Ronda Rousey has one big regret in her life. Apparently it’s her KO by Holly Holm in 2015. The Expendables 3Instead, Rousey said she very, very, very regrets sharing a video on Twitter more than a decade ago that promoted a conspiracy theory about the Sandy Hook shooting.
Former UFC fighter Rousey posted an epic apology to X on Friday for a video she shared in 2013. The video, which has since been removed from the internet, was originally published on a YouTube channel called ThinkOutsideTheTV and claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was part of a government conspiracy. At the time, Rousey called the video “very interesting and a must-watch,” according to Bleacher Report. After receiving backlash, Rousey later deleted her tweet of the video, but said it’s “more patriotic to ask questions and investigate rather than blindly accept what you’re told.”
There’s not much that can be said about this video since it’s been mostly removed from the web, but one thing is for sure: Rousey regrets sharing it.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewritten this apology over the last 11 years, and how many times I’ve told myself that now wasn’t the right time, or that apologizing would only do more damage. But 11 years ago, I made a decision I would later regret the most,” Rousey said. “I saw the Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reported it on Twitter. I didn’t believe it, but I was so terrified by the truth that I was looking for another myth to cling to instead. I quickly realized my mistake and removed it, but the damage was done.”
Why is Rousey feeling so sorry now? It’s likely because she hosted a Reddit Q&A a few days ago, where she was inundated with questions about the decade-old video. Angry Reddit users questioned the former fighter about why she thought it was appropriate to share such conspiratorial content. “As one of the most famous athletes on the planet, have you ever considered apologizing to the Sandy Hook parents for spreading a conspiracy theory that their children’s murders were faked?” one person asked. That was practically the only topic that came up.
Well, now it seems she has really considered it. Rousey’s apology continues: “It seemed to miraculously escape media scrutiny and I was never asked about it, so I never spoke about it again, because I feared that attracting attention would have the opposite effect to my intended effect: it might get more views for the conspiracy video and selfishly let even more people know that I was ignorant, self-centered, and insensitive enough to share in the first place. I drafted my thousandth apology to include in my final memoir, but my publisher begged me to remove it, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good. So I told myself that apologizing would only reopen the wounds, that I was selfishly trying to make myself feel better, that it would further hurt those who had suffered and that being featured again trying to shake off the label of me being a ‘Sandy Hook truther’ could lead even more people into a black hole of conspiracy theory nonsense.”
Ronda continues on at great length, perhaps the longest celebrity apology I’ve ever seen. I typed her entire tirade into a word counting app and it was 478 words long. That’s considerably longer than, say, the apology of the aging George H. W. Bush, who was caught pinching a woman’s buttocks while in a wheelchair; Bush’s apology for this arguably more serious crime was only 84 words long. Most of Rousey’s rhetorical attempt at atonement is a long series of self-flagellations, at one point claiming that she “deserves to be hated, labeled, disliked, resented, and treated so much worse,” and later stating that “every day since, I’ve regretted sharing the video and will continue to do so until the day I die.” You can read Ronda’s full apology here.
