Dana White reveals mother's money demands sparked bitter family estrangement

UFC president Dana White has opened up about his fractured relationship with his late mother June, describing the threatening emails she sent demanding money as the moment that ended their bond — and calling her 2011 unauthorised biography one of the most disturbing experiences of his life.

Speaking on The Diary Of A CEO podcast, White recalled returning from a two-week trip to London with then-partner Lorenzo Fertitta to find a string of increasingly hostile messages from June. “She wasn’t getting responses because I was in London,” White said. “Then the e-mails started getting nastier and nastier and nastier by the end and I just f*cking blew up and that was the beginning of the end with me and her.”

The emails, White explained, contained financial ultimatums — June demanding a lump sum or instalment payments, reportedly tied to plans to open a bar. When no reply came, the tone escalated sharply.

June White published Dana White, King of MMA in 2011, a book billed as an unauthorised biography of her son. White says he has never read it, but has been briefed by lawyers on its contents, which he claims included personal attacks on people who had done nothing to June, as well as private photographs published without consent.

“I don’t go on shows to speak negatively about my mother,” White said. “My parents pass away, I don’t want to tell bad stories about my parents, but that’s one of the grossest, most disgusting things that you couldn’t even imagine possible until it happens to you.”

White was careful to acknowledge June’s role in raising him and his sister Kelly largely as a single mother, with their father Dana White Sr. mostly absent from their lives. Both parents have since passed away, something White confirmed in a 2023 interview. Despite the estrangement, he credits his upbringing — difficult elements included — for shaping who he became.

“People say, ‘Do you think you are who you are today because of your parents?’ Absolutely, 100 percent,” he said. “Good, bad, whatever, however you want to look at it.”

White’s primary concern, he stressed, was not the personal attacks directed at him but the damage he believes the book caused to others named within it. “She didn’t hurt me, but other people that, you know, a lot of things that aren’t true and a lot of people that didn’t do anything to her in that book” — that, he said, was what he found hardest to accept.