Let’s not spoil a Cinderella season with unpleasant topics like alleged violence against women. Can the New England Patriots stay focused on football, and can two of the team’s players who face assault charges continue playing?
Those questions, plus speculation about the motivations of the accusers, have been the centerpiece of the conversation about Patriots star receiver Stefon Diggs and defensive lineman Christian Barmore. Diggs is charged with allegedly choking his personal chef, and Barmore is charged with allegedly throwing the mother of his child to the floor.
Both deny the charges, and Diggs has been defended by his girlfriend, Cardi B. Neither player has been arraigned, which is also worthy of note. With football, delay of game is a tactic to slow down play, which can result in a penalty. With a football player who may have violated the NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy, delay of arraignment is a tactic that can keep that player on the field.
As explained to me by Steven Olenick, chair of the sports and entertainment practice at the Mintz law firm, “an arraignment or filing of formal charges is generally the trigger point” the league uses to consider putting a player on its exempt list, which removes them from games and practices until off-field issues are resolved. Since that hasn’t happened, both Patriots “remain eligible to play,” although the commissioner retains the discretion to act earlier if warranted, Olenick said.
Diggs is scheduled to be arraigned on Jan. 23, two days before the AFC Championship game. Barmore is scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 3, five days before the Super Bowl.
According to the Globe, David E. Meier, the lawyer who represents both players, has asked for Diggs’s arraignment to be pushed back to March and is expected to do the same with Barmore. Meier did not respond to my email requesting comment on the arraignment dates.
“I’m a Patriots fan, aren’t we all? These are two very important players on the team,” Dan Conley, a former Suffolk County district attorney and senior adviser at ML Strategies, told me in an interview, before noting that the defense strategy “is not to get to the arraignment, so if you’re not arraigned, you’re not charged.”
It’s a “razor-thin distinction,” said Conley, one that means the players can keep playing.
Contrast that to the case involving Ricardo R. Alexandre, a 10-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, who was charged with assault after allegations by a woman he was dating. The alleged incident occurred on Dec. 28, and the woman reported it to police two days later. Alexandre, who pleaded not guilty to charges of strangulation and assault and battery, was arraigned on Dec. 31, put on leave with pay, and lost his license to work.
The cases are not precisely analogous. The alleged victim of the police officer went quickly to police. Meanwhile, the alleged incident involving Barmore happened in August, and the alleged incident involving Diggs happened in early December. In a statement to the media, Meier said the timing regarding the allegation against Diggs made it “crystal clear” there were ulterior motivations involving money.
As a law enforcement officer, Alexandre is held to a high standard of personal conduct, while the key standard of conduct for Patriots players seems to be on-field performance worthy of a bear hug from coach Mike Vrabel. Vrabel initially said the charges were “not disappointing at all.” He went on to say he takes the allegations seriously but doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions and mostly doesn’t want any distractions.
As an organization, the Patriots are all-in with Diggs, saying in a statement, “We support Stefon.”
With Barmore, Patriots officials said they were “aware at the time of the incident and informed the NFL in a timely manner.”
In 1996, in what now seems like ancient history, the Patriots renounced their rights to Christian Peter, a fifth-round defensive tackle, after Myra Kraft, the wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft who died in 2011, learned about Peter’s history of violence against women.
In 2015, then-attorney general Maura Healey launched a domestic violence prevention program for students in partnership with Robert Kraft. A spokesperson for now-Governor Healey did not respond to a request for comment about the allegations concerning current Patriots players.
Diggs and Barmore are innocent until proven guilty. They may be wrongly accused. But as Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who oversees a grant program that provides survivors of domestic violence with new mailing addresses, put it, “Domestic violence is a problem that can’t be ignored,” given its potentially deadly consequences. This past weekend, a 30-year-old Lawrence woman who was reportedly preparing to leave her husband was shot and killed in an apparent murder-suicide that took place while she was on the phone with her mother.
In a statement, Hema Sarang-Sieminski, the executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a nonprofit organization that works to end sexual assault and domestic violence, said that all allegations of domestic violence “deserve to be treated with the utmost seriousness, especially given what we know about patterns of violence that can escalate over time.”
That’s not what many Patriots fans want to hear right now.
As Galvin put it, “As a Patriots fan, I want to see them win, and I don’t want to see them disadvantaged.” But at the very least, said Galvin, these allegations should spark a larger conversation about the threat of domestic violence.
As Galvin also noted, the adjudicatory system around that larger issue “can be gamed a bit.”
That’s because winning the next game is what so many people care about more than anything else.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.