Just days before the Super Bowl, Sports Illustrated has decided to run an advertisement on their site that puts a spotlight on domestic violence in the National Football League.
The ad was created by UltraViolet, a gender-equality nonprofit. The video shows a football player preparing to, then tackling, a woman. It ends with text reading “55 NFL abuse cases unanswered” with a voice-over that says, “Let’s take domestic violence out of football” and ends with text that reads #GOODELLMUSTGO.
The hashtag the ends the video refers to the fact that the 55 unanswered cases of domestic abuse in the NFL are under the leadership of Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the National Football League. The NFL released a report recently that said Goodell did not do enough to produce facts surrounding the Ray Rice domestic abuse case.
“It is clear that Roger Goodell’s NFL took no initiative to prosecute domestic abusers and protect their victims,” Shaunna Rhomas, co-founder of UltraViolet, said in a press release, “and it is clear that the NFL will not take domestic violence seriously until Roger Goodell is gone.”
Sports Illustrated had previously rejected the ad, saying its editors decided not to run the ad because of its message. A spokesperson for Sports Illustrated told The Huffington Post that they had mistakenly rejected the ads and will now be showing them Thursday – the Super Bowl is this upcoming Sunday.
“We are thrilled that public scrutiny has persuaded Sports Illustrated to reverse their decision on our ads addressing the NFL’s domestic violence problem,” said UltraViolet’s founder, Nita Chaudhary. “The issue is and always has been that an astonishing 55 cases of domestic violence have gone unanswered under Commissioner Roger Goodell’s tenure at the NFL. Going into Super Bowl Sunday, we cannot allow the issue of domestic violence to be swept under the rug.”
Media Resources: The Huffington Post 1/25/2015; UltraViolet 1/15/2015; Feminist Newswire 12/1/2014
