Former UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones will not face charges for allegedly fleeing the scene of an accident and threatening a police officer during an incident in February.
On Tuesday, the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s office in New Mexico dropped all charges, stating it had “reason to believe the defendant’s alibi defense is credible.” In an unusual development, the charges had been filed twice due to a “clerical error,” leading to the dismissal of multiple cases for the single event.
“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 the social media platform 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.”
The charges stemmed from a February 21 car accident in Jones’s hometown of Albuquerque. Police arriving at the scene found a partially clothed woman in the vehicle who claimed Jones had been driving and had fled. Bodycam footage recorded the woman calling a man she identified as Jones, who then verbally threatened the officer over the phone.
In June, Jones seemed to implicate himself in a since-deleted post on X, writing, “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.”
This was the latest in a series of legal issues for the fighter. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a felony hit-and-run accident that injured a pregnant woman. He also has guilty pleas for DWI charges from 2012 in New York and 2020 in New Mexico.
Jones, widely considered one of the greatest fighters of all time, retired from competition earlier this year rather than unify his title against interim champion Tom Aspinall. He has since announced his intention to return for a potential UFC event at the White House next July.
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