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Brett Okamoto
Former UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones is no longer facing charges stemming from an incident in February in which he was accused of fleeing the scene of an accident and threatening a police officer.
The Bernalillo County (New Mexico) district attorney’s office dropped all charges against Jones on Tuesday, citing it has “reason to believe the defendant’s alibi defense is credible.” In one unusual detail, the charges were actually filed against Jones twice due to a “clerical error,” which resulted in multiple cases being dismissed regarding one incident.
“I want to begin by thanking the district attorney’s office for carefully reviewing the facts and ultimately vindicating me completely,” Jones wrote Tuesday on X. “I have always believed in the importance of truth and fairness, and I am grateful that the evidence spoke for itself. The simple fact is this: I was never there. I never even left my house that night, and all the evidence proved that.”
The charges against Jones stemmed from a Feb. 21 car accident in Jones’ hometown of Albuquerque. Police responded to a half-naked woman in the vehicle who claimed Jones had been driving and left.
Bodycam footage showed the woman later called a man she said was Jones, who then made verbal threats to the officer on the scene. In June, Jones appeared to implicate himself as the man on the phone, when he wrote and then deleted from X, “whoever was on the phone with me at first, his timestamp is different. By the time I was acting aggressive on the phone it was a completely different conversation. I was already in my paranoid and defensive state.”
Jones has dealt with several legal issues in his career. He was arrested and charged with a felony hit-and-run in 2015 after he fled the scene of a crash that injured a 25-year-old pregnant woman. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was sentenced to supervised probation.
Jones also pleaded guilty to DWI charges in 2012 in New York and in 2020 in New Mexico.
Widely considered the greatest fighter of all time, Jones retired from competition earlier this year rather than attempt to unify his heavyweight title against interim champion Tom Aspinall. But he quickly announced he intended to come out of retirement in hopes of competing on the UFC’s planned event at the White House next July.