Former UFC Champion Jon Jones is making headlines — again — for reports of unbecoming behavior, this time — again — the story revolves around testing for drugs and steroids. This time, however, the story isn’t about the results of a drug screening, but a complaint that describes Jones intimidating two drug screeners who stopped by the fighter’s home to collect a urine sample and allegedly implying a threat against their lives.
The two screeners, identified as “Jerome and Crystal,” reportedly arrived at the home of Jones to find him possibly intoxicated. The two allege that Jones threatened them in his behavior and by saying that people who come to his house “end up dead.
Crystal filmed the incident and later reported it to police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who have confirmed they have seen the recording.
I have received an incident report from the Albuquerque police department regarding Jon Jones and the @ABQRAW report.
It confirms that an anti-doping control officer told police that Jones, who appeared intoxicated, threatened her life and took her phone.
Story coming soon. https://t.co/6VYWvoAfcA
— Aaron Bronsteter (@aaronbronsteter) April 6, 2024
The video shows Jones saying, “Here f—ing Jerome and his girlfriend in my garage.” Later allegedly taking her phone from her and exclaiming, “Why you f—ing people come so early? Do you know what happens to people who come to my house? They end up dead.”
The shocking language is accompanied by reports Jones was acting in a threatening manner, becoming “tense and puffed up” and threatening legal action against the two screeners, which is when Crystal began recording the altercation.
Jones, however, has a completely different version of the events in question, releasing a video of his own and highlighting the end of the encounter where they “exchanged a high five and a hug.”
The UFC fighter asserts that he was reacting to the “unprofessionalism” exhibited by the screeners, calling his actions the result of “frustration.”
Commenting on the incident, Jones denied claims that he had been arrested over the incident, referring to himself as an “easy target” due to his many and highly-publicized “past issues.”
Some of those past issues include coming up positive in past screenings, which he explained as a faulty result that resulted from taking a different sort of male performance enhancer; attempts to evade previous efforts to conduct drug screenings; and a hit-and-run incident that involved a pregnant woman — an incident for which he lost his UFC championship belt in 2015.
The former light-heavyweight champion has become quite a controversial figure. Fight fans have waited for nearly a decade — arguably over a decade — for Jones to get focused and become a consistent fighter in the cage again. But time and time again, he’s in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
There are two sides to every story. And the fighter may be right about the unprofessionalism of the screeners. But for somebody so aware that he’s an “easy target,” it seems absurd that he would allow himself to act so unprofessionally, given his ongoing effort to redeem his image.
