Sponsorship suspended over reinstatement of NFL player

The crisis over the National Football League's handling of allegations of domestic and child abuse by professional American footballers has deepened with US hotel chain Radisson suspending its sponsorship of a team that reinstated a player charged with hitting his son with a tree branch.

The company pulled support from the Minnesota Vikings after the team named Adrian Peterson, the highest-paid running back in the league, to play the New Orleans Saints next Sunday, even though he was charged last Friday with reckless and negligent injury on his four-year-old son in Texas. He was dropped for last Sunday's game.

Peterson is accused of using a branch to slap his son in an incident last May that investigating police said left the boy with cuts and lash marks to his legs, buttocks and genitals. The footballer reportedly told police that he was administering a “whooping” similar to how his father had disciplined him as a boy.

Another accusation

“I am not a perfect parent but I am, without doubt, not a child abuser,” he said in a statement.

Radisson said that it “takes this matter very seriously particularly in light of our long-standing commitment to the protection of children”.

Another accusation of abuse involving Peterson, dating back to 2013, surfaced in the US media on Monday, involving another four-year-old son with a different mother. Peterson's attorney Rusty Hardin said the authorities took no action over that allegation and that an adult witness insisted that the footballer did nothing inappropriate.

Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman said at a press conference, standing before a backdrop displaying the Radisson logo, that the team would let the criminal case run its course, explaining the decision to reinstate the player.

“I understand this is a difficult thing to handle, but we feel strongly as an organisation that this is disciplining a child,” he said.

“Whether it’s an abusive situation or not, or whether he went too far disciplining, we feel very strongly that that is the court’s decision to make, but we also understand the seriousness of abusing children as well.”

The move sparked fury coming so soon after the NFL was condemned for initially only suspending Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for just two games in July for knocking his future wife unconscious in the lift of an Atlantic City casino in February.

Major sponsors

When footage of Rice’s attack on

Janay Palmer

was released online last week showing the viciousness of the assault on her, the Baltimore Ravens fired him and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.

Other major NFL sponsors Marriott, another hotel chain, and delivery company FedEx have said they are monitoring the league's response to this crisis. The NFL has come under fire from women's rights groups, members of Congress and sports commentators among others.