All charges have been dropped against Jon Jones stemming from a February incident that saw him accused of leaving the scene of an accident in his home city of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Jones was expected to appear for a bench trial Tuesday afternoon prior to the state deeming Jones’ alibi defense to be “credible” and the case being dismissed. Jones was facing two misdemeanor charges related to the incident — one for leaving the scene of an accident, and another for use of telephone to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend. In a statement issued Tuesday to Uncrowned, Jones’ attorney, Christopher A. Dodd, stated that the UFC star has been “fully vindicated”:
From the very beginning, we explained that a woman made a false allegation against Jon in an effort to avoid being arrested for DWI, and unfortunately, the police accepted that claim without properly weighing the facts. Once the relevant documents were finally disclosed by the police department, Jon’s cell phone records made it undeniably clear that he was nowhere near the scene of the crash. We are grateful that the district attorney’s office took the time to conduct a full and fair review of this case, which ultimately confirmed Jon’s innocence. At the same time, it is deeply troubling that such critical evidence was disregarded, forcing Jon to endure this ordeal unnecessarily. Our investigation into how this occurred remains ongoing.
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In a police report obtained in June by Uncrowned, Jones’ name first arose when a woman was found in the passenger seat of a car following a traffic accident in Albuquerque on Feb. 21 while “exhibiting signs of significant intoxication and lacking clothing from the waste down.” The woman told police that she “consumed alcohol and ingested psilocybin mushrooms” at Jones’ residence, and alleged that the last person she remembered driving the vehicle was Jones. She then alleged to have called Jones and a police service aide spoke to the man on the other line, who allegedly “made statements implying his capacity to employ lethal force through third parties” against the aide. In response to the perceived threat, the aide called for backup and a police officer spoke to the man on the phone, who allegedly made similar “allusions to violence,” which was captured on since-released police body-cam footage.
“Guess what, you won’t be the first guy this year that I’ve threatened, swear to God,” the person on the phone can be heard saying on the tape. “You’d be the second one. … My brothers, they kill people for way less.”
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The man on the phone never answered direct questions about whether he was actually Jones, although the former UFC champion appeared to implicate himself in a since-deleted social media post in June, in which he claimed: “Whoever was on the phone with me at first, his timestamp is different. 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.”
A longtime former UFC light heavyweight champion, Jones, 38, vacated his UFC heavyweight title in June by announcing his retirement from MMA, ending a drawn-out saga that kept British heavyweight Tom Aspinall stuck in an interim champion role for nearly two years. Jones has since expressed interest in returning to compete at the UFC’s White House card in 2026, however UFC CEO Dana White has thus far dismissed the idea, stating that he “can’t risk putting [Jones] in big positions in a big spot and have something go wrong.”
While Jones has found himself mired in a laundry list of legal issues over the years, regarding his latest run-in with the law, his name has been cleared and the case has closed by the state of New Mexico.
