The UFC announced Rampage’s return to the company during the UFC Fight Night 58 broadcast Saturday night, though rumors had circulated days before the official announcement.
The legal implications of the signing are more interesting than any of the in-cage ones since Scott Cokertweeted Rampage was still under contract to Bellator and that the promotion would protect its rights in court.
However, Rampage posted a statement to his website Sunday claiming he legally voided his contract with Bellator. Get it after the jump.
(Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in 2016, after he fights twice in the UFC, complains about bad matchmaking and other (perhaps non-existent) slights, leaves, and re-signs with Bellator. / Photo via Getty)
The UFC announced Rampage’s return to the company during the UFC Fight Night 58 broadcast Saturday night, though rumors had circulated days before the official announcement.
The legal implications of the signing are more interesting than any of the in-cage ones since Scott Cokertweeted Rampage was still under contract to Bellator and that the promotion would protect its rights in court.
After five months of grueling negotiations and gray-area contract talks with Bellator MMA and parent-company Viacom, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson officially terminates his contract with the up-and-coming promotion citing multiple breaches since the removal of President and Founder Bjorn Rebney. Jackson exercises a clause in the agreement that allows for a 45-day window to satisfy any contract dispute. Bellator MMA, failing to fulfill the requests of Jackson, was put on notice, failed to respond and eventually notified that negotiations were officially terminated.
Jackson’s U.K.-based fight manager and Wolfslair Academy founder Anthony McGann confirms, late Saturday night, that “Rampage has indeed signed with the UFC.” Details of the deal have not been made public. Jackson was available for comment late Saturday night from his Laguna Hills, CA training center Rampage Family Fitness and provided the following: “I went to the UFC and we put a deal together that worked out for both of us. I’m excited to be here. The UFC had nothing to do with me leaving Bellator. I was done with Bellator when I made the final call and they still didn’t do what they had to do contractually. I wish those guys the best but I’m where I belong.
Rampage posted a link to the statement in a tweet reading “Official statement on my UFC signing and what’s happening at RampageJackson.com (so Scott Coker can shut up).”
The ensuing legal battle is going to be more interesting than anything Rampage does in the Octagon, so stay tuned.
But Silva isn’t going quietly into his suspension. As he told MMAFighting’s Guilherme Cruz, Bigfoot plans to sue Brazilian MMA Athletic Commission (CABMMA) medical director Dr. Marcio Tannure, who authorized the veteran heavyweight’s therapeutic usage exemption for TRT, and oversaw his therapy. And if you listen to Silva’s side of the story, he might actually have a case here.
A week before his fight in Australia, Silva received a report from Tannure stating that his testosterone levels were low, and he should continue taking injections on a weekly basis. It seems possible that Tannure was unaware of just how soon Silva’s fight was coming up — but nevertheless, Silva’s followed the doctor’s orders, and it wound up costing him a $50,000 bonus and nine months of his career.
“I just did what they told me to do,” Silva told MMAFighting.com. “I’d never do something different that what the doctor told me to. I looked for a doctor with a good reputation, and he’s the UFC’s doctor in Brazil. I knew I’d be tested before and after the fight. Unfortunately, now I have to find the legal ways to overturn this situation or at least prove I’m not guilty…
“I took a shot at the same day he sent me that e-mail, and he asked me if I had another one to take with me to Australia, to take on fight week,” he said. “He authorized everything. I did exactly as I was informed to do.
But Silva isn’t going quietly into his suspension. As he told MMAFighting’s Guilherme Cruz, Bigfoot plans to sue Brazilian MMA Athletic Commission (CABMMA) medical director Dr. Marcio Tannure, who authorized the veteran heavyweight’s therapeutic usage exemption for TRT, and oversaw his therapy. And if you listen to Silva’s side of the story, he might actually have a case here.
A week before his fight in Australia, Silva received a report from Tannure stating that his testosterone levels were low, and he should continue taking injections on a weekly basis. It seems possible that Tannure was unaware of just how soon Silva’s fight was coming up — but nevertheless, Silva’s followed the doctor’s orders, and it wound up costing him a $50,000 bonus and nine months of his career.
“I just did what they told me to do,” Silva told MMAFighting.com. “I’d never do something different that what the doctor told me to. I looked for a doctor with a good reputation, and he’s the UFC’s doctor in Brazil. I knew I’d be tested before and after the fight. Unfortunately, now I have to find the legal ways to overturn this situation or at least prove I’m not guilty…
“I took a shot at the same day he sent me that e-mail, and he asked me if I had another one to take with me to Australia, to take on fight week,” he said. “He authorized everything. I did exactly as I was informed to do.
