Ronda Rousey Apologizes for Controversial Sandy Hook Tweet: ‘I deserve to be hated’
More than a decade later, Ronda Rousey is apologizing for sharing a controversial conspiracy video claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.
The shooting incident occurred on December 14, 2012, when Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire, killing 20 children and six staff members. Following the incident, conspiracy theories about the shooting ran rampant, many of them perpetuated by disgraced political commentator and former InfoWars host Alex Jones.
A month after the shooting, Rousey shared a YouTube video on X (formerly Twitter) that perpetuated claims that the entire incident was a work of fiction. The post included a caption from Rousey: “Extremely interesting, and must-watch.”
Rousey was immediately hit with outrage prompting her to delete the video quickly. While mainstream media failed to pick up the story, the incident was addressed by UFC CEO Dana White at a press event in March 2013. White unsurprisingly came to Rousey’s defense saying that “everybody has an opinion” and suggesting that the bigger problem was that “people are f*cking p*ssies.”
The whole thing was seemingly forgotten until recently when Rousey engaged in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). The MMA icon was immediately inundated with scathing questions about her past comments related to the massacre.
Ronda Rousey Will Regret Sharing Sandy Hook video ‘Until the day i die’
Shortly after, Rousey took to X and issued a lengthy statement apologizing for the 11-year-old post.
“I didn’t even believe it, [the conspiracy video] but was so horrified at the truth that I was grasping for an alternative fiction to cling to instead. I quickly realized my mistake and took it down, but the damage was done.
“By some miracle it seemingly slipped under the media’s radar, I was never asked about it so I never spoke of it again, afraid that calling attention to it would have the opposite of the intended effect — it could increase the views of those conspiracy videos, and selfishly, inform even more people I was ignorant, self absorbed, and tone deaf enough to share one in the first place.”
Rousey added that she’ll regret the decision to share the video “until the day I die.”
“I deserve to be hated, labeled, detested, resented, and worse for it. I deserve to lose out on every opportunity, I should have been canceled, I would have deserved it. I still do. I apologize that this came 11 years too late, but to those affected by the Sandy Hook massacre, from the bottom of my heart and depth of my soul I am so so sorry for the hurt I caused.”
Rousey also revealed that she had drafted an apology to include in her latest memoir, but “my publisher begged me to take it out, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good.”
