A horrific training camp injury for Ultimate Fighter winner Julianna Pena blew up into a major media story last week when Dana White began to tweet and talk with the media about how she was "attacked" at her gym by a team member. Pena suffered multiple significant knee injuries that White claimed would leave the WMMA star sidelined for two years.
That recovery timeline seems to have been corrected to roughly one year and stories from the gym were that Pena's injury did not come from being attacked, but rather came during a grappling session with a 135 pound male teammate that Pena often trains with.
That teammate, Josh Gow, spoke to MMA Sucka in an attempt to clear the air:
"Julianna text me and asked me if I was at the gym and I told her ‘yeah.’ Then she came in, got ready to go and I asked her if she was ready — we just started rolling and it was our first round. We were about two minutes in to it, it was just submission wrestling, grappling, rolling or whatever you want to call it and I took back position off the wall — as we were falling away from the wall, with my hooks in she was supporting my weight as I was going for a RNC, her knee twisted in a weird way and we are where we are at today. It was all really terrible."
...
"Not at all, I train with Jules on a very regular basis. We were just going in there, it was a submission grappling bout and there was nothing different. It was slow paced, it was the first round and it was a freak accident, that’s all it was. There’s really nobody that can explain it, it was just a freak accident at the gym."
Gow went on to say it was "pretty horrible of the media to have set somebody out as an attacker and not to get all the facts before coming out with all this stuff." The issue is, of course, that it was not the media who made the story public, it was Dana White, first with tweets and then during a media event. There was nothing flawed about the media reporting on what the most important public figure in the UFC said in public forums and the media was very dilligent in trying to follow up and get the story, and then presenting the information as it was made available.