On December 20, 1976, 26-year old Blenda Gay, a professional football player for the Philadelphia Eagles, was killed by his wife, Roxanne.  While official and most media accounts alleged that Roxanne suddenly and viciously cut the 6’5, 254 pound defensive end’s throat while he slept, much of the evidence reveals that Roxanne was actually the subject of repeated domestic violence, a plague that hit several generations in her family, until finally she could not take it anymore. During one last confrontation with the husband she loved before he changed under the pressure to be an NFL star, she stabbed him in the neck with a pair of scissors. Blenda staggered to the phone, called 911, and died on the doorstep as the police came and Roxanne was kneeling in prayer clutching her rosaries.   

This “murder” occurred after records show that Roxanne had made over 20 domestic violence calls to Camden police over a three and a half period.  Neighbors claimed that after an Eagles' loss, Blenda "bounced his wife off the walls".No arrests were ever made.  When the police arrived, they would “talk football” with Blenda, and promptly leave. On one occasion, even after signing a complaint against Blenda and a recorded hospital stay after a brutal beating, Roxanne inexplicably dropped the complaint she had filed. By their own accounts, Roxanne and others in her family explosively contend that Roxanne’s pleas to the NFL about the abusive situation were ignored.

Roxanne’s case became a cause célèbre for the feminist movement, with Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine even raising money for her legal defense. While Roxanne’s allegations of self-defense were corroborated by the only eye-witness, Fonda Gay (Roxanne and Blenda’s daughter), the NFL was more inclined to protect its brand and its players. In an ominous harbinger to the domestic violence so commonplace surrounding the NFL in recent years, Roxanne’s “defense” suddenly changed before her trial.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the judge presiding over Roxanne’s case decided there was no indication that Roxanne had been stuck in an abusive marriage. Contemporaneously, a court-appointed panel of four male psychiatrists determined in a “sanity hearing” that Roxanne Gay was unfit for trial, that she was schizophrenic, and recommended that Roxanne be confined to the now infamous Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. All this, despite Roxanne having shown no indications of mental illness prior to killing her husband.  While all charges against Roxanne were dropped, so did any tarnishing of the NFL. Roxanne’s misunderstood story was left to wither away in the mental hospital, where Roxanne contends she was subject to the harshest of treatments and therapies. Released just months later, Roxanne was now a shell of the proud woman her friends and family once knew. Roxanne and Fonda were not want for money, however, as the NFL set up a trust for Fonda, and has been paying Roxanne a monthly stipend ever since she killed her husband.  

This film follows the life and story of Roxanne Gay, the killing, the bizarre and contradictory circumstances that led her to the insane asylum, to her generally anonymous life today in an adult home on Long Island, New York.  The film will reveal new witnesses and evidence that point to the complicity and culpability of the NFL, as well as the Camden Police Department, in covering up the truth and hoping the violent story of Blenda and Roxanne Gay would just go away...