Dana White is taking criticism of his physical altercation with his wife head-on.
UFC's president spoke to reporters on Wednesday ahead of UFC Vegas 67 and was peppered with questions regarding the New Year's Eve incident.
White did not shy away from answering about it. He said that "hopefully everybody" saw the viral video of White slapping his wife and that there are "no excuses" for his "horrible personal experience."
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"It's something I'm going to have to deal with and live with for the rest of my life," he said. "There's never an excuse. I'm sure you guys have read some of the same stuff that I've seen. There's no defense for this, and people should not be defending me over this thing, no matter what. All the criticism that I have received this week is 100% warranted and will receive in the future…
"Nobody's happy about this. Neither am I, but it happened, and I have to deal with it. What is my punishment? You're my punishment. I've got to walk around for however long I live, whether it's 10.4 years or another 25 years, and this is how I'm labeled now. My other punishment is I'm sure a lot of people, whether it be media, fighters, friends, acquaintances who had respect for me might not have respect for me now. There's a lot of things I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of my life that are way more of a punishment than what, I take a 30-day, 60-day absence. That's not a punishment to me. The punishment is that I did it, and now I have to deal with it."
White said he "never put my hands on a woman in my life" before this incident "other than my sister when we used to try to kill each other when we were little."
"I guarantee you it’ll never happen again," he said. "Nobody should be defending me. There aren’t two sides to the story. There’s only my side."
"Hopefully everybody has seen what’s going on with me, and hopefully this never happens," he added. "But at the end of the day, we’re all human beings. We all make mistakes. All you can do is try to recover from the mistakes that you make in life. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll be on a case-by-case basis. We have a lot of people around here that make a lot of mistakes. I’m one of them."
