It's a troubling scene: an intimate partner is slapped across the face, punched twice, kneed in the head, and thrown onto the floor. This is the kind of behavior we are all looking to amend, in a new era of domestic violence awareness.
And yet rather few people reacted to this particular situation, even though it was described in the autobiography of one of the biggest stars in sports.
Ronda Rousey wrote in "My Fight, Your Fight" that she slapped her boyfriend across the face "so hard my hand hurt," "punched him in the face with a straight right, then a left hook," and then "grabbed him by the neck of his hoodie, kneed him in the face" and threw him onto the kitchen floor.
Is this a case of domestic violence? That's hard to say without context. The Justice Department's definition of domestic violence is "a pattern of abusive behavior that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner."
We simply don't know if there's a "pattern" here, since we hear little from Rousey about this relationship. Rousey, in Australia for her Saturday fight against Holly Holm, could not be reached for comment.
The boyfriend, "Snappers McCreepy" as Rousey calls him, was purportedly found to have taken nude photos of her. She grew incensed, as almost anyone would, and reacted with force.
"I'm not comfortable with her behavior," said Kim Pentico of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "What I am absolutely not willing to say is she's committed domestic violence without speaking with him and learning more about that relationship."