Daniel Cormier believes that if UFC president Dana White isn’t defending his actions for slapping his wife back, then no one should be.
Last week a video surfaced of White and his wife, Anne, getting into a physical altercation at a nightclub in Mexico on New Year’s Eve. During what appeared to be an argument, White grabbed his wife by the wrist and was slapped by her, at which point he retaliated by slapping her back.
White owned up to his actions and said “there’s no excuse” for hitting his wife, echoing his words from a 2014 interview in which he stated, “There’s one thing that you never bounce back from, and that’s putting your hands on a woman.”
“Dana White was wrong,” Cormier said on his “DC & RC” ESPN show. “He told you he was wrong. We have long been told our entire lives that we are not supposed to put our hands on women. Dana White himself has gone on record himself to say, ‘You are not supposed to put your hands on women.’ He understands that. He took accountability immediately.
“Now here’s the question: And in these instances the one thing you think about first is the family, the children, and the rest of the White family and how they will get through this. But Dana’s making no excuses for his actions. Some fighters are trying to defend him; he doesn’t defend himself. Why should anyone go to defend an action that he is saying, ‘I was wrong’? Everyone knows that is wrong.”
There has been little in terms of repercussions for White as both the UFC and Endeavor, the promotion’s parent company, have remained silent on the situation. TBS only delayed White’s Power Slap League premiere by a week to Jan. 18, rather than pull the plug on the show as many have called for given its nature.
Cormier thinks White now needs to serve as a voice to speak out against domestic violence.
“For me, it’s what happens next,” Cormier said. “How does Dana White become a voice for trying to help people in these situations? How does he go forward and lead the charge to try to help people to try to come back from this type of situation, domestic violence and all these other things? That’s the question for me.
“It’s no debate. It’s not like we can sit up here for 10 minutes and debate whether or not it was right or it was wrong. There’s no debate. Everyone is on the same page. He said it’s wrong, I know it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong, and everyone around the world knows it’s wrong. But the reality is, what comes next? How does Dana help with this issue going forward.”
