Ronda Rousey has one great regret in life—and apparently it isn’t getting KO-ed by Holly Holm in 2015 or appearing in The Expendables 3. Instead, Rousey is very, very, very sorry she shared a video on Twitter over a decade ago that promulgated conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting.
On Friday, the former UFC fighter posted an epic apology to X that concerned a video she shared way back in 2013. That video, which has since been deleted from the internet, was originally put out by a YouTube channel called ThinkOutsideTheTV, and alleged that the Sandy Hook shooting was part of a government conspiracy. According to Bleacher Report, at the time, Rousey called the video “extremely interesting, and must-watch.” Later, after backlash, Rousey deleted her tweet with the video, but then said that “asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told.”
Since the video has largely been erased from the web, there’s not a whole lot we can say about it. One thing’s for sure, though: Rousey sure regrets sharing it.
“I can’t say how many times I’ve redrafted this apology over the last 11 years. How many times I’ve convinced myself it wasn’t the right time or that I’d be causing even more damage by giving it. But eleven years ago I made the single most regrettable decision of my life,” Rousey said. “I watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reported it on twitter. I didn’t even believe it, 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.”
Why is Rousey feeling so apologetic right now? It would appear to be because of a Reddit AMA she hosted a few days ago in which she was pelted with questions about the decade-old video. Angry Redditors queried the former fighter on why she thought it was appropriate to share such conspiratorial content. “Have you ever considered apologizing to the Sandy Hook parents for being one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet and spreading conspiracies that the murder of their children was staged?” one asked. It was practically the only subject that came up.
Welp, now it really seems like she has considered it. Rousey’s apology continues: “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 views of those conspiracy videos, and selfishly, inform even more people I was ignorant, self absorbed, and tone deaf enough to share on in the first place. I drafted a thousandth apology to include in my last memoir, but my publisher begged me to take it out, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good. So I convinced myself that apologizing would just reopen the wound for no other reason than me selfishly trying to make myself feel better, that I would hurt those suffering even more and possibly lead more people down the black hole of conspiracy bullshit by it being brought up again just so I could try to shake the label of a ‘Sandy Hook truther.’”
Ronda goes on like this at considerable length. As far as celebrity apologies go, it might be the longest I’ve seen. I plugged her entire screed into a word count app and it is 478 words long, which is considerably longer than, say, geriatric George H. W. Bush’s apology after he was caught pinching a whole bunch of women’s butts from the confines of his wheelchair; for that inarguably more serious offense, Bush’s apology was only 84 words. The bulk of Rousey’s rhetorical attempt at atonement is one long string of self-flagellation. At one point, she claims she deserves to “be hated, labeled, detested, resented and worse” and, later, says has regretted sharing the video “every day of my life since and will continue to do so until the day I die.” You can read Ronda’s entire apology here.
