- Amanda Ribas shared her strange encounter with a stalker during UFC Vegas 89 fight week
- The guy was able to sneak into the UFC Performance Institute where Ribas was training
Amanda Ribas had one of the most unforgettable experiences of her life after a random guy stalked her and ended up getting inside the UFC Performance Institute.
The guy was weird from the start
Speaking to Ag. Fight, Ribas revealed that the unusual encounter started during fight week of UFC Vegas 89 last month. According to the Brazilian, the guy was acting weird the moment she saw him as she and her team walked their way to the hotel.
What’s even crazier was that Ribas said the man was claiming to be her husband. From that point on, she already knew the situation was a bit different.
“I don’t remember his name, but he was a bit of a crazy guy,” Ribas recalled. “On the first day, I arrived at the hotel — usually the fans are there for us to sign something, take a picture — but this citizen was a little crazy. He kept screaming, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.’ That same day, the guy at the front desk called my room and said, ‘Amanda, Alex is here wanting to go upstairs.’ Except that Alex is the name of my manager. I said, ‘Hey, the sensei is here now’. He went and said a crazy last name, I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I thought that was kind of weird.”
“The next day, when we arrived again at the reception, the young man was waiting. But he said he wanted to talk to me, and I said I couldn’t at the moment,” she continued. “He spoke to my father, handed him a letter, a bracelet and a teddy bear. So far, so normal, because it’s something that happens. I even like it, I love to get gifts. Then I read in the letter that he was in love with me as a man since 2020, that he met me in Abu Dhabi. We went to do some research. This young man, on his social network, it was written that I was his wife, that he lived in such and such a country and was going to move to [my hometown] Varginha [Minas Gerais, Brazil]. There was a picture of a teddy bear, everyone in my family, saying, ‘This is Marcelo, this is Arthur, this is Mirelly, this is Amanda, my wife’. I had some crazy business.”
The guy snuck into the UFC P.I.
Despite the strange situation, Ribas went on with her training camp routine inside the UFC P.I. only to find out that her stalker managed to get inside the facility. That’s when Ribas decided to seek help from the UFC security.
Fortunately for Ribas, the UFC deployed a security personnel to accompany her for 24 hours to ensure her safety. Looking back, Ribas is now remembering those moments with a laugh.
“The other day, this citizen managed to get into the P.I., I don’t know how, and he was telling people that I was his wife,” Ribas remembered. “[My manager] Alex [Davis] found out about it first, then he told me. Then he notified the UFC and they left a security guard with me 24 hours a day to be even more protected. It seems that they found out that he is a fighter, and he couldn’t fight in an event because he had taken a sword (laughs).”
“To finish this week that I started single, I went ‘dating,’ I got ‘engaged’ and ‘married,’ I ‘separated,’ too,” Ribas joked. “Because they researched and saw that he had posted on his social networks that he is traveling to another city, that we were separated, but that he wished me all the luck in the world (laughs). It was the most unexpected ‘relationship’ I’ve ever had.”
Ribas is coming off a decision loss to Rose Namajunas but is still one of the top contenders in the women’s flyweight division. She is currently ranked No. 8 in the official rankings.
