If Hope Solo is convicted, ‘obviously, disciplinary actions … will be taken’

Hope Solo and Christie Rampone celebrate a 2-0 victory over New Zealand on Aug. 3, 2012. (AP)

The Equalizer has the story. Team captain Christie Rampone, appearing on Huffington Post Live, said of Hope Solo’s pending trial on domestic violence charges:

“Right now the team is supporting her, as teammates. We all go through tough times, but at the end of the day, if something is changed on her court date in November, there’ll be, obviously, disciplinary actions that will be taken.”

You can see portions of Huffington Post interview with Rampone here.

Photo of the day: Ali Krieger and Megan Rapinoe

 Ali Krieger and the not-yet-blond Megan Rapinoe, November 2010. (U.S. Soccer)

Why Hope Solo is not ‘like’ Ray Rice

TMZ Sports

In the most thoughtful essay I’ve seen on the subject, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes about culture, politics, and social issues for The Atlantic, explains the fallacy — and the harm — in equating Hope Solo’s behavior with that of violent, abusive NFL stars.

Making that equation, he says, ignores what we know about human behavior throughout history.

“Ray Rice,” Coates writes, “did not so much ‘brawl with his family’ as he pummeled his fiancé into unconsciousness. Contrary to the flimsy notion that Real Men don’t hit women, Real Men have been pummeling women for much of human history.”

He continues:

In the history of humanity, spouse-beating is a particularly odious tradition—one often employed by men looking to exert power over women. Just as lynching in America is not a phenomenon wholly confined to black people, spouse-beatings are not wholly confined to women. But in our actual history, women have largely been on the receiving end of spouse-beating. We have generally recognized this in our saner moments. There is a reason why we call it the “Violence Against Women Act” and not the “Brawling With Families Act.” 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. …

Hope Solo only becomes Ray Rice through the annihilation of inconvenient history — through some forgery that implies that there is no tradition of men controlling women through violence.

George Frey/Getty Images

 

 

Quote of the day: On Hope Solo

“There are months when it seems that women only appear in the sports pages if they win a world championship or file a rape accusation. So I guess we should be glad Solo’s personal life is so awful, so explosive. Were it not, the U.S.’s win over Mexico and Solo’s shut-out record wouldn’t have appeared in the news as the footnote it is to the story ‘no one is talking about.'”

– Jennifer Doyle, an author and professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, on her blog The Sport Spectacle.

Brian Blanco/Getty Images

Media pack circles around Hope Solo

Hope Solo can run, but she can’t hide. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Exactly as I predicted, Hope Solo has become the target of a media blitzkrieg — which was inevitable after The Washington Post and The New York Times put her in their sights last weekend.

In a blog post titled “When Did We Start Caring About Hope Solo?” Matt Yoder of the terrific, if awfully named, Awful Announcing blog (“The worldwide leader in sports media blogs… although that’s debatable.”) pinpoints the moment:

It was Sept. 19, the day Juliet Macur of the New York Times and Cindy Boren of the Washington Post posted opinion pieces saying Solo should be suspended because of her arrest on domestic violence charges, just as an assortment of NFL stars have been suspended because of their arrests on domestic violence charges.

As Yoder notes, Solo was arrested in June, and there was nary a whisper all summer suggesting that she should be suspended.

The one exception (sort of), was Christine Brennan of USA Today, who wrote in mid-August — merely two months after Solo’s arrest — that it was wrong for U.S. Soccer to be promoting her pursuit of the career shutout record and that Solo should voluntarily sit herself down to focus “on getting whatever guidance she needs before she returns to soccer.” (It’s worth noting that even Brennan, the only strong media voice to criticize Solo before last week, stopped short of calling for the U.S. goalkeeper’s suspension.)

But in the wake of Big Media lighting into Solo, stories everywhere are parroting the same question: Why should she be playing, when Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy, and Jonathan Dwyer have been benched by the NFL?

Yoder points out that nothing has changed regarding Solo’s case. Her trial is and was scheduled for Nov. 4. She has and still does profess that she is innocent of criminal conduct. U.S. Soccer said and says that it will await the outcome of that trial before deciding what if any action to take against her.

Nothing has changed. Except that The Post, The Times and lots of wannabes decided it was time to take her to task.

“The increased media attention,” Yoder writes, “has been the only variable in Solo’s story since charges were filed.”

He continues:

The increased spotlight on Solo boils down to this – she is filling the media void.  With Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Greg Hardy now all out of the league for the time being our focus and outrage has to be targeted at someone, does it not?  This story isn’t going away anytime soon and with the attention on domestic violence and the lack of developments from the NFL, we have to look somewhere else to keep the story moving forward.

Solo and US Soccer are an easy target because they got caught out while the nation started paying attention to domestic violence crimes and weren’t smart enough to realize that sooner or later we would come knocking at their door.  Call it the Twitter mob, call it the impact of new media, call it what you want, but it’s clear that mass media today operates in a pack mentality.  Today that pack is circling around Hope Solo.  It moves from story to story, developing an intensely driven hyper-focus on whatever issue or person seems to be the leading story that day.

Or as I wrote last weekend:

“Now that the media titans have written the script — They got suspended. Why shouldn’t she? — the media mob (such as it is these days) can be relied upon to follow it.

 

Some in the media want Hope Solo to take a fall. (Rick Bowmer/AP)