(Ray Rice’s wife Janay Rice, along with her um…very youthful looking mother, speaking about the ‘elevator incident’ to The Today Show‘s Matt Lauer.)

Is it possible that a man can love a woman and be a “good person” (whatever that means in 2014) and still knock her unconscious, drag her body like rolled up rug, and look at her, half-in half-out of an elevator, with drunken blankness? Perhaps. Anything is possible. But only time will tell (and it may never tell us, the public) if this is the case for controversial football star Ray Rice and his wife Janay. Ray won an appeal when a judge reversed the NFL’s indefinite suspension last week, so he is available for hire. Janay sat down with The Today Show to share her side of what happened in that Atlantic City elevator last spring, and why she not only went on to marry the man who punched her, but also stand by his side as the media, the public and the Baltimore Ravens (temporarily and for everyone’s own devices) made an example of Ray Rice.

Watch Janay and her mom,
After the jump

On whether Ray Rice had ever hit Janay before or after the elevator incident: “No. No. There’s no way. He knows what he would have to deal with. I’m not going to sit there in silence and let something happen to me, God forbid in front of my child, and just let it happen? There’s no way.”
*This is a bit of a head-scratcher given the fact that the only reason the elevator attack went public was because of the video leak, and there was nothing in Janay’s actions that would lead anyone to think that she wouldn’t “sit there in silence.”*

On how a reportedly “good guy” could do something like this: “People are human, everybody makes mistakes…you would think we live in a country where nobody has ever sinned.”

On her frustration with the public outrage and NFL reaction to the Ray Rice scandal: “I was so angry, hurt, seeing the man that I love, have everything ripped up from under him. The support system that I thought we had in the Ravens, that made me angry…”

Related:
Chris Brown Offers Advice for Ray Rice: ‘It’s About How You Control Yourself’
Jim Jones Speaks On His New EP, Relationship With Dame Dash, Ray Rice and More