What is the real truth for damaged UFC antitrust fighters?

Eric Cramer's big post-antitrust settlement interview was an eye-opener.

After spending an hour watching a Zoom HR-style coming-out-party interview with Eric Cramer and Michael Dell’Angelo, the lead attorneys for fighters suing UFC over antitrust allegations, I walked away with a few observations:

Who are these guys? What was the point Mr. Cramer was trying to make? And is he really telling the truth?

Those are not the kinds of questions you want viewers to be asking after spending an hour in a setting that felt very scripted. It felt more like a boring version of one of those Wendy Walsh personal injury attorney infomercials you see at 3 AM in the morning.

The UFC antitrust case, in particular the Cung Le class, has been in the Federal court system for almost a decade. The backstory is simple: Rob Maysey, an attorney and fighter advocate in the Phoenix area (under the MMAFA banner), had a pen and a notebook full of legal concepts and ideas regarding UFC’s business practices. He pitched the idea of a fighter-based antitrust case to many different Big Law firms who had resources to fight UFC in court. One of those Big Law firms was Philadelphia-based Berger Montague.

It was another Big Law firm, Cohen Milstein, that agreed to participate as counsel alongside Mr. Maysey in suing UFC over antitrust. Once Cohen Milstein agreed to join the case, then other Big Law firms — including Berger Montague — jumped into the action.

Which is a long way of saying that you can’t tell the story of UFC antitrust litigation without mentioning Rob Maysey.

And yet, in a recent one-hour long interview with John Nash, it was lead Berger Montague attorney Eric Cramer who somehow managed to thank everyone involved in the litigation without mentioning Rob Maysey’s name. The same Rob Maysey who was just hired by Berger Montague after a $375 million dollar Settlement Agreement was reached.

If the point of the interview was to educate the public and reach out to UFC fighters to solicit their contact information to start the Claims process, they failed.

Many fighters who are part of the class know very little about the antitrust litigation.

Many of those fighters don’t know that Mr. Cramer and Mr. Dell’Angelo are the attorneys working with Rob Maysey on the case. For a majority of fighters, the only attorney they’ve been negotiating and volunteering information to over the last decade has been Mr. Maysey.

So, how do these guys expect fighters to help them out if they don’t mention Mr. Maysey’s name or explain their connection to him?

Both Mr. Cramer and Mr. Dell’Angelo are attorneys working on the Kajan Johnson side of the UFC antitrust case regarding prospective injunctive relief on fighter contracts. If they can’t establish a connection with their own clients regarding who they are and what they do, then they have a real problem on their hands.

If you wanted an example of how ineffective this one-hour interview was, consider the fact that there was confusion regarding which web site UFC fighters/Class Members should go to and submit their contact information.

Is it UFCClassAction.com, a web site which has a contact form for fighters to submit information to? Information on that site goes to Mr. Maysey.

Then there’s the Angeion-based web site UFCFighterClassAction.com, which apparently several fighters have submitted contact information to only to get no response in return. Angeion is the Philadelphia-based administrator that Berger Montague uses in class action settlements.

The answer is that fighters should submit information to UFC Class Action, since information there will be received by Mr. Maysey. However, the Angeion site is more recently updated. This is a mess.

This interview sure sounds promising, doesn’t it?

And yet, not all is lost. There was quite a bit of news and information that insiders could glean from Mr. Cramer and Mr. Dell’Angelo regarding UFC antitrust settlement payments and why certain decisions were made by the attorneys. One of those controversial decisions includes attorneys getting paid first before the fighters despite submitted fighter declarations stating that they need money right now.

The answers by Mr. Cramer in response to key questions raised in the interview were unintentionally explosive and unhelpful.