“You go get help with a doctor, you do the right thing, and now this story tarnishes my professional career,” he continued. “It tarnishes the great fight I did with Mark Hunt, and gave me a huge financial loss. The doctor knows that I cut weight, he knows how the body of a MMA fighter reacts. He should know at what level I would be with one shot. I felt like a lab rat. I did everything I was told to do and now I’m the cheater.”
To help build his defense, Silva plans to re-do his normal fight preparations under the supervision of different doctors:
“I’ll take the exact dosage I took, the exact timetable, and will get a doctor here in the U.S. and a doctor in Brazil to show to the fans that this is horrible for my career and the sport,” he said. “I want to prove that it was not my fault. When I have all the exams from both doctors, I want to sue (Dr. Tannure) for the moral and financial prejudice that he has caused me.”
Silva added that he’d like to continue undergoing TRT in the future as long as the UFC allows him to:
“I want to continue the treatment because it’s good for my personal life and my career as well. If you know what acromegaly is, you know what I have. My hormonal levels are not normal, my testosterone is too low, and I want to be on normal levels. I thought about a thousand things since this all happened,” he continued. “I considered leaving the sport because of these unfair things, but I don’t give up that easily. I have to show that it was not my fault.”
In other words, TRT is still not an exact science, and unless you’re dealing with a very experienced endocrinologist, mistakes can be made. And if Bigfoot still decides to use TRT when he returns from suspension, the same thing could happen to him again. So, our lesson for today: Don’t get on TRT unless you really need it to function normally, and if you really need TRT to function normally, you might want to consider a line of work other than professional fighting.
(A dead-eyed lunatic who will not stop until she has destroyed her own kin? Where have we seen this sort of thing before?)
Aren’t the elderly adorable, you guys? With their slow driving and their old-timey racism and their inability to adjust to current technological changes, they are all but walking punchlines just waiting to be set up! Take June White, for instance, who you might remember as the vitriolic, money-grubbing mother of UFC President Dana White. You see, old June wrote a tell-all book about her son a while back in which she claimed he was a soulless devil reincarnate, and has rightfully been raked over the coals for being the deplorable, transparent piece of garbage that she truly is in the time since. Typically, these attacks could be found in the form of comments like the one I just made on her Twitter account or her book’s Amazon page.
While most of us — like our buddies at Fightlinker, for instance — would write off the public’s harsh yet appropriate treatment of June as simple poetic justice, June herself has apparently viewed the backlash as an opportunity to self-implode with irony. Believe it or not, The Baldmother is now attempting to sue anonymous internet commenters with names like Bootyduty3 (If only I was joking) for “defamation, libel and civil conspiracy.” Sea Coast Online has the scoop:
June White, a Hampton resident and the mother of Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White, has filed a lawsuit to find out who has been smearing her name on the Internet ever since the release of a highly critical unauthorized biography she wrote about her son.
White claims a troop of cyberbullies — with aliases such as Bootyduty3, Joe Stranger and The Real June White — have been posting “horrific” comments about her and her family for more than a year. She said she fears her son’s company is behind the attacks. “I hate to say it but it could be (UFC that’s organizing the bad-mouthing), and that’s one of the reasons I really want to find out,” White said Wednesday. “If it is, that’s pretty sad.”
That’s Pretty Sad…June, I think someone just came up with the title of their soon-to-be-released autobiography!
More from this story, along with our running commentary, is after the jump.
(A dead-eyed lunatic who will not stop until she has destroyed her own kin? Where have we seen this sort of thing before?)
Aren’t the elderly adorable, you guys? With their slow driving and their old-timey racism and their inability to adjust to current technological changes, they are all but walking punchlines just waiting to be set up! Take June White, for instance, who you might remember as the vitriolic, money-grubbing mother of UFC President Dana White. You see, old June wrote a tell-all book about her son a while back in which she claimed he was a soulless devil reincarnate, and has rightfully been raked over the coals for being the deplorable, transparent piece of garbage that she truly is in the time since. Typically, these attacks could be found in the form of comments like the one I just made on her Twitter account or her book’s Amazon page.
While most of us — like our buddies at Fightlinker, for instance — would write off the public’s harsh yet appropriate treatment of June as simple poetic justice, June herself has apparently viewed the backlash as an opportunity to self-implode with irony. Believe it or not, The Baldmother is now attempting to sue anonymous internet commenters with names like Bootyduty3 (If only I was joking) for “defamation, libel and civil conspiracy.” Sea Coast Online has the scoop:
June White, a Hampton resident and the mother of Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White, has filed a lawsuit to find out who has been smearing her name on the Internet ever since the release of a highly critical unauthorized biography she wrote about her son.
