Dana White Says Mother’s Unauthorized Book Followed Money Emails
Dana White says the break with his mother started in an inbox, not in a bookstore. The UFC CEO told Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO that June White published an unauthorized biography without asking him, and that he was looking at the book for the first time in the room.
The title is Dana White, King of MMA, released in 2011 and billed as her account of his rise. White said the pages include childhood photos and pictures from his wedding. He also said he never signed off on any of it.
“And put a bunch of pictures in here of me when I was a kid and all this sht,” White said. “I mean, she put my fcking wedding pictures in here and sh*t.”
Bartlett asked whether she had requested permission. White did not hedge.
“No,” he said. “It happens, man. It happens.”
He told Bartlett he had never actually read the book. Flipping through the photos was enough for him to call the project out of line.
“It’s unfortunate and it’s, I’ve actually never seen the book. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the book,” White said. “It’s batsh*t nuts.”
The split, as he described it, predates the publication. White said he was in London for about two weeks at a time when he was not checking email on the road. He came home to a string of messages from his mother.
“I have like a bunch of emails from her like threatening me,” White said.
He recalled the demand as a choice between a lump sum and installments. The stated reason, in his telling, was a bar she wanted to buy.
“You have two options. You can give me this all up front or you can pay me payments,” White said. “Over the next f*cking whatever, I’m looking to buy a bar or whatever it was.”
She was not getting answers while he was overseas. White said the tone changed with every unanswered note.
“And then the emails started getting nastier and nastier and nastier by the end,” he said. “And I was like, I f*cking just blew up.”
That exchange, he said, closed the relationship. The book came later. The silence did not.
“And that was the beginning of the end with me and her,” White said.
He put the blame in parental terms rather than in a business dispute. June White raised him and his sister Kelly largely on her own. White has said his father, Dana White Sr., was mostly absent. Both parents died in recent years, a fact he discussed in a 2023 interview with Piers Morgan, and he said the estrangement with his mother was never repaired.
“Sometimes family is the worst. We all fail at certain things in life,” White said. “In my opinion, if you fail as a parent, it’s the ultimate failure.”
“My mom passed away without me or my sister talking to her,” he said.
Bartlett asked whether he had forgiven her. White did not give a clean yes. He said he does not do interviews to attack his mother, and that he would not rewrite the life that followed.
“I don’t go on shows to speak negatively about my mother,” White said. “I wouldn’t change anything.”
He still credited his parents for the person who ended up running the UFC. The credit and the criticism sat in the same answer.
“People say, do you think you are where you are today because of your parents? Absolutely, 100%,” White said. “Good, bad, whatever, however you want to look at it.”
The book is the part he will not soften. White called it something a person cannot picture until it happens inside their own family.
“That’s one of the grossest, most disgusting things that you couldn’t even imagine possible until it happens to you,” White said. “It happened, and it is what it is.”
He said the damage was not aimed only at him. Lawyers, not a cover-to-cover read, are how he says he learned what was inside.
“A lot of other people, I think, she hurt in that book. She didn’t hurt me, but other people,” White said. “A lot of things that aren’t true, and a lot of people that didn’t do anything to her in that book.”
“I’ve never read it, but I’ve had lawyers tell me about it,” he said.
The photographs are the piece he keeps returning to. Private images, including the wedding, were published by someone he says had no right to put them out.
“The personal private pictures that she just threw out there that she really didn’t have the right to do,” White said. “When you become successful, this type of sh*t happens to you.”
White has rarely walked through the split in public, which is why the Bartlett interview is already moving through MMA coverage. The book is still in circulation. He is still saying he has not read it, and the relationship he described ended before either of them could close it.
