Jake Paul will be taking it easy and sucking food through a straw for the coming weeks following his 6th round KO loss to Anthony Joshua. But his lawyers will be very busy threatening to sue anyone who dares question whether that fight was fixed.
These days, it’s not surprising that many fans think the fix is in. Sports gambling is rampant, and you can’t turn over a stone these days without finding multiple betting scandals barely hidden in the muck. UFC’s new ‘prediction market’ partner Polymarket is basically designed to let people with insider knowledge make money. So why wouldn’t we suspect everything is a fix?
Well, you plebes can think it, but if you say it then Jake Paul’s lawyers will come for you. They’ve already come for Piers Morgan and Sylvester Stallone, and according to Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions co-founder Nakisa Bidarian, they’re lining up a number of new targets following Paul vs. Joshua.
“Our lawyers are actively going after a number of people,” Bidarian told Ariel Helwani. “One in particular was claiming to be a lawyer online. I don’t remember the handle, but he had something like 200,000 likes. Basically this post said there was an agreement for AJ not to knock out Jake, but AJ disregarded the agreement and decided not to get his payday and knock out Jake. It’s pretty astonishing what people say.”
“Lou DiBella, I saw him put up a bunch of ridiculous things and even said, ‘Nakisa, go ahead and sue me but this wasn’t a real fight, he was pulling punches, he wasn’t giving it his full effort.’”
Bidarian insisted that all of Paul’s fights have been 100% legit with no secret backroom deals or anyone taking it easy on anyone.
“There has never once in Jake Paul’s career been any talk of that sort of anything to do with the fight being anything but a real fight that has exactly the same situation as any professional fight,” he declared.
Well … that’s not 100% true. Following the Mike Tyson fight, Jake Paul was asked if he ‘took his foot off the gas’ when he noticed Tyson was tiring out.
“Yeah. Definitely,” Paul said at the post-fight presser. “Definitely a bit. I wanted to give the fans a show but I didn’t want to hurt someone that didn’t need to be hurt.”
While there was no such admission from Anthony Joshua following his win over Jake Paul, several UFC fighters mentioned it looked like an old-fashioned carry to them. That includes former champs like Israel Adesanya, and now former bantamweight champ Aljamain Sterling.
“The fact that he was even able to get to that round, what was it, round six? You can say it’s impressive,” Sterling said on his YouTube channel. “But I also feel the other side of me, that has seen Anthony Joshua fight, makes me wonder, ‘Was there a bet on let’s just carry Jake Paul to X amount of rounds, make him look good?’ We want to entertain and maybe there’s a lot of people putting money on it going past three or four rounds or something like this. I’ve got to speculate and wonder.”
“I just don’t think Jake Paul would get out of two rounds at the most. I don’t want to say rigged. I want to say there was an agreement is where I’m at.”
Paul will probably have to hire a few more lawyers if he wants to tamp down on talk like this. These days, you can’t escape these kinds of accusation in normal sports because of the corrupting influence of sports betting (including apps like Jake Paul’s Betr). So why would these freakshow fights get to escape the same amount of scrutiny?
