Crawling out from under the rock she disappeared to hasn't been easy for Ronda Rousey.
While speaking to MMAjunkie at a media event for the upcoming “EA Sports UFC 2” video game, the former women’s bantamweight champion admitted she's been avoiding the public eye since her UFC 193 loss to Holly Holm in November.
“To be honest, I’ve been trying to disappear as much as possible,” Rousey said. “I don’t look at articles. I don’t look at tags. I don’t look at comments. People on the Internet are mostly evil, and I don’t want to accept any of that negativity. I just use social media to put information out there, but I really don’t use it to receive it because people are really cruel with that access.
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“I don’t want to allow them that access to me anymore because they really take it for granted, and they don’t look at you like a person. You’re an event to them. I don’t want want to read people saying all the worst things they can imagine about me every single day. I just put what I have to put out there out there, and I don’t look at anything else.”
Since she's never been a huge fan of social media, giving it up hasn't been a challenge for Rousey.
“I never used social media until it was to help me with work — until I was hustling and trying to get people to catch on to this whole women’s MMA thing," Rousey said. “It’s only been something for work for me, except in the Myspace days, which all I used that (for) was to put pictures out and tell jokes about things that people take totally out of context now. I’m like, ‘Why did I do that?’ Because I thought I had like 12 friends and they all got it and I’d never be famous, so who cares? I don’t really use social media for fun except to look at clothes I like or photography I like.”
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In an interview with Ellen Degeneres on Tuesday, Rousey confessed that she had suicidal thoughts after being knocked out for the first loss of her UFC career. The narrative is even more haunting considering she lost her father to suicide when she was 8.
Rousey has begun coming back into the public eye, hosting "Saturday Night Live" and appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2016 swimsuit issue.