Former Giants kicker Josh Brown gives first interview since being released

The NFL and the New York Giants showed once again last year that their stance on domestic abuse committed by players is all a facade, with the league suspending Josh Brown for one game (though it said a couple of years ago domestic abuse cases would result in a minimum six-game ban), and the Giants giving Brown a contract extension.

Of course, this being the NFL, it was only after the public got wind of the truth – that Brown was an alleged serial abuser of his now-ex wife Molly, and that she had called police in nearly every city they lived in together during his career – that they got tough, first placing Brown on the Commissioner’s Exempt list (a paid suspension) before the Giants released him in October.

Brown hasn’t really been heard from since, but in recent days he sat down with ABC News reporter Paula Faris to give his side of things.

[Read and React Newsletter: Shutdown Corner’s best Super Bowl coverage in your inbox!]

In the interview, Brown gives the impression that he believes there are different levels of abuse.

In a journal Brown kept, the 37-year old wrote that he had been “physically, verbally, and emotionally” abusive to Molly; Brown said he was bothered by the fact that his journal entries had been made public. The entries were part of King County (Wash.) records on his case, and were released last October.

When Faris asked Brown what his admission of abuse meant, Brown said, “I mean I had put my hands on her. I kicked the chair. I held her down. The holding down was the worst moment in our marriage.”

“(But) I never hit her. I never slapped her. I never choked her. I never did those types of things.”

Faris countered: “When you say that you physically abused her and physically harmed her, but you didn’t hit her. How are people supposed to reconcile that, Josh?”

Brown said, “They’re not supposed to. What I did was wrong. Period.” He said he’s “fully accountable” for what he said and did during his marriage.

“Domestic violence is not just physical abuse. We’re talking intimidation and threats, the attempt to control, body language,” he said. “An abuser is going to abuse to a certain degree to acquire some kind of a reaction.”

[Ditch the paper and pen – play Squares Pick’em for the Big Game!]