UFC bantamweight Ailin Perez is following through on her threat of legal action against Joselyne Edwards after their brawl at the UFC Performance Institute earlier this month.
Perez’s rep Lucas Lutkis on Tuesday told MMA Fighting Perez will file a lawsuit against Edwards by the end of this week, escalating what she said started as an online grudge and turned into a physical confrontation that left her with a cut under her left eye.
Perez first indicated she would take legal action during a recent appearance on The MMA Hour.
“Legally, this isn’t over, and you’re a criminal,” she said via translator.
Edwards wasn’t immediately reachable for comment, and her rep, Ali Abdelaziz of Dominance MMA, did not respond to a request for comment.
Perez revealed her clash with Edwards after a win at UFC Vegas 82. Explaining a black eye she sported on fight week, Perez said Edwards attacked her during a training session. Perez said her coach “saved” her by peeling off Edwards, but Edwards later claimed the coach was “strangling” her from behind while Perez attacked her. Veteran MMA manager Alex Davis later said he intervened to stop Edwards from being choked out by Perez’s coach.
Davis later wrote on social media that the coach, Javier Oyarzabal, confronted him at the host hotel for UFC Vegas 82, “trying to scare me” and calling his version of the altercation a lie.
Perez believes the alleged clash started because she previously wrote on an internet forum that she thought Edwards lost her fight with Lucie Pudilová, her scheduled opponent at UFC Vegas 82.
At the UFC PI cafeteria, Perez said Edwards was staring at her. Later, during a post-training photo session in a PI cage with a UFC photographer, she said Edwards approached and told her, “You better win your next fight, because you talk too much.”
“I made sure I did not disrespect her at all,” Perez said of her response, and added she’d accept a fight with Edwards if the UFC offered it but would fight there.
According to Perez, Edwards charged into the cage after her coach should avoid the “nervous”-looking Edwards.
“I close up like this, and I feel something, I don’t know what it is, but I got hit with a punch or maybe an elbow, right where I got hit in the eye, and that’s when Jocelyn jumps on top of me,” Perez said.
Perez said she was in “extreme pain” and momentarily blinded by the strike. Thinking about her safety and that of her child in a nearby room, she said she clinched Edwards to stop the altercation. She then called for Oyarzabal, who intervened by putting Edwards in a rear-naked choke, and went to another room with UFC security to escape.
Perez denied Edwards’ claim that she was the attacker, saying she was the only one to sustain injuries during the incident. She also denied Oyarzabal threatening Davis, saying the situation only became heated as the two argued in the hotel, and said the manager had an “ulterior motive” for cozying up to fighters as potential clients.
In a brief statement to MMA Fighting, Davis said he stands by his story.
“Jocelyn is a criminal, because she attacked me, and there was no one in that room, outside of Javier, that tried to defend me,” Davis said. “He saved me. If it wasn’t for Javier, maybe not literally, but figuratively, [she] could have killed me. Alex Davis doesn’t have the right to [give his opinion] about something when he didn’t want to intervene in the first place until after the fact, once I was already assaulted.”
As a result of the incident and her fight, Perez said she received seven stitches for her cut. She contemplated withdrawing from the fight but didn’t inform the UFC about the extent of her injuries until after the event.
“She keeps lying and inventing things to make herself look like the victim, but at the same time, she’s going out on my page and saying things like, ‘When I see you again, I’m going to break your other eye,’” Perez said. “I don’t know what this criminal’s intentions are, but I know she’s lying about the situation, and she really wanted to make me not able to fight Saturday. So when she saw me fight and I won, she wanted to shoot herself, because she was not happy with the result.”
Perez thanked the UFC for assisting her after the altercation and wouldn’t say what the promotion should or shouldn’t do about the incident. She vowed to take her own action, however, and issued Edwards a direct message.
“What is your problem?” she said. “Because at the end of the day, I offered you to do the fight in the UFC, and instead of wanting to compete with me in a professional sports manner, you tried to assault me. So what is it that you want? Because if you don’t want to fight with me, I don’t understand what your problem is. I don’t know what you want.”