In a recent video about the prevalence of misconduct in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, instructor Nick Chewy Albin offered a perspective that challenges the narrative that the sport has an unusually high concentration of bad actors.
“I don’t feel like there’s some abnormal amount of bad people in jiu-jitsu,” Chewy states plainly. “I think it’s honestly just a numbers game.”
His argument centers on the sport’s rapid growth. As BJJ expands globally, the mathematical probability of bad actors entering the community increases proportionally regardless of screening efforts.
To support his position, Chewy draws comparisons to other professions with hierarchical structures. He points to teaching, where inappropriate relationships between educators and students make headlines despite the overwhelming majority of teachers maintaining professional boundaries.
“It’s not that teachers are all bad or that we have some abnormal amount of bad teachers. It just there’s some bad people out there that do inappropriate stuff.”
The BJJ instructor attributes much of the current perception to what psychologists call negativity bias. While thousands of practitioners share positive transformation stories on social media about weight management, community building and confidence gains, these accounts fade into background noise. Meanwhile a handful of scandal reports dominate conversations and shape perceptions of the entire culture.
Using the example of airplane accidents, Chewy illustrates how rare negative events capture disproportionate attention.
“Plane crashes don’t happen that often with passengers on them. They’re pretty d-mn rare,” he explains, noting that millions of incident-free flights go unnoticed while a single crash creates widespread fear of flying.
However this perspective warrants scrutiny when examined against research findings. The 2017 ESPNW survey revealing that over 60 percent of 259 women experienced harassment in BJJ suggests the issue may extend beyond simple statistical probability.
Almost every major team has some major controversy behind it. Kingsway/New Wave has a fugitive on the loose with a rumored double digit number of women he assaulted, B team had suspended Jay Rodriguez due to his behavior to female teammates, Atos has Andre and Gustavo Galvao, Checkmat has Ricardo Vieira and Leandro Vieira, Roberto Cyborg even had that entire New York Times expose about what happened with Marcel Goncalves.
And this is just the latest round of controversy. There were plenty of other cases over the years showing that nobody belongs on a pedestal.
The sport’s inherent physical proximity creates unique vulnerabilities, allowing inappropriate contact to masquerade as legitimate technique, particularly affecting beginners who lack the experience to distinguish between the two.
While Chewy welcomes platforms that allow practitioners to share experiences without fear of retaliation, framing misconduct as an unavoidable byproduct of growth risks downplaying a systemic issue. BJJ’s unique physical intimacy, combined with hierarchical structures and repeated high-profile controversies across major teams, suggests that these problems are not merely statistical inevitabilities. The evidence points to the need for accountability and cultural change, rather than a passive acceptance that “bad actors” are simply part of the numbers.
