Ailin Perez Says Jealousy Fueled Norma Dumont Feud
Ailin Perez says the bad blood with Norma Dumont started long before they shared a cage.
The Argentine bantamweight beat Dumont by unanimous decision at UFC Vegas 121 on September 26. The win moved her to No. 2 in the women’s 135-pound rankings and stretched her UFC streak to seven fights.
Ariel Helwani asked where the hostility came from. Perez went back to earlier cards when both women were featured names on the same night.
“We shared cards together in the past where we were both like the two big bots of the card,” she said, using the English phrasing from the interview. “And I think that there was a lot of jealousy and envy that she was feeling watching me be the star of the show.”
She put the booking history next to that. Perez said she had been trying to get Dumont in the cage for years and kept getting turned down.
“I’ve been trying to fight her for so many years and there’s been so many times where she’s declined to fight me and then come out and said that I declined to fight her, which made no sense,” she said. “I think that was where the origin, at least on my end, of why I don’t like her.”
Helwani asked whether she really believed the issue came down to jealousy over her body. Perez did not walk it back.
“I think definitely, yes, it’s because of, she’s jealous of my butt,” she said. “But also because of her boyfriend, Marco Tulio.”
She described the same pattern at events in Las Vegas and elsewhere. “Every time that we saw each other, it was like this thing where he just would look at me, and I think that that would really bother her, and it was constantly.”
That is Perez’s account. Dumont has not answered those specific claims in this interview.
The faceoff made the fight personal in public. Helwani noted that Dumont threw money and condoms at Perez during the staredown. Perez said she took that as an attempt to shrink her.
She tied it to her OnlyFans work and to photos or video she said may have leaked. In Spanish she said Dumont wanted to belittle her and pull her off the fight by treating her as something she is not.
Then she added that even if that were true, she does not see a problem with it. The point, she said, was to knock her out of focus when she was locked in.
The fight itself did not match the week’s heat. Perez won a decision that was closer on the scorecards than the buildup suggested, and security had to step in after the final horn.
The result still changed the division. Perez is 14-2 overall and 7-1 in the UFC. Dumont dropped in the rankings after the loss.
Perez is already talking about what comes next at 135 pounds, including a possible path toward Kayla Harrison and Amanda Nunes at UFC 334. This interview was about the fight she just finished.
She framed Dumont as someone who ducked her, then tried to rewrite who declined, then tried to embarrass her at the face off. Those are her words, not a commission finding and not a statement from Dumont’s camp.
The only result that is official is the decision in Las Vegas. Perez left with the win, the ranking bump, and a public explanation for why the staredown looked the way it did.
