Ray Rice: 'We Just Want Our Lives Back'
After Janay Rice spoke during the first installment of her interview with NBC's Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Monday morning, husband Ray Rice joined her for the second segment on Tuesday morning. During the sit-down interview, the former Baltimore Ravens running back, who won his appeal and was reinstated to the NFL on Friday, asked for a "second chance" to play football.
"They would have to be willing to, you know, look deeper into who I am and realize that me and my wife had one bad night, and I took full responsibility for it," said Rice when Lauer asked him what it would take for another NFL owner to take a chance on signing him. "And one thing about my punishment and everything going along with anything that happened is that I've accepted it. I went fully forward with it. I never complained, or I never did anything like that. I took full responsibility for everything that I did, and the only thing I can hope for and wish for is a second chance."
Rice added that he "made a horrendous mistake not apologizing to my wife" during their public press conference months ago, but didn't do so because of possible legal ramifications.
The 27-year-old running back says he takes full responsibility for his actions of punching his then-fiancée inside an Atlantic City, New Jersey, hotel elevator, knocking her unconscious in February, and it's something that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.
"The big deal is for me to always protect her, and that's why I said I take full responsibility," he continued telling Lauer. "She can do no wrong. This is something, you know, as a man you have to own and, we're horribly sorry, and I'm horribly sorry for everything that I have to put my family through. I still got to live every day, go take my daughter to school. She's going to grow up and the way the Internet works now she's going to Google her father's name and the first thing that's going to come up is, you know what's going to come up."
Rice continued, making a plea to the public to have their lives back.
"The reality of it and that's what I'm more worried about fixing is that I want my wife, my daughter, my family — we all just want our lives back," he said. "I realize football was one thing, but now I realize that the amount of people we've affected, the amount of families we've affected, that, you know, domestic violence is a real issue in society. We could take our one bad night, it just happened to be on video, but we are truly sorry to the people that are really going through it. You know, it's a real problem. And I know when the time is right, I know my wife wants to help, I know I want to help."
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(Photo: Today via NBC)