sued him for assault in March 2012. Now, everyone else can watch the video to see if it shows Marshall doing something he shouldn’t have done.
Over the objection of lawyers representing both Marshall and Christin Myles, the plaintiff in the case, a federal judge granted the request of multiple media outlets to release the video, via Dom Cosentino of NJ.com.
Marshall can be seen in the black-and-white surveillance video consoling his wife, who had been hit with a champagne bottle, cutting her lip and knocking out multiple teeth. Eventually a commotion unfolds, with Marshall backing up and Myles accosting a man who, based on the trial testimony, is former NFL receiver Mike Sims-Walker.
Marshall allegedly punched Myles after she attacked Sims-Walker, but Marshall’s back is to the camera at that moment, making it impossible to see whether a punch occurred.
The video still would have been enough to support a verdict against Marshall, given the clear testimony of Myles that he punched her, testimony from Sims-Walker that he offered to take the blame for hitting Myles, and inconsistencies in the version offered up by the defense, which at one point included Marshall disputing his own lawyer. But a juror later told reporters that it was not clear based on the video whether Marshall had struck Myles.
This suggests either that Myles wasn’t a compelling and/or credible witness. It’s also possible that her lawyer didn’t persuasively explain that the case shouldn’t turn on whether the video clearly shows a punch, since: (1) plenty of cases are driven by witness testimony without video; and (2) the video confirms that there was some sort of forceful interaction between Marshall and Myles, with only the key moment in the exchange missing from the visual evidence.
The NFL has been tight-lipped on the situation, which happened more than two years before the Ray Rice debacle. An NFL spokesman told Cosentino that there is “nothing to report” in the aftermath of the disclosure of the video.