Bart Scott says CBS treated him ‘like a puppet’ during Ray Rice scandal: ‘Tried to pit me against him’

Like many outspoken NFL athletes before and since, former New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott had a meteoric rise in sports media after retiring from the league.

Scott, who was the face of a New York defense that made it to two straight AFC title games, was elevated to a full-time role on The NFL Today at CBS in 2014. That same season, NFL coverage was dominated by the Ray Rice domestic violence story.

So in his first season in a major media seat, Scott was forced to weigh in on a generational scandal involving one of his former teammates. Scott even got the call-up to CBS This Morning to give his reaction to Rice's two-game suspension. In an interview this week on The Pivot , Scott recalled feeling that CBS "tried to pit me against him" and that the network was using him "like a puppet" to get a clip of a fellow NFL player criticizing Rice.

"One thing I hated about my experience with CBS … I felt like they thought they were going to use me like a puppet, and I reversed, Uno, draw-two, f*ck you," he said.

"What they wanted was crazy, can't wait, can't believe this, ahh 'He beat his wife, he should be banned, blah, blah, blah.' Right? And they wanted that, and I can tell that they were setting me up for that. But if they would have did their opposition research, they would have known that I was a teammate of Ray. They knew that I was a teammate, but some guys that was his teammate … didn't hold in and lock in.

"This is the type of friend I am. And I f*ck with Ray, we all f*ck with Ray. But I'm the type of friend when the world is against you, even though I would be against you, I'm gonna support you and then I'm going to be against you and take you to the side after the fact. After I help you through the storm. I ain't gonna abandon you, you know what I'm saying? I'm going to walk you through the storm and then say, 'Man, what you did, I can't rock with that.'"

In a CBS This Morning interview (still available on YouTube ), Scott explained that Rice's situation was fairly unprecedented . Rather than agreeing Rice got off easy , Scott suggested the incident might lead to formalized rules around domestic violence suspensions.

One of the show's anchors asked Scott directly whether he had spoken with Rice. Scott confirmed he had, and cited Rice's "tremendous record" prior to the video showing him striking his then-fianceé. Clearly beneath the surface, Scott had mixed feelings about the setup.

"They wanted me to throw Ray underneath the bus and step on him and build it so they could have these big clips. And I refused," he explained on The Pivot .

"Because I'm a believer that no man should be judged by his worst moment, right? So that was his worst moment. And what I'm also not gonna do is I'm not gonna pile on when the world's piling on. And you have to ask yourself, when somebody does something bad, is this a bad person doing a bad thing? Or is this a good person that had a bad moment?

"And I knew that Ray Rice was a good person that had a bad moment, which we all can do impulsive things … we shouldn't be defined by that. And I hated that the industry tried to pit me against him and try to use me for clickbait. And I refused to do it. And I could tell; I could look at her face when she was trying to get out of me what she wanted to get out of me.

"I've been around the game too long, too savvy, been around these crazy-a** reporters that try and get you, especially in New York, they try and get you to say sh*t and use their journalistic tricks that don't work on me. Because I'm not some Neanderthal, right? To this day, I think that Ray Rice has lived his apology."

Scott shared on The Pivot that when he left for the Jets, Rice took over his Baltimore-area charity helping victims of addiction. More recent coverage of Rice has shown that he and his partner remained together and continued to build a family after the incident, and that Rice has become a speaker and advocate against domestic violence in sports.

When sports stories become national news, outlets often interview athletes as experts. However, the backgrounds and relationships these athletes carry are different from the cozy ties of the political world. As Scott shared, it was clear CBS knew he had a relationship with Rice, yet expected him to shred it to make good television.

"They set us up, but they don't care about the relationship that they could have ruined between me and Ray Rice," Scott said. "They just want to use me as a puppet."

In the end, the legacy of the Rice story became just as much about sports media as the NFL. The situation laid bare many reporters' deference to the league office , and the industry's discomfort in addressing domestic violence .