Despite being fresh off of a nineteen-second knockout victory over Philip De Fries at last weekend’s UFC on FUEL TV 9, it may be a while before we see Matt Mitrione in the Octagon again.
Earlier today, Mitrione was a guest on The MMA Hour, where he wrapped up his appearance with some jokes he had prepared for host Ariel Helwani. He started off with a joke about Aleksander Emelianenko’s unretirement, a joke about how he considered finishing De Fries – a Llyod Irvin student – with a rape choke, and a joke about how transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox should call herself “The Queen of the Buffaloes” in reference to “Silence of the Lambs.”
If he just stopped there, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about his appearance on the show, but he wasn’t done making jokes at Fallon’s expense just yet.
“Holy shit, I have not seen a man beat a woman like that since Chris Brown beat Rihanna. That is exceptional how he just beats innocent, unknowing women like that. Incredible,” Mitrione continued. “Since he’s obviously looking for any way to break or avoid the rules regarding fighting, if he ever fights again – which I hope he doesn’t – but if he ever fights again and loses to a woman, is he going to charge that woman with a hate crime because she imposing on his freedom as a tranny?”
At this point, Ariel Helwani intervened to ask Mitrione why he kept referring to Fallon Fox as a man. This resulted on a fairly heated rant from Meathead, which we have video of after the jump.
Props: MMAFighting.com
“Because she’s not a he. He’s a he. He’s chromosomally a man. He had a gender change, not a sex change. He’s still a man. He was a man for 31 years. Thirty-one years. That’s a couple years younger than I am. He’s a man. Six years of taking performance de-hancing drugs, you think is going to change all that? That’s ridiculous. That is a lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak, and I mean that because you lied on your license to beat up women. That’s disgusting. You should be embarrassed yourself. And the fact that Florida licensed him because California licensed him or whoever the hell did it, it’s an embarrassment to us as fighters, as a sport, and we all should protest that.”
The UFC reacted quickly to Mitrione’s rant, suspending Matt Mitrione and issuing the following statement on their website earlier today:
The UFC was appalled by the transphobic comments made by heavyweight Matt Mitrione today in an interview on the ‘MMA Hour.’
The organization finds Mr. Mitrione’s comments offensive and wholly unacceptable and — as a direct result of this significant breach of the UFC’s code of conduct – Mr. Mitrione’s UFC contract has been suspended and the incident is being investigated.
The UFC is a friend and ally of the LGBT community, and expects and requires all 450 of its athletes to treat others with dignity and respect.
Here’s what I took away from this:
– That joke he made about the Lloyd Irvin rape case? Perfectly acceptable; probably because he didn’t tweet it.
– Calling Fallon Fox a man is ignorant and transphobic when Joe Rogan isn’t the one doing it.
– Maybe if he just made a video teaching people how to rape her, he wouldn’t have been suspended.
– I hate to sound like a broken record, but this is exactly why the UFC really needs some sort of policy in place to ensure that fighters know where the line is drawn in terms of what is acceptable and unacceptable to say about an issue and what will happen to them if they cross that line (aside from community service, of course). Or rather, why this policy needs to be evenly enforced among all UFC employees.
– Of course, this is all written under the assumption that Meathead’s suspension will leave him on the shelf for an extended period of time. Time will tell how many months he is actually suspended for.
I can’t be the only one who feels this way, right?