More on Mayweather’s history of beating up women and the way people are hiding it so that other people will pay lots of money to watch him punch a man.

Ignore the police reports, the court records, and his own plea deals, he says into the camera lens, never an ounce of doubt on his face, because there are no pictures. It’s a cliché of Internet life—pics or it didn’t happen—and one that Mayweather has leveraged into making it okay for millions of sports fans to plunk down $100 to watch him fight Manny Pacquiao without an ounce of doubt about putting money directly in the pocket of a misogynist.

To Rachel Nichols: “Once again, no pictures. Just hearsay and allegations.”

To Katie Couric: “Did I kick, stomp and beat someone? No, that didn’t happen. I look in your face and say, ‘No, that didn’t happen.’”

But, Diana Moskovitz reports, there are pictures, but we don’t get to see them.

In at least two cases of domestic violence, official records show pictures were taken. In one case, a police report explicitly says that the photos show a victim’s injuries. But authorities in Las Vegas, a city poised to make millions off Floyd this weekend, have either destroyed the photos or haven’t released them.

Because, after all, it’s just women. It’s not as if he hit anyone important.

We shouldn’t need to see the pictures. The overwhelming evidence should be enough. The guilty and no contest pleas should be enough. The words of so many women should be enough. But seeing pictures—in all their grotesqueness and horror—is unfortunately the only way to prove a man hit a woman. It’s part of why officers take these pictures, to show a judge and a jury what happened.

“When you’re in a front of a judge, you describe the injuries written in the complaint, the bruising, the swelling, the blood,” prosecutor Scott E. Kessler told the New York Times for a 2007 story about how digital cameras were changing domestic violence investigations. “But until a person sees another human being with those injuries, with the swelling, the blood, the bruising, it’s hard to get that point across.”

He was proven right last year, when TMZ published the video of Ray Riceknocking out his future wife, Janay, with one swift punch. Before the video was published, Rice was poised to return to football after a short suspension. Afterward, Rice was gone for an entire season and dumped by his team. He’s still searching for a chance to play.

There has been no elevator-tape moment for Mayweather, though, despite his long and well-documented history of beating up women, and there probably never will be.

Las Vegas has made sure of it.

It’s Chinatown, Jake.

H/t Marcus Ranum