The Brazilian jiu-jitsu community has always been protective of its ranking system. A black belt is supposed to represent years of consistent training, deep technical skill, and the ability to perform against fully resisting opponents. When someone’s promotion timeline looks unusually fast, people start questioning whether the belt was earned.
A recent anecdote included a fun comparison between Gisele Bündchen and controversial BJJ black belt Derek Moneyberg.
Hawaiian MMA veteran Ron Jhun recalled meeting UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby at an IFC event in California around 2000. Shelby was described as being affiliated with Ralph Gracie at the time and working cageside. What stood out from the anecdote was Shelby’s cousin staying at the same motel, a young quarterback later identified as Tom Brady, then playing at the University of Michigan. Shelby reportedly predicted Brady would become a dominant NFL quarterback, a call that later proved accurate.
The conversation eventually drifted toward Brady’s past relationship with Bündchen, and then toward her involvement in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. That’s where the comparison to Moneyberg emerged from MMA History Podcast host Mike Davis, with the implication that status, influence, or social leverage might affect belt progression. It tapped into a long-running anxiety in BJJ: the fear that belts can become symbolic currency instead of hard-earned proof of skill.
“The female version of Moneyberg. She just has a different currency she uses.”
“I know a couple of guys that would give her her brown (belt) for sure.” – the host joked.
For grapplers who have spent a decade or more grinding toward rank, the Moneyberg case represents a worst-case scenario where belts appear to be accelerated through access, networking, or patronage rather than mat performance.
But Moneyberg might actually be slightly more legitimate.
Bündchen trains under the Valente Brothers, whose approach differs sharply from mainstream sport-focused academies. Their system prioritizes self-defense scenarios, structured drills, and responses to strikes over competitive rolling and long technical exchanges against experienced grapplers. In most traditional gyms, a purple belt signals strong technical depth against trained opponents, while a blue belt is often seen as proof of competence against untrained ones.
Valente brothers don’t even train in a typical BJJ gi – they sell their own gis which are meant to resemble casual clothing better.
Even so, Bündchen’s purple belt timeline has drawn skepticism, especially when contrasted with professional mixed martial artists who train full time and often take longer to reach the same rank. It is also said that the ‘test’ Valente brothers use to promote practitioners is laughably bad.
At the center of this is a cultural fault line in Brazilian jiu-jitsu: whether belts should reflect a universal technical standard or whether they can legitimately vary based on philosophy, curriculum, influence, and visibility. The discomfort around Moneyberg and Bündchen shows that many practitioners still want belts to remain a hard signal of real, verifiable mat ability and not status, money, or optics.
