Just 11 days out from his next title defense, UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones finds himself under scrutiny for homophobic comments sent under his Instagram account to an MMA fan in Sweden, who says Jones blocked him on Twitter, went through his Instagram pictures, and was repeatedly harassed with homophobic comments on multiple occasions.
According to Malki Kawa, Jones’ manager, the offending remarks were not sent by Jones himself. He says that Jones lost his phone and the person responsible for those comments was the one who retrieved it:
Per his manager @malkikawa, @jonnybones lost his phone today, someone got it and began sending derogatory messages on Instragam. Wasn’t him.
— Ariel Helwani (@arielhelwani) April 16, 2014
Interestingly enough, Kawa deleted this claim on his own Twitter account, but his original tweet was found via TMI.me, a service used for tweets that run over 140 characters. We have a screenshot:
Jones later tweeted at 9:39 PM ET that he’d indeed lost his phone and had changed his social media passwords:
Just got a new phone. Changing all of my social media passwords. Apparently I was hacked.
— Jon Bones Jones (@JonnyBones) April 16, 2014
Attached are some screenshots (taken by Bloody Elbow) of the offensive quotes, along with a screenshot captured by the Swedish man, who posted evidence of the tirade on his Instagram page:
The rough translation of “For 15 minuter sedan” is “15 minutes ago”, i.e. a time stamp. So while the photos themselves were not uploaded today, all of the published comments under Jones’ account were from April 15th.
It is also worth noting that Jones appears to have posted a “selfie” on his Instagram AFTER the time where the Swedish man made the comments about Jones “stalking him.” So, the obvious question is ‘how was your phone stolen for those comments but photos were posted after the initial allegations?'”
Here is the selfie in question:
Bloody Elbow contacted Kawa at approximately 8:30 PM ET to inform him of these Instagram postings and to give him time to speak with Jones over this very serious matter. Multiple attempts to get a statement from Kawa as of 10:40 PM ET have been unsuccessful.
About the author
