Julianna Peña stands behind her callout of Amanda Nunes at UFC 307, regardless of whether Kayla Harrison or the chirpers from the rest of the MMA world thought it was the wrong move.
“Will I fight Kayla? Yes. Am I going to fight Kayla? Yes. Am I running from Kayla? No,” Peña told Uncrowned on “The Ariel Helwani Show.” “But at the end of the day, it’s like, who are you going to get your body in a train wreck first with, for Amanda or for Kayla? And if you ask me, no, the Amanda fight’s a bigger fight than Kayla, but I’ll take Kayla too. Whatever. Let Amanda sit there and cower away like she normally does, and when I’m done with Kayla, then we’ll have our victory dance.
“But do not be surprised when [Nunes] says, ‘Why are you even calling me out, girl? I’m retired.’ Shut up, dude. I’m so sick of her, seriously.”
Now a two-time UFC champion, Peña, 35, recaptured the women’s bantamweight title at UFC 307 with a contentious split decision over fellow TUF 18 castmate Raquel Pennington.
Peña won the first three rounds on the scorecards of two judges, Michael Bell and Sal D’Amato, while judge Derek Cleary only gave her rounds two and three. The result was not with controversy, though. Twenty-five of the 27 media scorecards on MMA Decisions awarded Pennington the victory, as did more than 75% of the site’s fan vote. Pennington has since joined in that chorus, arguing that she should still be the rightful UFC women’s bantamweight champion. However, Peña doesn’t see her case.
Peña vehemently argued Monday that she clearly won the first three rounds and also believes she should’ve won the fifth round as well.
“Five was close, I’ll give her that,” Pena said. “But again, my strikes are landing more, they’re more significant, and she’s throwing punches in the wind. I’m parrying it all. Like, literally they don’t get through.
“She’s punching in the air, it’s not landing. Whenever I punch, I land.”
Following her win, Peña surprised many by turning her attention to retired former champion Nunes rather than Harrison. A two-time Olympic champ and former two-time PFL champ who pushed her UFC record to 2-0 with a win over Ketlen Vieira on UFC 307’s same pay-per-view card, Harrison is now the clear No. 1 contender in the division. The UFC broadcast even put her on-screen during Peña’s post-fight interview, yet Peña pushed only for the trilogy fight she never got against Nunes.
More than a week later, Peña has no regrets.
“She’s like Voldemort in the MMA world with these girls. No one wants to say her name,” Peña said of Nunes. “But I know somebody who wants to say her name and I know somebody who is only saying her name, and that person is me. And you can see that I’m right, because the next day she made a video shaking her ass and tagging Dana and, ‘I miss you and I want to come back.’ So then they give me a call, they say, ‘She wants to face the winner of you versus Kayla, and so she will come back but she’s waiting to fight the winner.’ So she thinks I’m going to lose to Kayla, and when I beat Kayla, then she’s going to say, ‘I stay retired.’ But if Kayla wins, then she’s going to come out of retirement and look like some hero.
“The first fight I took [Nunes’] pride, the second fight I took her soul, and she walked out of there with freaking elephantiasis on half her face, crutches, in a wheelchair. She knows that it’s not going to be some walk in the park, easy night in the office. She knows that no amount of money that they pay her is going to be worth the amount of damage that she’s going to have to sustain in this fight, because I’m not going away and she knows that. And so, again, I know she wants to fight, it was the right callout, and that makes me so mad that ‘DC’ (Daniel Cormier) was like, ‘Oh, she dropped the ball, she dropped the ball.’ Really? I dropped the ball while the next day while she’s shaking her ass and tagging Dana and saying, ‘Please call me.’ I know she wants to fight, I know she retired too early, and so does Dana and so does the promotion.”
That being said, the likelihood of Peña fighting Nunes next remains relatively low.
Harrison has all the momentum and has looked sensational since signing with the UFC and dropping down to 135 pounds. So if that is what’s next, Peña is ready to face it head-on, as always.
“Honey, I am not afraid of you,” Peña said to Harrison, dismissing the decorated judoka as a “clown.”
“You are not some oogity-boogity person who can’t be beat. I see you bleed the same blood as me. I’ve seen you lose in the PFL and that’s when you came running over the big leagues. Like, you are in the big leagues now. You were playing over there in the AAAs, you were over there in the minors. Now it’s the real sh*t. Now is where we find out what you’re freaking made of. Can you make the weight? Can you fight for 25 minutes? And I guarantee you I will not go away. If she thinks she’s just going to take me out in the first round or the second round or the third round, like Holly Holm or Ketlen Vieira, she is sorely mistaken. And I’m just so sick of her trying to act like she’s some freaking boogeyman. I’m not afraid of you. Plain and simple, I am not afraid of you.”