PoV: You’re a criminal about to break into a house. You slip on your Bad Guy sneakers with the soles sanded down so as to not leave any tracks. You don your leather gloves and slip on your Groucho Marx mask. The perfect disguise.
As you slither through the front door and enter the main hallway, a golden radiance blinds your eyes. You use your hand as a shield and peek between the fingers. You see belts. Big, beautiful, octagon-shaped belts lining the walls and wrapping around all the way to the next room.
An involuntary whimper escapes your lips. You’ve chosen the wrong house. You turn to leave, but it’s too late.
He’s already behind you.
6 UFC Fighters Who Were Actually Robbed
Yes, while the term “robbery” in an MMA context is usually used to refer to an unfair judges’ decision, today we’re talking about 6 UFC fighters who were actual victims of robbery or burglary: Who did it, how it happened, and the events that followed. Let’s take a look.
1. Jon Jones
In an Instagram video posted by Jon Jones in November of last year, a man in a red cap with a somewhat robotic gait walks over to a row of Jones’s cars and begins entering them, scrounging for things to steal.
From inside the house, you can hear Jones’s dogs barking, and soon Jones opens his garage door, wielding a shotgun in one arm. He chases the would-be car thief through the night, though reports gloss over whether Jones detained him and called the police, or simply gave him a Clint Eastwood-style threatening monologue before sending the punk on his way.
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The only thing we can be certain of is that every car in that driveway is a car that Jon Jones does not need to be getting behind the wheel of.
2. Anthony Smith
Light heavyweight contender Anthony Smith was asleep in his house at 4 a.m. in April of 2020 when a screaming man woke his family up. Smith got out of bed and found the man in his house, and a long struggle ensued. In fact, Smith was surprised at just how long and how well his intruder fought.
“I’m not lying when I said it was one of the toughest fights I’ve had in my whole life.”
In an interview with ESPN, he said, “No normal human is able to fight like that. I’m by no means the baddest dude on the planet, but he’s a regular Joe and I had a hard time dealing with him.”
He explains, “And he took everything that I gave him – every punch, every knee, every elbow. He took every single one of them and kept fighting me.”
Fans and pundits were surprised Smith had such a difficult time with a seemingly random person. In his podcast, Joe Rogan asked, “Why didn’t he just choke him unconscious? Why didn’t he just choke the f*** out of him?”
Only later did the information come out that his intruder, Luke Haberman, was previously a standout high school wrestler.
Luke Haberman, the man who invaded Anthony Smith's home, is reportedly a former standout high school wrestler from Nebraska. pic.twitter.com/Ejr4928nu0
— Chris Taylor (@CTaylor_96) April 11, 2020
Also, the guy was a total looney toon. Footage emerged from that night in which we see Haberman attempt to break into a neighbor’s house. You will have to watch this to believe it.
.@lionheartasmith says he's still ready to fight on 4/25 even after he fought off an intruder at his home over the weekend. This is video for the suspect after he allegedly broke into another man's home before going to Smith's. Smith describes what happened.@3NewsNowOmaha pic.twitter.com/mGwSlTjimo
— Jake Wasikowski (@jakewasikowski) April 9, 2020
Haberman treats the homeowner like a grizzly bear who poked his snout into Haberman’s tent while he was camping. He screams, “GET OUT! GET OUT!”
Get out of what? His own house?
When you understand that Smith’s attacker was psychotic and a gifted wrestler, his difficulty quickly overcoming Haberman begins to make more sense. Though, that didn’t stop Jon Jones in a deleted tweet from sending a strangely erotic potshot Smith’s way.
3. Polyana Viana
UFC strawweight Polyana Viana was waiting for an Uber ride in Rio de Janeiro when she was accosted by a man asking her the time. After she told him, he continued to linger around her and soon demanded that she hand over her phone. He claimed to be armed and motioned to a gun-shaped object he was carrying, which Viana correctly realized was too soft to be a real firearm.
That’s when Viana realized this gentleman was ordering the Rio Special: A two-piece and a biscuit. She dropped him with two punches and a kick and then held him in a rear-naked choke position until the cops arrived.
On the left is @Polyana_VianaDF, one of our @UFC fighters and on the right is the guy who tried to rob her #badfuckingidea pic.twitter.com/oHBVpS2TQt
— danawhite (@danawhite) January 7, 2019
That guy’s face should be the poster boy for r/instant_regret. The environmentally conscious among you will be hoping that the straw he subsequently drank his food with was of the reusable metal variety.
