Ronda Rousey has one big regret in her life, and apparently it wasn’t getting KO’d by Holly Holm in 2015, nor appearing in The Expendables 3. Instead, Rousey is very, very, very sorry for sharing a video on Twitter more than a decade ago that spread conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting.
On Friday, the former UFC fighter issued an epic apology to X regarding a video she shared back in 2013. The Sandy Hook shooting was part of a government conspiracy. At the time, Rousey called the video “very funny and a must-watch,” Bleacher Report reported. Rousey later deleted her tweet and video after the backlash, but later said, “Asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what someone tells you.”
Since the video has essentially been removed from the web, there’s nothing we can say about it. One thing is for sure, though: Rousey definitely regrets sharing it.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve redrafted this apology over the past 11 years. How many times I’ve convinced myself it wasn’t the right time, or that I would do more harm than good. But eleven years ago , I made the most regrettable decision of my life,” Rousey said. “I watched the Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reported on it on Twitter. I didn’t even believe it, but was so shocked by the facts that I kept looking for another fiction to replace it. I quickly realized My own fault and took it down, but the damage had been done.
Why does Ruthie feel so apologetic now? This seems to be due to a Reddit AMA she hosted a few days ago, where she was asked questions about the decade-old video. Angry Reddit users asked the former fighter why she thought it was appropriate to share such conspiratorial content. “Have you ever considered apologizing to Sandy Hook’s parents for being one of the most famous athletes on the planet and spreading a conspiracy to murder their child?” someone asked. That was actually the only topic that came up.
Well, now it looks like she’s actually thought about it. Rousey continued to apologize: “Miraculously, this incident seemed to escape media attention. I was never asked about it, so I never mentioned it again for fear of the consequences of drawing attention to it. The opposite of the intended effect – it might increase the perception of it. I drafted the thousandth apology for inclusion in my last memoir, but my publisher begged me to remove it, saying it would obscure it. Everything else, and would do more harm than good, so I convinced myself that apologizing would only reopen wounds and was nothing more than my selfish attempt to feel better, and that I would be hurting those who were suffering, and possibly exposing more people to it. A black hole of conspiracy bullshit so I can try to shed the “Sandy Hook truth teller” label.
Ronda spoke like this at considerable length. As far as celebrity apologies go, this is probably the longest I’ve ever seen. I entered her entire article into a word-counting app, and it came out to 478 words, which is much longer than the apology an elderly George H.W. In what was undoubtedly a more serious offense, Bush’s apology was only 84 words long. Much of Rousey’s rhetorical attempt at atonement is a litany of self-flagellation. At one point she claimed she deserved “to be hated, labeled, disgusted, resented, and worse,” she later said, “I have shared this video every day of my life since then and Will continue to do so until the day I die. You can read Ronda’s entire apology here.
