In days gone by, Whoopi Goldberg, she of Ghost and Sister Act fame, was someone we looked up to. We thought she was a bit like her wise-cracking characters. However, this crown seems to have slipped from her dreadlocks, as she’s used her platform on talk show The View (think a snappier, shoutier version of Loose Women) to defend an American football player after he assaulted his girlfriend.
Ray Rice, who plays for the NFL team the Baltimore Ravens, fought with his then-fiancée Janay Palmer in the lift of an Atlantic City Hotel on 15 February this year. Both were arrested at the time and charged with simple assault. However, more recently, footage emerged of him taking her unconscious body out of the lift after the attack:
After going viral, the attack is now a national debate in the US, not only because, well, this is a case of a man beating up his partner – that happens way too frequently to always make it to national news – but because he’s in the public eye. Under pressure to do something about it, the NFL gave Rice a $58,000 (£34,000) fine and a two-game suspension.
This amounts to a loss of 0.058 per cent of his salary (this is like someone with a £24,000 salary being fined £1,392). And, when you see that another NFL player got a year’s suspension for smoking weed, and another got a four-game suspension for taking fertility drugs, it kinds of shows how little the NFL give a crap about domestic abuse – although they did release a statement pretending that they gave a shit: ‘The league is an entity that depends on integrity and in the confidence of the public and we simply cannot tolerate conduct that endangers others or reflects negatively on our game.
‘This is particularly true with respect to domestic violence and other forms of violence against women,’ it read, reports The Guardian.
And now, Whoopi Goldberg has waded in with some seriously questionable wisdom on the whole thing: ‘If you hit somebody, you cannot be sure you are not going to get hit back… You have to teach women: do not live with this idea that men have this chivalry thing still with them.
‘Don’t assume that’s still in place. So don’t be surprised if you hit a man and he hits you back.’
Which is basically saying ‘ner ner you started it’ to a woman who got knocked out cold by the man she presumably loved.
She’s not the only one, though, as an ESPN presenter Stephen A Smith has been suspended for saying pretty much the same thing, reports The Huffington Post: ‘What I’ve tried to tell the female members of my family… is that... let’s make sure you don’t do anything to provoke wrong actions.’
If he can get suspended, we sort of think Whoopi should be suspended too. Just because she’s a woman doesn’t make her comments any less wrong or damaging.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.