White claims a troop of cyberbullies — with aliases such as Bootyduty3, Joe Stranger and The Real June White — have been posting “horrific” comments about her and her family for more than a year. She said she fears her son’s company is behind the attacks. “I hate to say it but it could be (UFC that’s organizing the bad-mouthing), and that’s one of the reasons I really want to find out,” White said Wednesday. “If it is, that’s pretty sad.”
That’s Pretty Sad…June, I think someone just came up with the title of their soon-to-be-released autobiography!
But don’t worry, we haven’t reached the summit of Mt. Irony yet, Nation:
White said she filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire on April 12 because she was told that’s the only way she can get a subpoena to find out who’s behind the aliases. She’s representing herself because attorneys quoted her “well over $100,000″ to carry out her suit.
The lawsuit charges 21 anonymous commenters with defamation, libel and civil conspiracy. It says they’ve called White “psycho,” “vindictive,” “spiteful,” and “pathetic,” among many expletives, and suggested that she and her family participated in sexual deviancy and drug abuse and that she both abandoned and kidnapped her children.
That must be tough, June, having random people throw spiteful and dishonest remarks at you like that. Well, at least spiteful. Now, just go with us for a minute here, but we’d like you to imagine what it would be like if one of those random people turned out to be the woman who gave birth to you. And even worse, she was making money off of the comments that served no other purpose than tearing you down. Unforgivable, right?
White said it was her supporters who initially pointed out that it could be the UFC organizing the attacks.
“They told me that (UFC) has a department that’s all they do is discredit people they’re mad at for whatever reason,” she said.
She said her supporters, like her, initially thought that Dana would intervene to put an end to the harassment.
“I had been waiting for Dana to tell whoever’s doing this to knock it off and defend his mom and family, and they were all surprised he wasn’t stepping up to the plate,” she said.
Alright, June, you’ve earned this one fair and square.
In what was supposed to be a day of oral arguments pertaining to the State Attorney General’s most recent motion to dismiss, attorney John M. Schwartz — representing the Attorney General’s office — acknowledged unequivocally that the law prohibiting pro MMA did not apply to amateur versions of the sport, and that as per the statute, a pre-approved third-party sanctioning body could oversee MMA events in the state. The admission of the latter prompted the counsel representing Zuffa’s interests to say that if that were truly the case, then there’d be no further need to pursue the lawsuit – which in turn prompted the presiding Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S District Court of the Southern District of New York to push both sides to immediately settle…
Notwithstanding whether a settlement is reached, the door is now open for Zuffa — or any other MMA promotion — to circumvent the ban by utilizing one of the pre-approved sanctioning bodies enumerated in the statute. Those sanctioning bodies include the World Karate Association (since renamed the World Kickboxing Association, a.k.a. the “WKA”), the Professional Karate Association and the U.S. Judo Association, among others…
In what was supposed to be a day of oral arguments pertaining to the State Attorney General’s most recent motion to dismiss, attorney John M. Schwartz — representing the Attorney General’s office — acknowledged unequivocally that the law prohibiting pro MMA did not apply to amateur versions of the sport, and that as per the statute, a pre-approved third-party sanctioning body could oversee MMA events in the state. The admission of the latter prompted the counsel representing Zuffa’s interests to say that if that were truly the case, then there’d be no further need to pursue the lawsuit – which in turn prompted the presiding Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S District Court of the Southern District of New York to push both sides to immediately settle…
Notwithstanding whether a settlement is reached, the door is now open for Zuffa — or any other MMA promotion — to circumvent the ban by utilizing one of the pre-approved sanctioning bodies enumerated in the statute. Those sanctioning bodies include the World Karate Association (since renamed the World Kickboxing Association, a.k.a. the “WKA”), the Professional Karate Association and the U.S. Judo Association, among others…
Under the 1997 law [banning professional MMA in New York] and by the Attorney General’s own admission, sanctioning by a third-party organization is a viable way around the ban. In addition, as long as the law remains on the books, the New York State Athletic Commission has no regulatory authority over MMA and would therefore have no oversight over such events.
“We’ll take it,” said UFC in-house counsel Timothy Bellamy, who was present at today’s proceedings. “We’d rather have the state lift the ban and we go that route first, but we’ll know in the next two months if that’s going to happen.” If it doesn’t, said Bellamy, then the UFC would use the third-party-sanctioning option.
