The agent for Adrian Peterson issued a statement on Wednesday in which he expressed unhappiness with a reporter for discussing the running back’s methods of discipline for his children.
Peterson pleaded no contest in 2014 to a misdemeanor charge for recklessly assaulting his 4-year-old by striking him with a switch — a tree branch — to discipline him. He was also suspended from the NFL that year.
Bleacher Report’s Master Tesfatsion published an article on Wednesday about Peterson’s resurgence this season with the Washington Redskins. The feature discussed Peterson’s controversial past, including the child discipline case.
Peterson said that he still uses physical forms of punishment for his children, including using a belt.
From the article:
Four years removed from the trial, he still uses physical forms of punishment to discipline his children — ”I had to discipline my son and spank him the other day with a belt,” Peterson says — though he employs other techniques as well. He will take away their electronics, place them in different timeouts around the house, have them do wall squats. “There’s different ways I discipline my kids,” he says. “I didn’t let that change me.”
Peterson said that nine times out of ten, he won’t use physical methods of discipline, but he does in extreme cases such as the one with his son who got the belt. He says the child had been given four chances to correct his wrong and did not.
Even though the anecdote came at the end of a lengthy feature which discussed a great deal about Peterson’s career and path, the back’s agent is upset that the story came out and became the focus. Agent Ron Slavin sent the following statement about the article, via Ian Rapoport:
Unless the writer published something that was told to him off-the-record, then the writer did nothing wrong. No trust was violated. Nobody was misled. Peterson told the truth and does not seem to have learned many lessons from the 2014 case.
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