UFC CEO Dana White made headlines back in early 2023 for slapping his wife during a New Year’s Eve party in Cabo, the details of which remain sealed under Mexico’s privacy laws. Not surprisingly, White was buried under an avalanche of criticism for the “embarrassing” incident but the outrage did little to keep the promotion from setting yet another revenue record.
His three kids, however, were not so quick to sweep it under the carpet.
“If you’re a racist, your kids know you’re a racist,” White told former ESPN anchor Sage Steele on her podcast. “If you do things like that to your wife, your kids know. The list goes on and on, nobody knows you better than your kids do. They lived it. They live in the house for 18 to 20 years and they see what they see. My kids know who I am. My kids know what I’m about. That’s the only f****** thing that matters to me. When that situation happened, we had to deal with our kids. F****** media, you think I give a s*** what they f****** think? They can all kiss my ass. My kids were the focus and the priority during that situation. Dana, my oldest, didn’t talk to us for like four days. We got through it with them, but at the end of the day, your kids know who you are.
“That was the most important part of it. That was the only thing that mattered to me and my wife. Nobody wants to see their dumb, drunk parents slapping each other on TMZ, you know what I mean? It is what it is. It was bad, but it happened and it needed to be dealt with. When I was going out and talking about it publicly and you’ve got the media asking you about apologies, we apologized. We apologized to the people that we needed to apologize to — to our kids. That’s what we did.”
“I made some decisions in my life that I could guarantee that would never happen again,” White said. “I made some decisions in my life and things I needed to fix with myself to make sure that never happens again. That will never happen again, no matter what. Me and my wife have known each other since eighth grade, we’ve been friends since eighth grade and we’ve been married for almost 30 years. It’s weird and I think about it all the time, that that situation would play out on New Year’s Eve, basically on stage, in front of however many people all with phones aimed right at me, and boom, here we are. It was crystal clear how and why it happened. I had to take a look at myself and say we need to fix this and this can never happen again.”
White, 54, did not receive any formal punishment for the incident, which may suggest “something is wrong with the system,” according to this critic. White once claimed you “don’t bounce back from putting your hands on a woman” but as of this writing, it appears to be business as usual for UFC and its parent company, TKO.