Ronda Rousey Reveals Her Shame In Apology That's 11 Years In The Making

Former UFC champ Ronda Rousey has apologized for advancing a Sandy Hook conspiracy theory on social media over a decade ago, saying she “should have been canceled” for it.

Rousey, who became the female face of UFC for defending her bantamweight title six times , issued a long mea culpa around 2 a.m. Eastern time Friday for casting doubt on the 2012 mass shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. She had shared a conspiracy video in January 2013, reportedly calling it a “must-watch” and rationalizing that “ asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told.”

“I apologize that this came 11 years too late, but to those affected by the Sandy Hook massacre, from the bottom of my heart and depth of my soul I am so so sorry for the hurt I caused,” she wrote Friday on X, formerly Twitter. “I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you’ve endured and words cannot describe how thoroughly remorseful and ashamed I am of myself for contributing it.”

“I made the single most regrettable decision of my life,” she explained. “I watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reposted it on twitter. I didn’t even believe it, but was so horrified at the truth that I was grasping for an alternative fiction to cling to instead. I quickly realized my mistake and took it down, but the damage was done.”

Rousey’s sudden atonement followed a Reddit thread reminding her of the mistake while she sought to crowdfund her graphic novel, “Expecting the Unexpected.”

Although she briefly expressed remorse for causing hurt when she took down the video, she tried to explain Friday why she avoided mentioning the topic for more than a decade.

“By some miracle it seemingly slipped under the media’s radar, I was never asked about it so I never spoke of it again, afraid that calling attention to it would have the opposite of the intended effect - it could increase the views of those conspiracy videos, and selfishly, inform even more people I was ignorant, self absorbed, and tone deaf enough to share one in the first place,” she wrote on X.

Rousey, who’s married and has a nearly 3-year-old daughter and a baby on the way , insisted that “I should have been canceled, I would have deserved it. I still do.”

Rousey, also an Olympic bronze medalist in judo who retired from mixed martial arts in 2016 and later became a full-time pro wrestler, is not the only athlete to generate false skepticism about the Sandy Hook tragedy.

New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and baseball Hall of Famer Chipper Jones have similarly been accused of spreading lies about the shooting .