Baltimore Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome has revealed that the version of what Ray Rice told him about the incident involving him and his wife matched the video released on Monday.
The 27-year-old was shown to have punched his then-fiancee in a lift of an Atlantic City hotel in February, knocking her unconscious, which culminated in his arrest.
Rice was initially suspended by the NFL for two games, but following the release of the CCTV footage by TMZ, the club released him and the league banned the running back indefinitely.
"Ray had given a story to John [Harbaugh] and I," Newsome said to the Baltimore Sun. "And what we saw on the video was what Ray said. Ray didn't lie to me. He didn't lie to me."
However, Ravens president Dick Cass believes that the facts he was told differ to what was present in the footage from the lift.
He said: "There's a big difference between reading a report that says he knocked her unconscious or being told that someone had slapped someone and that she had hit her head.
"That is one version of the facts. That's what we understood to be the case. When you see the video, it just looks very different than what we understood the facts to be."
A report emerged on Wednesday that the NFL received a copy of the video three months before it was released online.
Simon Sinclair
