Sanchez says he’s done running from Fabia, three years after the self-help guru helped destroy “The Nightmare’s” illustrious UFC career.
Diego Sanchez is opening up on the negative impact his former coach and mentor Joshua Fabia has had on his life and career over the past several years.
The original Ultimate Fighter winner was a fixture on UFC cards for 15 years, and while he never managed to win a belt he did engage in some of the most entertaining fights from the Zuffa era of the sport. The wheels would fall off his career not because of age but because of a man named Joshua Fabia. In 2019 he left his longtime team at Jackson-Wink to work with Fabia, who touted himself as a self-help guru running a “School of Self Awareness.”
Fabia had no experience training pro fighters. The training we saw involved him chasing fighters around the cage with a knife and punching an upside-down Sanchez in the head repeatedly. Unsurprisingly, Diego looked out of shape and unprepared in all his fights under Fabia’s tutelage, and his sole victory during that period came via a disqualification. Fabia spread chaos in the background at UFC events, starting arguments with fighters, staff, commentators, and anyone else he felt wasn’t showing him enough respect.
The UFC would end up canceling an upcoming fight with Donald Cerrone and releasing Sanchez in 2021 after Fabia requested all of Diego’s medical records from the promotion, citing ‘the long-term effects of Diego being an MMA fighter.’ Half a year later when Sanchez finally split with Fabia, he said the request was part of a scheme to try and extract a settlement from the UFC.
In a new Instagram video, Diego Sanchez is still clearly suffering from the aftershocks of Fabia’s manipulations.
“For the past 2 years, I have been running from a very traumatic experience,” Sanchez said. “Words cannot even explain how traumatizing this was. It involves a very evil man that manipulated, blackmailed, extorted me, and eventually put an end to my UFC career. And I’ve been dealing with this psychopath for, s—, it’s been 3 years, 4 years. And I paid him out. I paid him money to get out of my life because the situation had become so volatile and so evil and dark that there was no other option.”
Sanchez said he paid ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ to move on, but is still living his life in fear of his former guru.
You have to see this bizarre Diego Sanchez-Joshua Fabia training video to believe it https://t.co/uk26e85JeC
— World of MMA (@CM_fights) May 8, 2021
“I’m dealing with a very unstable mentally unstable sociopathic psychopath, that is basically the best way I could put it,” he said. “You’re dealing with a Charlie Manson type of mind where he’s so far gone that it makes him unstable and dangerous. And the manipulation that was put on, part of it was that he’s an ex-trained hitman, an ex-contract worker for the cartels. And just so much darkness on this guy that it put me in a state of fear that I was worried for the safety of not only my life, but also my daughter, my mother, and even my daughter’s mother too.”
“Dude, I have lost sleep over this. I have gone countless nights with no rest, sleeping in the mornings to to feel safe because there’s a true psychopathic person out there that wants me dead, that believes in his mind that I was the source of ruining his life when ultimately this man came into my life and did the opposite. He ruined mine. But in his opinion, he I ruined his reputation. I ruined his company. And I wasn’t the one that had the greed in my heart. He had the greed in his heart.”
It’s unclear what contact Joshua Fabia still has with Diego Sanchez at this point, but Sanchez declared he was done running from the conflict.
“Now I am in the right state of sound mind where I am ready to move forward, let this past go and move forward,” he said. “But for me to do that, I have to fight this fight. I have to stop running from this guy. I have to go forward, not back. I have to stand up against this evil bully.”
“I have to stand up for this now because if I don’t stand up against this guy, I am going to put other people in a place where he could come into their life, where this guy could manipulate them, blackmail them, extort them as he did me.”