(KDVR) – Ray Rice and Jonathan Dwyer are no longer a part of the NFL. Adrian Peterson is no longer an active member of his team.
Meanwhile, Hope Solo is not only still a member of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and her club team, she’s being celebrated for her on-field accomplishments.
What do all theses athletes have in common? All four have seen domestic violence charges levied against them in the last year.
But there are plenty of differences, as well. And that has raised a bevy of opinions about Solo as domestic violence has taken center stage in sports this past month.
Solo, a star goalkeeper for Team USA and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Seattle Reign, entered into this conversation when she was charged with two counts of misdemeanor domestic violence in an alleged assault of her half-sister and 17-year-old nephew last summer in Kirkland, Wash.
Not only has Solo not missed a game since the charges were filed, the U.S. Women’s National Team sent out an email with the following subject line just weeks after her arrest.
That email came before an August match pitting Team USA against Switzerland. Solo set the shutout record one match later, helping her team to an 8-0 win over Mexico. In the team’s next match — also against Mexico — Solo was given the captain’s armband.
When USA Today writer Christine Brennan wrote the U.S. Women’s National Team in disgust asking why Solo was being celebrated, a spokesperson responding by saying Solo had “an opportunity to set a significant record that speaks to her hard work and dedication over the years with the National Team.”
“While considering all factors involved,” the spokesperson continued, “we believe that we should recognize that in the proper way,” suggesting that to do anything aside from hail Solo’s on-field accomplishments would have been improper.
To say Brennan was unsatisfied with the response might be an understatement.
“As the NFL has found a way to remove alleged abusers from its active rosters,” Brennan wrote, “so too should have U.S. Soccer.”
And she’s not alone in that opinion.
ESPN’s Kate Fagan, the New York Times’ Juliet Macur and the Washington Post’s Cindy Boren have all suggested U.S. Soccer needs to find a way to punish Solo before the outcome of an upcoming trail, which is scheduled to begin on Nov. 4.
So what exactly is Solo accused of doing?
The devil may be in the details, especially for those who believe it’s unfair to compare Solo to NFL players who have been recently accused of domestic violence.
The Solo incident reportedly began on June 21, after she arrived at her sister’s house, allegedly upset that her husband had refused to take her to the airport for a flight.
For the record, Solo’s husband is former NFL football player Jerramy Stevens, who has been accused of both rape and domestic violence — with the alleged victim being Solo on one occasion.
Shortly after arriving at her sister’s house, according to an arrest affidavit, it became clear Solo was under the influence of a considerable amount of alcohol, and she became upset with her nephew when she thought he was mocking her.
After conversation settled down momentarily, Solo and her nephew reportedly started talking about the latter’s interest in acting. In order to be a good actor, the 17-year-old suggested, you need an “athletic state of mind.”
Solo responded that her nephew would never achieve that state of mind, according to the arrest affidavit, because he was “too fat, overweight and crazy to ever be an athlete.” The nephew responded by insulting Solo, and telling her to get out of his family’s house.
Shortly after that, the nephew reportedly accused Solo’s family and father of being crazier than him, and Solo allegedly charged and punched him. According to the report, the two grappled and Solo wound up punching her nephew and sister, who attempted to intervene, several times.
In an effort to stop Solo from assaulting his mother, according to the arrest affidavit, the nephew broke a broom over Solo’s head. When it was clear that Solo was undeterred, the nephew reportedly grabbed a broken BB gun, pointed it at Solo and told her to leave.
When the police arrived on the scene, they found the nephew bleeding from one ear and his jaw and nose reddened. Solo’s sister’s left cheek was swelling. The officer reported seeing no injuries to Solo, and that she refused to allow him to inspect her for injuries.
Solo told the officer she had not assaulted anyone, and she has stuck to that story by pleading not guilty when the domestic violence charges were filed.
Sure, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested, just like Rice, Dwyer, and Peterson, Solo has technically been charged with a domestic violence crime. But the crime Solo is accused of committing, Coates suggested, is “not the same specimen of violent and wrong.”
“There is a reason why we we have the ‘Violence Against Women Act’ and not the ‘Brawling With Families Act,’” Coates wrote. “That is because we recognize that violence against women is an insidious, and sometimes lethal, tradition that deserves a special place in our customs and laws.
“This is the tradition with which Ray Rice will be permanently affiliated. Hope Solo is affiliated with a different tradition — misdemeanor assault.”
What’s more, Slate’s Amanda Hess wrote, “launching a campaign to raise awareness of female domestic abusers would be an absurd way to spend the extremely limited cultural capital” available to U.S. women’s soccer.” Why?
For starters, Hess wrote, women’s soccer pales in comparison to the NFL it terms of popularity, and because “perpetrators of domestic violence are overwhelmingly male, the victims are overwhelmingly female, and the violence that occurs between intimate partners represents a far more insidious form of abuse than that of a woman fighting with her extended family.”
When reached for comment by Brennan, U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun, who is based in Colorado Springs, seemed uninterested in differentiating between different forms of domestic violence, saying “abuse in all forms is unacceptable.”
However, the USOC may not have the authority to punish Solo ahead of her November trial due to rights granted to her under the U.S. Amateur Sports Act.
That doesn’t mean that U.S. Women’s Soccer couldn’t have benched Solo, suspended promotional campaigns featuring her — as Nike, Wheaties and Castrol did with Adrian Peterson — or reached an agreement in which she could have taken time away from the sport to deal with her personal and legal issues far from the soccer field.
And, as Brennan wrote, “considering the nation’s domestic violence climate” that sort of approach may have been “preferable.”
