Chael Sonnen recounts half-year when he claims to have been ‘catfished by Aspen Ladd’

Chael Sonnen may have been taken for a bit of a ride this past week when he proclaimed that Mark Zuckerberg personally contacted him to share news of booking a fight against Elon Musk for a battle of the billionaires at UFC 300, only for the news to be immediately denied by a representative for the Meta CEO in a TMZ follow-up report mere hours later.

But if Sonnen was fooled by a prankster impersonating Zuckerberg, if wouldn’t be the first time.

“I’ve been catfished before,” Sonnen said with a laugh on The MMA Hour. “I got catfished — I got catfished by Aspen Ladd.”

Sonnen claimed the situation occurred during Ladd’s UFC career — “This was early Aspen Ladd, this is like one or two weight misses Aspen,” he said — and it all began with a direct message exchange on Twitter. Ladd was still viewed as an up-and-coming contender in the UFC’s bantamweight division, and Sonnen said he exchanged messages with the person overseeing the account for up to seven months before he suspected something was amiss.

“I get a long DM, and it was very clear that this was a copy and paste,” Sonnen explained. “And somewhere in there they made the mistake of referencing Laspen Add, which is not Aspen Ladd, which is not how you would speak. Right? I’m not going to send you a message and go, ‘Chael Sonnen will be on the such and such.’ I would say, ‘Me, I.’

“So I had them. I had them. I called them out on it. I said, ‘Hey, WTF. This is a copy and paste, for one, which changes everything.’ Right? And the gal was like, ‘Oh my God! Yeah, you’re right. I’m not [Ladd]. I thought you knew that. I’m not Aspen Ladd. Here’s who I am.’

“She’s a great gal,” Sonnen continued, laughing again, “friends with [UFC executive] Reed Harris, ends up calling me because she got the number from [a mutual friend]. I’m just saying, it was a small world and she wasn’t trying to fool me, but I was fooled.”

Unfortunately, Ladd’s UFC run flamed out after its promising start. She lost three of her final four UFC bouts and dealt with a variety of weight-related issues before being released by the promotion following a badly botched weight cut for a bantamweight bout against Sara McMann in September 2022. Ladd then inked a deal to compete in PFL’s featherweight division, where she has won two of her three bouts, sandwiching wins over ex-Bellator champion Julia Budd and Karolina Sobek between a loss to Olena Kolesnyk.

But at least as far as Sonnen is concerned, there’s no hard feelings over his half-year Twitter miscommunication with a person he assumed was the soft-spoken fighter.

“It was Aspen Ladd’s account,” Sonnen said, “but she had what the kids call a publicist.”