It cost Sanchez six figures to escape from the grasp of his coach and life guru Fabia, whose bizarre behavior got him tossed out of the UFC.
Things got so bad between Diego Sanchez and his guru Joshua Fabia that Sanchez ended up paying $100,000 just to get Fabia out of his life.
There’s been a whole lot written about the tumultuous two years where Fabia ‘coached’ Sanchez through his life problems and MMA career. There was a bunch of strange behavior and training techniques we witnessed, and the whole thing culminated in Sanchez getting pulled from a fight against Donald Cerrone and kicked out of the UFC.
VICE TV’s new ‘Dark Side of the Cage’ series dedicates an entire episode to Joshua Fabia’s treatment of Diego Sanchez, and re-shines a light on how Sanchez ended up paying Fabia $100,000 to f**k off. The episode debuted Wednesday, January 15th.
“Diego agrees to buy his way out of bondage”pic.twitter.com/3DRph3UR0Y
— Jed I. Goodman © (@jedigoodman) January 16, 2025
It was that, or someone was probably going to get killed.
Fabia would end up recording the moment where Sanchez wrote him a check for a hundred grand. He even released it on the internet himself thinking it would make him look good.
“They made me sign the check right there in that moment, on camera too, to have proof that it wasn’t a forced thing,” Sanchez told VICE. “At that moment it was the easiest thing to do because I would have done anything to get out of that situation.”
“You want your freedom. You can have it. You’re gonna write a check to me and School of Self for $100,000. As I told you, this is the case, when this happens, because you robbed me of everything. You did not pay me correctly. You told me all of this money is mine as I did all the work. And you’re now on your own.”
“I vouch for Josh right now,” Sanchez said at the end of the video. “And I’ll say it on camera that, number one, he never hurt me, and number two, he helped me a lot and healed me a lot. So that’s on camera, right now.”
Sanchez would later recant that statement, detailing abuse that included sleeping on the floor for months and getting doused in cold water and being locked outside in subzero weather for hours.
It’s unclear how much money Fabia siphoned off from Sanchez over the course of their ‘business relationship,’ but based on this $100,000 payment to go away, we’re going to assume it was a lot.