Ronda Rousey apologises for Sandy Hook tweet confessing ‘I need to be hated’

Former UFC star Ronda Rousey has apologised for sharing a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting conspiracy video on social media – 11 years ago.

Twenty students and six staff members were killed in a horrifying school shooting by Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012. The children massacred by Lanza were between the ages of six and seven, with the incident now known as one of the darkest days in American history. Lanza, 20, shot himself dead at the scene.

Despite the tremendous and unimaginable pain the shootings caused the families impacted by Sandy Hook, sick conspiracy theorists have long disputed whether the horrific events happened. Just two years ago, far-right American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1billion in damages to the families of Sandy Hook for falsely claiming it was a hoax.

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Eleven years ago, Rousey, who was one of the faces of the UFC at the time, shared a video on Twitter, now known as X, which questioned the events of Sandy Hook and whether they really happened. In the post, Rousey called it an “extremely interesting, and must-watch” video.

During a recent AMA [ask me anything] on Reddit, the MMA star turned WWE wrestler was met with a deluge of questions asking her about her previous comments. And in a statement posted to X on Friday morning, the 37-year-old has now apologised for sharing the video, calling it “the single most regrettable decision” of her life.

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The lengthy statement began: “I can’t say how many times I’ve redrafted this apology over the last 11 years. How many times I’ve convinced myself it wasn’t the right time or that I’d be causing even more damage by giving it.

“But eleven years ago I made the single most regrettable decision of my life. 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 realised my mistake and took it down, but the damage was done.”

She continued: “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 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.

“”So I convinced myself that apologizing would just reopen the wound for no other reason than me selfishly trying to make myself feel better, that I would hurt those suffering even more and possibly lead more people down the black hole of conspiracy bulls*** by it being brought up again just so I could try to shake the label of being a ‘Sandy Hook truther’.

Rousey said she had tried to issue an apology in her memoir, Our Fight, which was released earlier this year, but was discouraged from doing so by her publisher, who she said “begged” her to take it out, saying it would “overshadow everything else and do more harm than good”.

She said: “But honestly I deserve to be hated, labelled, detested, resented and worse for it. I deserve to lose out on every opportunity, I should have been cancelled, I would have deserved it. I still do.”

Rousey added: “I apologise 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.”