The email, from Edward Muncey, Vice-President of New Media & Technology, reads:
“Dear representative of Ironforgesiron.com and Softlayer.com,
We are absolutely confident that the web pages through the links below are participating in contributory copyright infringement by embedding unauthorized videos in the form of .gif’s from UFC 147. Below, I have provided the URLs of the web pages on your website containing the embedded .gif’s displaying unauthorized video of UFC 147. Please remove all embedded .gif’s immediately. Description of copyrighted work: UFC 147”
Since this has been made public, all of the UFC 147 .gifs have been taken down. Zombie Prophet has issued a statement on the matter, clarifying that he would be removing advertisements from the site so as not to profit off of the UFC’s copyrighted material. As a result, all the funding IronForgesIron will receive going forward will be from donations. ZP also thanked his supporters, and explained how making and hosting .gifs isn’t as easy as we might think it is:
(We know exactly how you feel, Rich. / Props: @zprophet_mma)
The email, from Edward Muncey, Vice-President of New Media & Technology, reads:
“Dear representative of Ironforgesiron.com and Softlayer.com,
We are absolutely confident that the web pages through the links below are participating in contributory copyright infringement by embedding unauthorized videos in the form of .gif’s from UFC 147. Below, I have provided the URLs of the web pages on your website containing the embedded .gif’s displaying unauthorized video of UFC 147. Please remove all embedded .gif’s immediately. Description of copyrighted work: UFC 147”
Since this has been made public, all of the UFC 147 .gifs have been taken down. Zombie Prophet has issued a statement on the matter, clarifying that he would be removing advertisements from the site so as not to profit off of the UFC’s copyrighted material. As a result, all the funding IronForgesIron will receive going forward will be from donations. ZP also thanked his supporters, and explained how making and hosting .gifs isn’t as easy as we might think it is:
“When i first started making gifs…i would host “teh gifs” on tinypic. back then they did not have a size limit. about a year after starting the gifs tinypic changed their policy and i had to find another host. At the time finding an unlimited host was hard unless you paid for hosting and that’s what i had to do and have been doing since. YES I PAY TO MAKE AND HOST THE GIFS YOU ENJOY!
A little more than a year ago i joined IFI and later became its owner. with that came more money being spent just to post and make gifs. none the less i couldnt afford doing this for long being on disability and had to put ads on here to cover the thousand ive spent making and hosting gifs for the last 4 years and IFI for the last year.
As of recent i was told by the UFC to remove some gifs which i have. i also got a sick amount of support from many many friends i never knew i had but i also got a lot of hate, accusations of making money off the UFC and death threats. From i could gather some people think IFI make mad money because of the ads. So i decided to remove them and go back to donations only.” [emphases mine]
Let’s be clear; if you send someone hate mail and death threats for providing an appreciated service to a community at his or her own expense just because you feel like a certain massive corporation is being somewhat less-than-appropriately compensated by said individual, do us all a favor. Please close this page and the German schizer porn you’ve got on in the background, step away from your computer, and go chug the nearest bottle of Drano. If you need a chaser, try some laundry detergent. Thanks.
Yes, IronForgesIron uses copyrighted material and makes a profit off of it. But suing them because is such a disproportionate response that it has the potential to do more harm to the UFC brand than hosting .gifs ever could. Hell, those .gifs could be considered advertisements for the sport, because they effectively communicated the most exciting, visceral moments to a broad audience. It’s not like they caused the UFC to lose money, or compete with the non-existent UFC .gif website. IronForgesIron doesn’t hurt the UFC financially; shitty cards and public relations fiascos — like, you know, suing a dude on disability — hurt the UFC financially.
As for Edward Muncey, Vice President of the Internet, you need to get your priorities in order. Instead of needlessly bullying websites, how about you put some of that time into that Twitter account you made three years ago. You got off to such a promising start with witty, intellectual retorts like “Me! Me! Me!” I can see why the UFC hired you; you’ve got a strong grasp of what appears to be the company mantra. But maybe more time on Twitter — or just interacting with your company’s fanbase in a manner that doesn’t involve legal intimidation — will give you a better understanding that the relationship between a company and consumers isn’t just built on services provided, but also upon the manner in which a company acknowledges and respects those consumers. Just because you can sue the shit out of a pillar of the MMA community doesn’t mean you should.
Currently, the National Football league is facing over 80 lawsuits involving more than 2,200 former players alleging the league did not do enough to prevent long-term damage to their brains brought on by concussions sustained during their playing days….
Currently, the National Football league is facing over 80 lawsuits involving more than 2,200 former players alleging the league did not do enough to prevent long-term damage to their brains brought on by concussions sustained during their playing days. Football, and specifically the NFL, brought this disaster on itself. The sport of MMA will not. […]
