MMA fighter Dillon Danis has been hit with a lawsuit and a restraining order by model Nina Agdal after he unleashed a barrage of social media posts towards her ahead of his boxing match against Logan Paul, but UFC welterweight Matt Brown has acknowledged that the controversy has gained a lot of attention for the match.
Over the past few years, Dillon Danis, once a Bellator veteran, seems to have traded his gloves for a keyboard, becoming more notorious for his online trolling rather than his actual fighting skills. Perhaps, though, this skill has not been for naught, as his recent social media antics seem to be gaining traction. Following his agreement to fight Logan Paul in a boxing ring in October, Danis started a relentless digital war against his opponent’s fiancée, model and social influencer Nina Agdal. His posts ranged from images to videos and even memes, growing so intense that Agdal was compelled to file a lawsuit and secure a restraining order against Danis.
The lawsuit alleges that Agdal had to endure humiliation, emotional distress and significant harm to her reputation as a result of the non-stop onslaught of online posts from Danis. Furthermore, according to Agdal, Danis overstepped federal and state laws by gaining unauthorized access to a private video from her Snapchat account. Danis will have to formally respond to these allegations in court as he has recently been served with the lawsuit’s paperwork. He missed a hearing about the issue this past week. However, UFC welterweight Matt Brown acknowledges that Danis’s pugnacious internet presence piqued his interest in the fight, an event he was previously indifferent about.
For the last four years, without participating in a single fight, Danis developed a dubious reputation as a troll on the fringes of the combat sports world, riling up social media users with audacious promises about his eventual return to professional fighting. He even agreed to a boxing match against KSI in early 2023, only to withdraw a few weeks later. Initially, his decision to fight Paul in October was met with mockery and criticism. Yet, his relentless internet campaign against both his opponent and his fiancée, might have tipped public sentiment in his favor.
With all the attention centered on him, Danis’s greatest challenge still lies ahead – he must step into the ring and face off against Paul in their upcoming boxing match set for October 14. This is where Brown speculates that Danis’s verbose online stunts could backfire. Regardless of the outcome, Danis’s antics have undeniably generated much interest in the fight. As Matt Brown puts it, “It worked, because a year ago, we didn’t give a f*** about Dillon Danis. We were so sick of hearing his name and we would have never brought it up on this podcast, but here we are talking about it now… He’s got close to a million followers now. He hasn’t done anything except be the laughing stock of the jiu-jitsu and combat sports world and now all of a sudden he’s got a million followers. I don’t want to watch it but I’m going to watch it. I don’t want to talk about it but we’re sitting here talking about it. It’s kind of fun. Dillon made this one kind of fun.”