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The past few weeks can’t have been all that easy for Anthony Johnson.

The feared UFC light heavyweight, who faces Jimi Manuwa on Saturday night at UFC 191, once again found himself in hot water on August 18 when he posted an ugly, misogynistic rant against an unnamed woman in his gym who’d had the temerity to stretch with her yoga mat where Johnson was trying to lift weights. Johnson threw her yoga mat, yelled at her a bit and then wrote a Facebook post saying that she was built “like a bag of dry dog food.” 

The post spread like wildfire, which was to be expected. Johnson has a history of issues with domestic violence, including a 2009 incident that saw Johnson eventually sentenced to three years probation, community service and domestic violence counseling. A civil temporary restraining order was issued against Johnson in 2014, leading to his suspension from the UFC, but the organization reinstated him after the complaint was dismissed by the woman who filed it.

Johnson came out okay in this situation, too. Initially defiant on social media, Johnson apologized. The UFC announced an investigation, eventually expressing their disappointment in Johnson’s actions and noting that he would be undergoing counseling and making a donation to a Florida-based women’s charity, though no details on what kind of counseling or how big the donation would actually be were ever provided. 

But even after all that, according to Johnson, he’s doing just fine. He’s not worried, not even a little bit. And, in fact, the recent hubbub was all a media creation, anyway.

“As long as my friends and family know who I am, I sleep well at night. I don’t worry about what the media has to say,” Johnson says during a UFC 191 media function Thursday. “I’m going to start answering like Marshawn Lynch. ‘You know why I’m here.’ They’re going to say what they want to say. I keep training. I keep fighting and stay focused.”

I tell Johnson that surely it must have been a little bit distracting, at least. But he shakes his head adamantly.

“Not even a little bit, man. Whenever I posted my ‘rant,’ as they called it, I took that upon myself to post it. I’m not afraid of the media because they’re going to say what they want to say, anyway,” he says.

“I didn’t attack anybody. All I did was throw a yoga mat and talk some trash,” he continues. “Who hasn’t thrown somebody’s stuff out of the way and talked trash? I’m just a public figure, and they want to make an example out of me. That’s fine with me. I’m not perfect. Show me somebody that hasn’t talked trash about somebody and put it on Facebook. It just happened to be me, and they want to say what they want to say. Like I said, I sleep well at night.”

Sleeping well at night is a thing Johnson keeps going back to, especially when asked how all of this has affected his mindset.

“I’m not worried about it. I sleep well at night. I have a nice comfy bed. I have awesome friends. I sleep well at night,” Johnson says. Again. “Yes, I was wrong for saying the things that I said. But I have already apologized, and everybody knows that. Life goes on. If people want to talk about it and whatnot, go right ahead. I still sleep well at night.”

I ask Johnson how long, in his estimation, did it take for someone from his management or the UFC offices to reach out to him and say, hey Anthony, perhaps this is not the best time to be posting rants against women on Facebook? Maybe?

Johnson says it was within one hour that his manager Glenn Robinson called him and told him to take the post down, but he was not inclined to agree with the suggestion.

“I’m like, Glenn, it’s already up. It’s already out there. You know how it is once you hit that send button, it’s out there. I’m like, Glenn, I’m not embarrassed by anything that I said,” Johnson says. “Do I regret it? No.

“It’s a lesson learned. But I am sorry. I felt bad for what I said. Nobody deserves to be talked about like that. Once again, I was mad. And that was it. So I apologized to her like a man, I admitted to her that I was wrong like a man. I kept living life like a man.”

Johnson says that he saw the woman two or three days after the incident started. He was in the gym, stretching (in the area where you are supposed to stretch, it must be noted by the author, so as not to have his yoga mat thrown across the room by an angry weightlifter), and when he came to the edge of the artificial turf area during his warm-up, he saw her standing there.

According to Johnson, he walked up, offered a handshake and said he was sorry.

“She said she was sorry, too. It was over with. She didn’t make a big stink about it. The media made a big stink about it,” he says. “She understood that when you’re mad, you say things. She accepted my apology, and I accepted hers.

“At the end of the day, we were both in the wrong. I was just dumb enough to put it on social media.”

 

Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.

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