Former UFC Star Charged with Murder in Mexico

Retired mixed martial artist Phil Baroni has been arrested in Mexico for allegedly killing his girlfriend, local prosecutors said Wednesday.

The former UFC fighter, 46, was detained after a woman was found dead on Jan. 1 in the beach resort of San Francisco, the prosecutors’ office in Nayarit state said. According to the Tribuna de la Bahia outlet, Baroni sought officers’ help and told them his girlfriend had slipped and hit her head after he had thrown her into a shower in the wake of an argument.

Inside a room at a local hotel, officers found a naked woman covered by a sheet with visible signs of bruising on her face and around her body, the report said. It added that she displayed no vital times by the time law enforcement arrived.

In a statement on Twitter, the Nayarit prosecutors’ office on Wednesday said that an American, “Philip ‘N’,” had been detained for the crime of “aggravated femicide.” A state official later confirmed his surname as Baroni, the Associated Press reports, adding that an initial hearing in the case has been scheduled for Monday.

Baroni, known as “The New York Badass,” first fought in the UFC in 2001 and continued fighting professionally in several other MMA organizations including Bellator and Strikeforce over the next two decades.

His most recent MMA fight came in 2019 at the Rebel Fighting Championship in Shanghai, China, a contest which he lost by submission in the first round against Sai Wang.

In 2019, Baroni also took part in a professional wrestling event, Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport, in New Jersey. “The news about Phil Baroni is terrible and incredibly tragic as well,” Barnett, who also fought in the UFC, tweeted on Wednesday. “I’ve known Phil for 2 decades + and at the 1st JB Bloodsport show could see that his personality and behavior was erratic, displaced, and emotionally he was all over the place and it was obvious why: CTE,” Barnett added.

Barnett said managing Baroni at the event had been so difficult that he couldn’t book him again, even though he wanted to. “He was too much to handle and so scattered,” he added. “He blew up at me because I hadn’t used him again and I blocked him on social media but there wasn’t much I could do.”

Baroni’s arrest in Mexico comes after UFC President Dana White apologized this week after he was filmed hitting his wife, Anne, in the face in a Cabo San Lucas nightclub on New Year’s Eve. After TMZ published a video of the incident, White said he was embarrassed and said both he and his wife were drunk at the time.

“You’ve heard me say for years, ‘There’s never ever an excuse for a guy to put his hands on a woman,’ and now here I am on TMZ talking about it,” White told the outlet.

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