Did Jon Jones retire from the UFC to drown out headlines of his latest legal problems? That’s a theory some fans had after it came out hours following his announcement that Jones had been charged with leaving the scene of an accident back in February.
The one misdemeanor charge doesn’t capture the salacious nature of the police reports. Cops found a woman naked from the waist down in the passenger seat of a crashed car, and she said Jon Jones had been driving. She claims she’d been drinking and doing mushrooms with Jones. When she called Jones for the police at the scene, whoever answered was intoxicated and threatened to have them killed.
So you can imagine a situation where the Albuquerque Journal contacts the UFC for comment, and a decision is made to finally pull the plug on the Jon Jones waiting game. But UFC CEO Dana White claimed he had no idea about the charges until the day after he announced Jones’ retirement. Even he admitted he wondered whether the impending story had something to do with Jon’s decision.
But when Ariel Helwani reached out to Albuquerque Journal reporter Geoff Grammer, he told Helwani the May criminal charge was only discovered following news of Jones’ retirement.
“Geoff Grammer tells me he’s sitting there, he sees the news of Jon Jones’ retirement,” Helwani said. “And amazingly, as an incredible reporter, says, ‘Hey, let me just look up Jon Jones’ name, Jonathan Jones, in the Albuquerque police records and see if anything comes up. And voila: there’s this incident from February.”
“What? That’s absurd. How they kept this quiet for four months, I will never understand. One of the most famous, if not the most famous resident of Albuquerque gets into another fender bender — if you wanna call it that — and no one knows for four months? In the past, we knew within hours.”
“Now I’ve spoken to a few people who are very, very tied in,” Helwani continued. “And they said they’ve known about it, but the police did a great job of keeping it under wraps. That’s what they said: ‘He’s got great relationships.’ And if not for Geoff Grammer looking it up after the announcement, who knows if and when it ever gets out? I’m assuming it it would’ve at some point.”
“But to suggest now that the UFC got ahead of this because they knew? No.”
Jones’ lawyer is currently accusing Albuquerque police of ‘targeting’ Jones and questioning whether they had the legal standing to demand phone log evidence that may have placed Jones in the area of the accident. He insists Jones was at home all night, not driving the car, and the woman in question was trying to get out of a DUI with a false story.
Jones’ only comment on the situation?
“Keep in mind, even the media can get it wrong sometimes if they don’t have all the facts,” he tweeted. “Don’t believe everything you read online.”
