UFC fighter Sean Strickland reached back to share horrific stories from his childhood in a recent podcast.
During a long conversation with Theo Von that took place in December and was released earlier this month, Strickland outlined his childhood in which he would sleep under his mother’s bed, and one instance where he assaulted his father.
“My dad gets on top of my mom and I remember he said ‘I’m going to f—ing kill you tonight.’ Maybe it’s just rough sex, we don’t know at this moment,” he said in a clip of the interview posted to X.
UFC Champ Sean Strickland Gets Emotional Sharing the Childhood Trauma He Endured Growing Up
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“I’m under the bed and he starts strangling her. I get out and the only thing I can see is a guitar, I just f—ing crack him in the head and call the cops,” he said.
“I run down the street to call the cops, he’s arrested and my dumb a– mom bails him out of jail … I wouldn’t even say that’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Strickland said threats of violence were constant in his household.
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“I remember I used to just sit there and hug my mom’s leg in the kitchen.
“We had this little nook and she would go in the nook and I would sit there and all night long, I’m by the feet of my mom and my dad is ‘I’m going to f—ing kill you,’” he said, noting that his father would threaten his mother with burning her face with acid.
“He was always telling her ‘if you cheat on me’ — and she probably was cheating on him — ‘if you cheat on me, I’m going to cut you up and put you in a bottle of acid and bury you,’” Strickland said.
“Now you fast forward this, I don’t go to school. I’m up until three in the morning and I couldn’t stay awake in school,” he said.
“I remember I was in third grade, no second grade, in I kept falling asleep at my desk and my teacher took my desk away from me,” Strickland said.
“She made me like stand up and so me I’m like you, f— you. Being this little kid, I just went and fell asleep on the ground,” he said.
“Mind you like the school system’s like ‘oh Sean like he’s just a bad kid,’ they don’t realize I’m up til three o’clock in the morning,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m sorry bud,” Von, who was left without words at some revelations, said as Strickland became overcome with the emotions he felt from his recollections.
Dricus Du Plessis, who will fight Strickland on Jan. 20 for Strickland’s UFC middleweight title, had some hard comments to make after the interview aired, according to USA Today.
“Do I think he’s a hypocrite? One hundred percent … 100 percent. Obviously, childhood trauma is something you can’t help, but if you know what it feels like to be the one on the receiving end of such trauma, don’t inflict it on others, because that’s exactly what he does,” Du Plessis said.
“You didn’t deserve that as a kid, but as a grown man, you dish it out, you’re going to get it,” he said.
