Dana White made headlines after he was caught on camera slapping his wife during an altercation at a Cabo San Lucas nightclub.
The incident immediately sparked outrage with many calling for White’s removal from his post as the UFC’s CEO. But despite swimming in a sea of criticism, White faced little repercussion as the promotion’s parent company, Endeavor, quickly sought to sweep the entire incident under the run.
Dana White slapping his wife in a drunken altercation right before the launch of Dana White's Power Slap League
Here’s the video of Dana White and his wife trading slaps.
link👇👇https://t.co/BrX0j1BAvj#ufc #mma pic.twitter.com/p7z1Krubww— Britni Durham (@britni_durham) January 3, 2023
However, White’s children weren’t so quick to forget, as he himself explained during a recent appearance on former ESPN anchor Sage Steele’s podcast.
“If you’re a racist, your kids know you’re a racist,” White said. “If you do things like that to your wife, your kids know. The list goes on and on, nobody knows you better than your kids do. They lived it. They live in the house for 18 to 20 years and they see what they see. My kids know who I am. My kids know what I’m about. That’s the only f*cking thing that matters to me. When that situation happened, we had to deal with our kids. F*cking media, you think I give a sh*t what they f*cking think? They can all kiss my ass.
“My kids were the focus and the priority during that situation. Dana, my oldest, didn’t talk to us for like four days. We got through it with them, but at the end of the day, your kids know who you are.
“That was the most important part of it. That was the only thing that mattered to me and my wife. Nobody wants to see their dumb, drunk parents slapping each other on TMZ, you know what I mean? It is what it is. It was bad, but it happened and it needed to be dealt with. When I was going out and talking about it publicly and you’ve got the media asking you about apologies, we apologized. We apologized to the people that we needed to apologize to — to our kids. That’s what we did.”
Dana White Contradicts Statement About Domestic Violence in 2014
Following the release of Brazilian standout Thiago Silva due to his involvement in a domestic dispute with his estranged wife in 2014, White was quoted as saying, “You don’t bounce back from putting your hands on a woman.”
That no longer appears to be true as zero tolerance has become a thing of the past under the UFC banner.
“I made some decisions in my life that I could guarantee that would never happen again,” White said. “I made some decisions in my life and things I needed to fix with myself to make sure that never happens again. That will never happen again, no matter what. Me and my wife have known each other since eighth grade, we’ve been friends since eighth grade and we’ve been married for almost 30 years.
“It’s weird and I think about it all the time, that that situation would play out on New Year’s Eve, basically on stage, in front of however many people all with phones aimed right at me, and boom, here we are. It was crystal clear how and why it happened. I had to take a look at myself and say we need to fix this and this can never happen again.”
Watch Dana White’s full appearance below:
