Photograph by John Locher/AP

Last week, Floyd Mayweather, promoting his upcoming fight, was asked about the N.F.L.’s banishment of Ray Rice. “I think there’s a lot worse things that go on in other people’s households,” Mayweather said. “It’s just not caught on video.” This was an absurdly dismissive response and also, undeniably, a true statement, delivered by a man who might be in a position to know its truth. Mayweather has been accused of a series of assaults on women, some of them brutal: in two cases, he has pleaded guilty; in another, he was found guilty; in 2012, he served two months in jail.

The day after his remarks, Mayweather delivered a perfectly remorseless apology: “Whoever I offended I apologize. I am only human. Domestic violence is something I don’t condone.” The CNN anchor Rachel Nichols wondered whether Mayweather’s remarks about Rice reflected his own views on violence against women:

NICHOLS: You are someone with a history of domestic violence, yourself. You’ve even been to jail for it. Why should fans root for you with this kind of history? MAYWEATHER: Everything has been allegations. Nothing has been proven. So, you know, that’s life. NICHOLS: I mean, the incident you went to jail for—the mother of your three children did show some bruising, a concussion when she went to the hospital. It was your own kids who called the police, gave them a detailed description of the abuse. There’s been documentation. MAYWEATHER: Mm-hmm. Once again, no pictures. Just hearsay and allegations. And I signed a plea bargain. So once again, not true.

After the interview, Nichols marvelled at “the denial of the public that supports him,” concluding with an editorial comment: “I am curious how many of those who shuddered at the video of Ray Rice in that elevator this week are also planning on plunking down their seventy dollars tomorrow for Mayweather’s pay-per-view fight. It is worth considering before you pull out your credit card.”

Despite Nichols’s good questions, it’s hard to imagine that echoes of Mayweather’s past transgressions had much effect on the audience for last Saturday’s fight, a rematch against Marcos Maidana, whom Mayweather had already beaten in May. It was a dull fight; Mayweather won it even more easily than he had won the last one. The only moment of excitement came in the eighth round, when Mayweather seemed to smother Maidana’s face with his glove, and Maidana responded by biting him. Apparently, neither the mouth guard nor the glove prevented Maidana from supplying sufficient pressure to startle Floyd, who later claimed that his fingers were numb for the rest of the fight. No doubt some viewers were happy for a respite from the otherwise predictable display of Mayweather excellence that they had, against Nichols’s advice, paid as much as seventy-five dollars to watch.

Mayweather has never been suspended or fined for his various attacks, not least because there’s no one with an incentive to do so. He has his own executive team and promotes his own fights, with help from companies—Golden Boy Promotions, the cable network Showtime—that treat him as a valuable partner, not a misbehaving star. (Mayweather is even an executive producer of “All Access,” an ostensibly documentary series on Showtime, which precedes his fights.) In theory, the Nevada State Athletic Commission could take action, but a state commission generally deals gently with the boxers and the promoters whose fights justify its continued existence. This summer, for example, a member of the Nevada commission called Mayweather and one of his top executives “wonderful role models for the sport.”

In basketball, an owner like Donald Sterling who offends many of the league’s players and viewers might be forced out by his fellow-owners, who judge that his antics threaten their investments more than the precedent of a forced sale. In football, an aging star like Ray Rice might be banished for the sake of the sport. In boxing, though, the top executives are managers and promoters, not owners and commissioners, which reflects a different, more unapologetic economic arrangement: everyone is trying to make as much money as possible from (and, in theory though not always in practice, for) every fighter. In some ways, this rather anarchic system works. Although boxing is hardly a mainstream sport, its stars are paid well; Mayweather, who earned a minimum of thirty-two million dollars on Saturday, is by some measures the world’s highest-paid athlete, in any sport.

Mayweather does particularly well in the athlete pay rankings if you exclude endorsement deals, because, unlike virtually all of the other top athletes in the world, Mayweather isn’t the focus of a single major advertising campaign. This partly reflects his insistence on doing whatever he likes and almost never apologizing. It also reflects the survival strategy of boxing, which has stayed afloat by demanding more money from fewer fans, in particular the million or so people in America who are in the habit of buying fights on pay-per-view. This arrangement makes boxing more accountable to its fans, who are given only the matchups they are likely to watch, and sometimes pay to watch.

But accountability to boxing fans isn’t the same as accountability to America at large, which is why it was a little odd to hear Nichols ask Mayweather about “the public” that supports him—it is, like all collections of fans, a smaller-than-general public, and one with peculiar tastes. As promoters well know, boxing fans aren’t too troubled by bad behavior, which is why Mayweather’s time in jail didn’t affect his earning power once he got out. A villain can be as big an attraction as a hero, and, anyway, any boxing fan will find it hard to resist watching the best boxer in the world, no matter how appalling his crimes. Mayweather might well see a disappointing pay-per-view buy rate for his Maidana rematch, but it won’t be because viewers decided that he didn’t deserve their money; it will be because not enough of us thought that Maidana deserved him. If the next fight looks like a good one, we’ll all come flocking back.

The N.F.L. is answerable to all sorts of people, but boxing is free to focus on the true believers and ignore everyone else. Of course, instead of “free,” you might say, “forced”: Mayweather’s untouchability, and even his riches, are the result of a sport that for decades has been left alone with its fans. For an athlete in trouble, especially this year, the anything-goes world of boxing might seem like a tantalizing alternative reality. But for a sports executive whose profits depend on easy accessibility and broad cultural relevance, the story of boxing’s biggest star probably looks more like a cautionary tale.