UFC president Dana White slammed a civil lawsuit filed against him that revealed he was the victim of a years-old sex-tape extortion plot.
In 2015, Las Vegas resident Ernesto Joshua Ramos was arrested and charged after the FBI found he tried to extort $200,000 from an unnamed “prominent Las Vegas businessman,” who allegedly appeared in a video having sex with Ramos’ live-in girlfriend in 2014, according to a Nevada suit that was filed on Ramos’ behalf Friday and reviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Now, the 42-year-old Ramos claims White reneged on a potential $450,000 deal between the two that forbade Ramos from leaking White’s name to the public after the criminal case closed. (A court-issued protective order prevented the release of White’s name during the case, the suit said.)
Ramos believed, through White’s legal team, that he would get a chance to work out a lucrative non-disclosure agreement with White after pleading guilty.
Ramos, who pleaded guilty and served a 366-day sentence in federal prison, said the woman, a Las Vegas club stripper, had been seeing the 50-year-old, married White over the course of several months and taped the two in the act without White’s consent.
“I just found out that a bulls— lawsuit was filed against me yesterday,” White said in a statement to the Review-Journal. “This guy went to federal prison for trying to extort me over five years ago. Now he’s hired a lawyer who is also a convicted felon, and he’s trying to extort me again for $10 million. He got no money from me last time and he won’t be getting any money from me this time. I look forward to the court dismissing this quickly so I can get rid of these scumbags forever.”
The attorney representing Ramos is Ian Christopherson, who was convicted in 2012 for tax evasion, according to the same outlet.
Ramos, who is a real estate agent and personal trainer, also claims White’s lawyers provided “false derogatory information” about him to the FBI in order to prompt agents to launch the extortion investigation.
The suit said White was in Brazil for a UFC event at the time of the alleged sex tape.
Zuffa, the UFC’s parent company, also was named in the suit.