Report: TMZ paid $100,000 for Ray Rice videos

Ray Rice with wife Janay Palmer. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File) The price for the videos that ended a career and rattled the NFL to its core: $100,000.

That’s how much TMZ paid for the two security camera videos of Ray Rice attacking his then-fiance Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino in February 2014. The videos, released separately, provoked outrage and put the NFL on the defensive in a way it had never been over the course of its long history.

The details of TMZ’s payments are outlined in an expansive new article in The New Yorker. The degree of sophistication involved in TMZ’s pursuit of celebrity scandal is impressive, regardless of what one thinks of the end result (or its journalistically suspect method of paying sources for material). Consider the way in which the Ray Rice tape ended up in the hands of TMZ despite the NFL being unable to procure it:

According to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor. After guards responded to the incident in the lobby, several surveillance officers gathered and wondered aloud if a tape of Rice and Palmer could be sold to TMZ—the Web site that, since its inception, in 2005, has taken a merciless approach to celebrity news.

At around 4:30 a.m., one of the surveillance officers, sitting at a monitoring-room computer, reviewed footage from a camera that faced the elevator and, using a cell phone, surreptitiously recorded the screen. The officer then called TMZ.

The first tape released, of Rice dragging Palmer’s unconscious body, provoked shock; the followup, of him actually striking her, provoked outrage. The initial tape was released in February, the followup in September. TMZ reportedly paid $15,000 for the first tape and about $90,000 for the second. The NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell tried to dodge accusations that the NFL slow-rolled its own investigation and insufficiently punished Rice (the initial suspension was for two games). Rice was cut by the Ravens and has not played a down of professional football since.

The key takeaway from the TMZ story is this: there is a vast and thorough network of de facto deputy investigative journalists working as valets, hotel clerks, waiters, and more. Combine the easy ability to film anything with the willingness of TMZ or other outlets to pay for salacious video, and you’ve got a society where getting away with anything scandalous in public is harder than ever before. When exposing matters such as domestic violence, clearly getting in bed with the muckrackers is sometimes what it takes to bring ugly secrets to light.

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