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Originally Posted by LSMF
I'm still trying to find out exactly what Stephen A said that was so offensive that he needed to be suspended.
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1) It's context. It's taking into account his past remarks (one quoted below) when a professional athlete (Chad Johnson, Floyd Mayweather, Ray Rice) assaulted his wife/girlfriend, and the sense that his current remarks fail to distinguish themselves sufficiently from his past remarks (remarks for which he has previously apologized, and which he admitted were insensitive and wrong-headed). It's the sense that he is still too close to blaming (or assigning a proportion of blame to) the victim for the assaulter's violent, criminal acts.
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There are plenty of instances where provocation comes into consideration, instigation comes into consideration, and I will be on the record right here on national television and say that I am sick and tired of men constantly being vilified and accused of things and we stop there. I’m saying, “Can we go a step further?” Since we want to dig all deeper into Chad Johnson, can we dig in deep to her?
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It's also another dot in the trend line forming a pattern of Smith taking a sympathetic view of the assaulter, and seeming to try to shift responsibility to the victim such as a 2013 interview with Floyd Mayweather where Johnson took an extremely sympathetic perspective to Mayweather, and allowed Mayweather to paint himself as a victim (for serving 57 days in prsion, after a series of domestic assault incident for which he went unpunished), and never even acknowledged that Mayweather went to prison for physically assaulting a girlfriend/ladyfriend/female acquaintance.
2) It's also the (intentional?) ambiguity with the use of the word "provoke". Nothing a woman can say justifies use of physical violence, and nothing short of physical confrontation justifies the use of physical force. That, however, cuts both ways. If a woman physically attacks a man, I think the law allows him to use physical force to defend himself and prevent the woman from injuring him. So if Smith's message had been "Men, don't put your hands on a woman (violently) and expect to get away with it. And women, don't put your hands on a man (violently) and expect to get away with it." a reasonable person might share your confusion.
Smith's consistent message, however, has been that women shouldn't "provoke" men to violence, which could mean anything from mouthing off, to spending too much of "his" money, to not keeping his house clean, to not having him a cold drink and a hot dinner waiting when he got home, to not being sexually available for his every whim.
3) It's ESPN doing a little brand management. Smith is supposedly taking his talents from ESPN to Sirius in the very near future, so ESPN feels freer to point the finger at him and give him a wrist slap since he won't be their asset.