Photo credit: Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

Photo credit: Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

Yesterday, Kyle went out on a limb to say he didn’t think any scandalous Dez Bryant video actually existed. I agreed with him. Today, we found out that there was at least some kind of incident at a Wal-Mart, but there still may not actually be video of it.

According to Mike Florio, the NFL has (surprise, surprise) at least known the details of a supposed incident for over a week. The Lancaster, Texas police department sent NFL Media an incident/investigation report “via the Texas Public Information Act” regarding said incident. Here’s how Florio describes what the report says:

An unknown person called the police to explain that a black female was “being dragged from one vehicle to another vehicle” by a black male. The vehicle the woman was dragged from was a Mercedes registered to Dez Bryant.

When a police officer responded, a Wal-Mart security guard explained that he arrived at the scene with the door to the Mercedes still open and a child’s toy on the ground, but that no one was present. Then, two men pulled up in an Escalade registered to Dez Bryant. The two men, Carl King and Christopher Mitchell, said they received a call from the alleged victim, asking them to pick up “her” Mercedes.

Then, a Bentley arrived in the parking lot, with the alleged victim and Dez Bryant inside. The alleged victim claimed that she had an argument with a man named Alex Penson, that she was not assaulted or injured in any way, and that it was “just an argument” with Penson. The alleged victim claimed she was dropped off at a friend’s house, and that she contacted Bryant to pick her up.

The responding officer determined after talking to all parties that there was no offense, and that everyone was free to go.

Florio said the video is likely to come out (if there is one), but what it would show is up in the air. If what the police believed what happened actually happened, then Dez has done nothing wrong. If not, this could be an issue.

There is still not one even remotely legitimate source that has said they’ve seen the contents of a video.

And on the whole “5x worse” thing: Abuse is abuse. It’s terrible. It doesn’t need to be hyped up or quantified for hits or put side-by-side with other instances of abuse to decide which is worse. It’s always indefensible. If a video does come out and it shows Bryant abusing a woman, we’re going to be inundated with people wondering if what he did was worse than what Ray Rice did, if he should be suspended for longer than Rice was, etc. At the bottom of it all, Rice should probably be in jail, and if there is video of Bryant dragging a woman across a parking lot (which there may or may not be), he should have been arrested too. Instead, it becomes fodder for pundits and ESPN and hot takes on your Facebook timeline. We can talk all day about whether the NFL is handling domestic abuse the right way, but before it even gets to them, it has to be dealt with.