Ronda Rousey has apologized for her 2013 tweet about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The former MMA fighter shared a statement on social media, expressing her regret over sharing a conspiracy theory video that suggested that the shooting had been staged. “I can’t say how many times I’ve redrafted this apology over the last 11 years,” she wrote. “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 11 years ago I made the single most regrettable decision of my life,” Rousey continued. “I watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reposted 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.”
Rousey mentioned that she “quickly realized” her mistake and took the tweet down, so her social media post thankfully “slipped under the media’s radar.” She was “never asked about it” so she did not address it again until now, in fear that speaking on it previously “would have the opposite of the intended effect — it could increase the views of these conspiracy videos and selfishly inform even more people I was ignorant, self-absorbed and tone deaf enough to share one in the first place.”
She also wrote that she initially wanted to include her apology in her memoir Our Fight, which came out earlier this year. However, her publisher “begged me to take it out, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good.”
The former UFC fighter believes she deserves “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 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,” she continued. “I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you’ve endured and words cannot describe how thoroughly remorseful and ashamed I am of myself for contributing to it. I’ve regretted it every day of my life since and will continue to do so until I die.”
She also shared a warning to those who have perpetuated these harmful conspiracy theories: “It doesn’t make you edgy, or an independent thinker, you’re not doing your due diligence entertaining every possibility by digesting these conspiracies. They will only make you feel powerless, afraid, miserable and isolated. You’re doing nothing but hurting others and yourself.”
This statement comes after a Reddit AMA on wrestling subreddit r/SquaredCircle, in which various people asked Rousey about her Sandy Hook comments; she did not respond to questions related to the tragedy.
Her since-deleted 2013 tweet featured a video from the YouTube channel ThinkOutsideTheTV, which claimed that the families of Sandy Hook victims were paid actors. Rousey wrote that the clip was “extremely interesting and [a] must-watch,” per Bleacher Report.
Rousey did not apologize back then; instead, she doubled down on sharing the video, tweeting, “I just figure asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told.”
In addition to her MMA career, Rousey has acted in such films as The Expendables 3, the Entourage movie and Furious 7 and the TV series 9-1-1.
