As he was boarding a plane to leave Los Angeles, Adrian Peterson was arrested on a domestic violence charge after a reported argument with his wife.
As Adrian Peterson was boarding a Los Angeles plane to head to a Super Bowl party in Houston, he was arrested and charged with a felony domestic violence charge and removed from the plane by police.
After the arrest, Peterson explained the situation to Mark Berman of Fox 26.
“It’s blown out of proportion. Me and the wife got into an argument on the plane. That was pretty much the gist of it. I ended up grabbing her hand and taking her ring off her finger. She didn’t press any charges. The state of California pressed charges because there was a scratch on her hand. Literally that’s why I went to jail, because the ring left a scratch on her finger. We just had a disagreement. I know the headlines: Domestic violence. You’d think I beat her up or something. It was nothing like that.”
“Only thing I will say is it looks horrible because Adrian Peterson arrested for domestic violence,” Peterson continued. “I don’t hit women. It’s not that type of situation, and it just looks bad. I’ll deal with it, and God willing get the charges dropped and move on.”
Adrian Peterson maintains innocence after arrest for domestic violence charge
In 2014, Peterson was suspended from the NFL for one year after he was charged with felony child abuse. Peterson used corporal punishment on his 4-year-old son, spanking him with a switch that resulted in cuts and bruises all over his body. As of 2018, Peterson said that he continues to discipline his children with a belt in addition to timeouts and wall squats.
“There’s different ways I discipline my kids. I didn’t let that change me,” Peterson said at the time.
Still, that moment in 2014 did leave an impression on Peterson, as he never intended to hurt his child to that degree.
“When I turned him around and saw it, no one knows how horrible I felt inside because I left marks on my son,” Peterson said. Peterson himself grew up in Texas being disciplined in a similar manner, which is culturally common in the South.