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Ailin Perez competed on the preliminary card of UFC Fight Night 232, defeating Lucie Pudilova by unanimous decision.
The bout with Pudilova wasn’t the only fight Perez had in Las Vegas this past weekend, as the fighter also got into a physical altercation with fellow UFC fighter Joselyn Edwards.
Perez addressed the altercation during the post-fight press conference, claiming that the feud with Edwards started over a social media post, while also stating that it was Edwards who attacked her first.
“So, pretty much I’m someone just like everyone else. I don’t have a problem personally with anyone,” Perez said at her post fight press scrum (transcript via Jed Meshew of MMA Fighting). “What I did was I stated my opinion online about the fight. I didn’t disrespect anyone; I didn’t talk about about anyone. But this irrelevant lady came up to me after I was opinionated about one of her fights, just talking about the performance that she did. And she came to assault me. She did assault me with the intention to make me pull out of my fight, but I’m sorry, she did not achieve it. I won and fought regardless of the assault that took place.
“I want to thank my coach, who was there at the time of the assault, because if it wasn’t for him, I would have had much worse injuries because he was able to take her off me when she was assaulting me. And the fight probably would have been off if it wasn’t for my coach, who saved me.”
Edwards, in a statement to MMA Mania, states that it was both Perez and Perez’s coach who actually attacked her first:
“While we were fighting, her coach attacked me from behind. He was strangling me so that Ailin would hit me. Her coach attacked me. I practically had to fight two of them. He did not protect anyone, he started the fight, he was the one who heated things so that the fight would take place, and then he attacked me and was strangling me. Later, when they had already separated me from Ailin, he was still strangling me and did not want to let me go. He never separated the fight; he attacked me while she attacked me.”
MMA fighter manager Alex Davis also got involved in the physical altercation, with his statement to MMA Mania being similar to what Edwards stated:
“I was sitting on the large octagon inside of the P.I. looking at my phone when I heard yelling to my right. When I approached the cage, I saw Ailin and her coach on top of Joselyne, so jumped in to break up the fight. When I went to help out and saw the male coach choking Joselyne with a rear-naked choke, and it was very deep — he was cranking on the choke. If the choke was held on for much longer, it would have been a terrible scene. I’m not sure if she was fully unconscious, but she was close. When I got the coach off of Joselyne, the coach was ranting and yelling, trying to continue to fight. I was trying to calm Joselyne down because she thought she was still fighting.”
There has been no statement yet from the UFC on this matter.
