Amanda Ribas says male stalker snuck into UFC PI, claimed she is his wife
UFC flyweight Amanda Ribas has had extra stress as she not only tries to raise her stock inside the octagon, but now allegedly has to keep eyes in the back of her head outside the cage as well.
According to a report from Drake Riggs of MMA Fighting, the 30-year-old Brazilian mixed martial artist has a stalker that is infringing on her personal space and getting a little too close for comfort.
During UFC Vegas 89 fight week, Ribas was approached at the fighter hotel by a Ukrainian man who said he had previously met her during UFC 251 fight week. Since then, the man has been head-over-heels infatuated with her.
“I don’t remember his name, but he was a bit of a crazy guy,” Ribas told Ag. Fight. “On the first day, I arrived at the hotel — usually the fans are there for us to sign something, take a picture — but this citizen was a little crazy. He kept screaming, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.’ That same day, the guy at the front desk called my room and said, ‘Amanda, Alex is here wanting to go upstairs.’ Except that Alex is the name of my manager. I said, ‘Hey, the sensei is here now’. He went and said a crazy last name, I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I thought that was kind of weird.
“The next day, when we arrived again at the reception, the young man was waiting. But he said he wanted to talk to me, and I said I couldn’t at the moment. He spoke to my father, handed him a letter, a bracelet and a teddy bear. So far, so normal, because it’s something that happens. I even like it, I love to get gifts. Then I read in the letter that he was in love with me as a man since 2020, that he met me in Abu Dhabi. We went to do some research. This young man, on his social network, it was written that I was his wife, that he lived in such and such a country and was going to move to [my hometown] Varginha [Minas Gerais, Brazil]. There was a picture of a teddy bear, everyone in my family, saying, ‘This is Marcelo, this is Arthur, this is Mirelly, this is Amanda, my wife’. I had some crazy business.”
Ribas would lose a decision to former UFC strawweight champion Rose Namajunas in the UFC Vegas 89 main event, but that didn’t stop the man from continuing his pursuit.
“The other day, this citizen managed to get into the P.I., I don’t know how, and he was telling people that I was his wife,” Ribas laughed. “[My manager] Alex [Davis] found out about it first, then he told me. Then he notified the UFC and they left a security guard with me 24 hours a day to be even more protected. It seems that they found out that he is a fighter, and he couldn’t fight in an event because he had taken a sword (laughs).”
