Norma
Dumont’s rivalry with Ailin Perez
goes way beyond the Octagon.
Dumont (13-3) and Perez (13-2) are set to meet in an
Ultimate Fighting Championship bantamweight bout at
UFC Vegas 121 on Sept. 26 at Meta Apex in Las Vegas. There is
serious bad blood between Dumont and Perez leading up to the
fight.
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Dumont explains the personal issues fueling her UFC Vegas 121
fight with Ailin Perez
Perez posted a video last month accusing Dumont’s boyfriend, UFC
middleweight Marco
Tulio, of checking her out while training at the UFC
Performance Institute.
While Dumont understands Perez’s style of mental warfare, she vows
not to be affected. The Brazilian plans to stay unfazed by Perez’s
gimmicks and focus on letting her fists do the work this weekend.
Dumont is just glad to have the opportunity to legally beat up
someone she truly hates.
“It’s a fight that literally has a personal anger, a personal
issue, that the two of us have against each other,” Dumont told
MMA Fighting. “It’s a fight that we’re going to
deliver a lot. I’m excited, I really want it. I think it’s going to
be fun.”
Dumont admits that she has a personal grudge against Perez. She
says Perez has filmed her without permission several times and also
claims that the Argentine has been tagging Tulio in so many of her
posts that he had to block her.
“She’s already secretly filmed me three times,” Dumont added. “She
loves doing that. She has mental problems. This girl really has
mental problems. And when I saw the video, I looked at it and… this
isn’t the first time she’s done this before. She had already tagged
him in her stories, so much so that he blocked her specifically so
she would stop tagging him in things. She has this little game of
trying to get people worked up. But, honestly, it’s very
insignificant, so it makes absolutely no difference to me. Ever
since she signed the contract, I’m going to focus on beating her on
the 26th. I don’t need to say anything else; I don’t need to fall
for her bait or play along with the little things she likes to do.
She’s already not someone who has much shame about anything,
neither in her personal life nor anything else, so now that the
contract is signed, I already have my date to beat her; I have my
time to do what I need to do, what I want to do without getting
arrested, so it makes absolutely no difference to me what she does
outside of the fight.”
Dumont is coming off a decision loss against Joselyne
Edwards that snapped a six-fight winning streak. Meanwhile,
Perez is riding a six-fight winning streak since suffering a
submission loss in her UFC debut in 2022.