Report: TMZ paid more than $100,000 for Ray Rice elevator videos
Footage of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice attacking this fiancee inside an Atlantic City casino elevator cost TMZ well into the six figures, according to The New Yorker.
Rice knocked Janay Palmer — now his wife — unconscious during the altercation at the Revel Casino on February 2014. Days later, TMZ posted grainy video of Rice dragging his bride-to-be out of the elevator. That footage cost the gossip site $15,000, according to The New Yorker.
But it was the second video that effectively ended Rice’s NFL career and highlighted both NFL’s investigation process and the league’s handling of domestic violence issues. In this footage taken from inside the elevator, Ray Rice can be seen throwing a punch and knocking out his fiancee.
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The New Yorker reports TMZ paid nearly $90,000 for this footage, which hit the site on Sept. 8. Within hours, Rice — who had received a two-game suspension from the NFL — was cut by the Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the league. Rice was reinstated later this season after an appeal, but has not been signed by another NFL team.
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A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the league's head of security had possession of the footage from inside the elevator months before TMZ secured it. An investigation conducted by former FBI director Robert Mueller concluded that nobody at the league office had received or seen the video.
Prosecutors had possession of all the footage and by the time the second video became public, Rice had already been allowed to enter a diversion program that spared the former Rutgers University product jail time and paved way for the arrest to be expunged.
Investigators at the Revel couldn’t figure out which one of the casino’s security staff had taken cell phone video of the Rice footage with total certainty and passed that footage onto TZM, The New Yorker reports.
TMZ declined to discuss the payments when asked by the magazine.