4. Jessica-Rose Clark
In January of 2018, a week before her fight against Paige VanZant, women’s flyweight fighter Jessica-Rose Clark was the victim of a robbery while she was away from home. She said $30,000 worth of goods were stolen from her house.
Someone just broke into my house, stole all my housemates stuff, trashed the whole place, stole clothes and shoes from me
Wtf man.— Jessy Jess (@missjessyjess) January 11, 2018
They also kicked our cat and smashed his rib cage and it has pushed his intestines up into his chest cavity.
He has to have surgery and we don’t know what’s going to happen yet https://t.co/lqlY8d4efH— Jessy Jess (@missjessyjess) January 11, 2018
Sadly, her cat Dwight had to be put down. Clark worked with the police to try to get justice for what happened to her and for Dwight, and in March she posted this update.
So LVMPD found prints, have a name and address for one of the men who robbed us and killed Dwight. But they said there’s no point arresting him “for just a burglary”
$30000 burglary and a murdered cat deserves an arrest I think? #JusticeForDwight— Jessy Jess (@missjessyjess) March 20, 2018
Shockingly, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department identified one of the suspects but chose not to arrest him. Not only that, but Clark claimed in a follow-up tweet that, “. . . the officer in charge of the investigation has been ignoring our emails for the last two weeks.”
2018 Nevada burglary statistics show that only 12.56% of burglaries in the state are solved, though (and I’m just spitballing here), perhaps that clearance rate could be improved if law enforcement arrests burglary suspects when they’ve been identified by DNA evidence.
However, no further update has been provided, and we have to assume Clark’s robbers remain free.
5. Michael Bisping
In 2018, Michael Bisping’s daughter hosted a small get-together with friends while he was away. The gathering was apparently infiltrated by uninvited schoolmates.
Bisping explains, “They left, but a short while later on Snapchat, these guys are showing all the stuff they robbed from the house. Stole all my watches, Rebecca’s jewelry . . . I have a very nice watch collection and they all got stolen. Rebecca’s purses, jewelry . . . things like that all got taken. They stole a lot of my shoes, for crying out loud!”
He goes on to say that his daughter’s friends confronted the thief and recovered some, but not all of Bisping’s belongings.
Bisping wanted to confront the thief, stating, “I was like, get me this kid’s number. So I get his number and I call him up and he won’t pick up the phone. So then I sent him a message back and I said, “Look, listen, unless you want to go to jail . . . unless you want to deal with the police, I suggest you pick up the phone. You were man enough to come into my house and take my belongings; be man enough to speak to me one on one — give me my sh*t back. I just wanted to speak to the guy. Believe it or not, I wanted to give him some advice.”
Bisping didn’t reveal the advice he had prepared, but here are a few guesses:
“Don’t steal my shoes.”
“Give me my shoes back.”
6. Tim Kennedy
If you thought the Jon Jones story was anticlimactic, I want to welcome you to the blue ribbon winner for “stories which lead to more questions than answers.”
It was March 22nd, 2019 when Tim Kennedy dropped this enigmatic Instagram story.
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The story received virtually no news coverage, and Kennedy did not retell the experience in an interview or podcast appearance he did around that time. His Instagram story seems to imply he wanted to save any description of the attempted burglary for his self-defense courses.
Considering that the event was so serendipitous for Kennedy’s business, I was curious if fans were at all dubious about it. And while I was unable to locate any past discussion of the story on the r/MMA subreddit, the MMA forum Sherdog had a lively 19-page debate about the event, with many posters expressing doubt about the veracity of Kennedy’s account.
User “BeardotheWeirdo” expressed his doubts, saying, “I don’t buy the story, the “no one came” amongst his ads sealed it for me.”
This detail of Kennedy’s story is indeed perplexing. The idea that “no one came” (referring to the police), mixed with his glib note, “Play stupid games. Get stupid prizes,” seems to imply Kennedy just straight up shot the guy.
Tim Kennedy reached out to us to elaborate on the story and assure us that police were in fact contacted and did in fact arrive on the scene. The man in the video Tim Kennedy posted was in fact arrested. Tim went on to say that he sold that house after the incident and that his wife never felt safe there.
Our apologies to Tim Kennedy if he felt we were saying he was fabricating the incident.
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