Fighters have to worry about many things during training camp and the week leading up to their fight, but fending off a crazed stalker should not be one of them. Just ask UFC women’s flyweight contender, Amanda Ribas, who found out the hard way at UFC Vegas 89 last month that “being a fan” can mean something totally different to someone else.

Ribas, who is one of the most popular female fighters on the UFC roster today, recently headlined UFC Vegas 89 this past March against former UFC women’s strawweight champion Rose Namajunas. It was Ribas’ return to flyweight and a big opportunity for her to capture a win over a former champion and push herself closer towards title contention. On paper, it was her biggest fight to date.

Unfortunately, Ribas had to deal with some outside distractions during fight week in Las Vegas. Unlike some fighters who might have bad beef with their opponent or struggle to make weight, Ribas was forced to handle her own personal stalker. One who pretended to be married to her and pretty much harassed her the entire week leading up to UFC Vegas 89.

“I don’t remember his name, but he was a bit of a crazy guy,” Ribas recently 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.”

The fight week weirdness did not stop there. According to Ribas, her stalker even managed to sneak his way past security and get into the UFC Performance Institute. Once again, he started telling people that Ribas was his wife. This eventually made its way to Ribas’ manager, Alex Davis, who informed UFC and was able to get security to shadow Ribas for 24 hours a day.

“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).”

Ribas, 30, ended up losing her main event fight to Namajunas via unanimous decision. It’s not the way she wanted to start her 2024 campaign, but at least her fight week stalker has since disappeared.

“To finish this week that I started single, I went ‘dating,’ I got ‘engaged’ and ‘married,’ I ‘separated,’ too,” joked Ribas. “Because they researched and saw that he had posted on his social networks that he is traveling to another city, that we were separated, but that he wished me all the luck in the world (laughs). It was the most unexpected ‘relationship’ I’ve ever had.”