Rose Namajunas Thinks Conor McGregor’s UFC 223 Apology Was Fake

After recently appearing in court for his April 5 assault that forced three fights off April’s UFC 223, Conor McGregor is expected to avoid jail time in New York.

For his bosses at the UFC, that will hopefully lead to a massive-grossing title fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov, something McGregor’s coach believes will undoubtedly happen before the end of the year. As bad as the UFC wants the MMA world to move on and for that to transpire, not everyone involved in the highly-publicized attack is willing to forgive “The Notorious” so easily.

The fighters connected to the three fights canceled from UFC 223 are planning potential legal action, yet women’s strawweight champion Rose Namajunas, who was present when McGregor threw a dolly through a bus containing Nurmagomedov, was not injured but nearly withdrew due to the mental trauma sustained from the incident.

McGregor allegedly apologized to ‘Thug’ Rose on Instagram shortly after the attack, but Namajunas wasn’t buying then and she reiterated she isn’t buying now during the debut episode of “Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show” on ESPN today. The 115-pound queen described her opinion of the Irishman so-called apology, blasting it by insisting it wasn’t an actual apology:

“I did get an Instagram message from him, but I don’t really know if that was really him. To me, that doesn’t seem like the type of, it just didn’t seem like a sincere apology from an actual person. To me, I didn’t really, I guess, consider it a real apology.”

Namajunas went into detail about what McGregor supposedly said in his “apology,”  asserting that what the former UFC lightweight and featherweight champion said didn’t matter because she didn’t care what beef he had with Khabib. For her, she might be willing to work things out, but wants a personal face-to-face interaction rather than a fake one online:

“It said, ‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ and then it was like, but then he immediately went on to like justifying what he did and stuff like that and the reasons why he did it,” Namajunas explained. “That to me was like, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t care what beef he’s got with who. That’s none of my business, I don’t need to know that information. Do you know what I mean? That doesn’t do anything for me.

“So there was an apology and I’m a pretty cool person and I always accept apologies, but to me, I’m like a personal person, I like face to face. That’s how I like to handle things. I feel like anything can be worked out, you just gotta talk through it as adults.”

So “Thug” Rose reminded everyone that she responded to McGregor’s “apology” with a strong-minded comeback before telling him to call her longtime partner Pat Barry:

“Yeah, I said ‘f— that,'” Namajunas said. “I said call Pat [Barry]. I just put Pat’s phone number and said, ‘f— that’ to whatever your message is and call him.”

Namajunas said McGregor never called, however, and that’s when Barry agreed with her suggestion that the apology didn’t come from the man himself:

“That didn’t come from Conor,” Barry said. “That apology didn’t come from him.”

Finally, Namajunas unveiled that she wasn’t yet over the incident, with memories of his attack making her paranoid and wanting to stay inside at times, to the point of seeing a therapist:

“No, man. When we got back home, we stayed upstairs, locked in our room because we were just paranoid about how crazy the week was. It was really tough. I’m still trying not to leave the house too much or there will be times when I’m just like, ‘Yeah we should just go home,’ like I just have a weird feeling. I live in a very nice neighborhood, there’s nothing that really goes on around here.

“So, for me to be like sketch. … I’m still paranoid about everything. I have a therapist that I go see.”