Chris Brown, Mo’Nique offer Ray Rice advice during TV interviews

The controversy over Ray Rice’s domestic violence incident and the NFL’s handling of the situation continues to swirl, but outside the storm’s center Rice got some advice from someone very familiar with the situation: Chris Brown.

Brown, who was sentenced to five years of probation after assaulting then-girlfriend Rihanna on the evening before the Grammy Awards in 2009, offered up these observations to Rice during an appearance on MTV on Thursday: “To Ray, or anybody else -- because I’m not better than the next man -- I can just say I’ve been down that road. I deal with situations and I’ve made my mistakes too, but it’s all about how you push forward and how you control yourself.”

Rice was cut from the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely from the NFL after a video was obtained by the media showing the football player punching his then-fiancee, now wife, Janay Palmer in an elevator at an Atlantic City casino.

Brown has had continuous run-ins with the law since the 2009 incident, including a recent 2½-month jail stay for probation violation. He was released in June.

“I still talk to my therapist twice a week,” Brown said in the MTV interview with Sway Calloway. “It helps if I’m frustrated and I’m dealing with something, to vent and say what I’m going through so I can hear from an actual clinical person .... Feelings, emotions, and energy are supposed to come and go. It’s not supposed to stay there. You’re not supposed to keep it inside, because it’ll bottle up and you’ll become a monster.”

Meanwhile, comedian and actress Mo’Nique appeared on “Good Day L.A.” on Los Angeles’ KTTV-TV (Channel 11) on Friday and said she saw potential for redemption in Rice.

“We speak of religion and we speak of forgiveness, but the moment someone messes up we say throw them away and get rid of them,” she said. “Every action that we do is forgivable.”

Mo’Nique, who won the Academy Award for playing an abusive mother in the 2009 film “Precious,” said, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Get rid of him. It was horrible what he did.’ And it was. It was tragic for us to see that happen to that young woman .... There’s no excuse for that. On the other side of it, there’s the beauty in it, because you see this woman saying I’m going to stand by my husband.”

The actress also talked about her own history with domestic violence, saying, “There was a time I wanted to say ‘domestic violence.’ There was a time I did say it. But the truth was we would just fight. And if I would lose, now I’m going to call the police [and say] it’s domestic violence. But if I won, we just had a fight.”

Many experts in domestic violence say they don’t believe the elevator incident was Rice’s first such incident, based on his reaction after punching out his fiancee.

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