By Scott B
UFC champ Kayla Harrison has accused fighter Tyrone Spong of stalking her and derailing her MMA career.
In a 2024 court filing obtained by Kneebar News, Harrison wrote about a previously-unreported romance with Spong. She said that after breaking up with the decorated kickboxer in 2022, he turned frighteningly obsessive.
Among the consequences, Harrison wrote in a petition for injunction against stalking, was her lone MMA defeat: a Professional Fighters League (PFL) title bout in late 2022.
Harrison was a huge betting favorite going into the fight. Gamblers gave opponent Larissa Pacheco a mere 22.5% chance of winning. But when Spong showed up uninvited at the Madison Square Garden event, Harrison was unnerved. “I ended up losing my fight, my title, and my undefeated record,” she wrote. The two-time Olympic gold medalist never again fought for a PFL tournament championship.
Harrison — who captured the UFC bantamweight belt last month by submitting Julianna Peña, some 30 months after losing to Pacheco — said her relationship with Spong began in 2020, when mutual manager Ali Abdelaziz introduced them at a birthday party. The friendship turned romantic in late 2021, two months after Harrison obtained the first of two domestic-violence restraining orders against then-boyfriend Anthony Rocco Martin, a former UFC fighter she called “extremely abusive.”
Harrison and Spong dated through mid-2022, when she underwent an unspecified surgery. Soon after, however, she learned Spong had been “lying” about being estranged from his wife. Harrison responded by ending their relationship.
In her petition, Harrison claimed that Spong spent the following two years engaging in persistent and even illegal harassment. She swore that on one occasion, the Amsterdam native broke a window in the $2-million home Harrison shares with her children in Parkland, Fla., climbed through it, and watched her sleep from the doorway to her bedroom. Harrison also claimed that Spong regularly showed up at her church, called her dozens of times a night, had friends contact her posing as marriage counselors, and threatened suicide.
On another occasion, Harrison wrote, Spong falsely accused her ex-boyfriend Martin of threatening to rape and kill her. His purported goal: to “be perceived as the hero that would save me and my children.”
Then there was the exotic bird. Harrison was home asleep on her 32nd birthday when Spong — who once faced criminal charges for letting an “extremely dangerous” cougar escape his suburban Florida home — dropped off a baby emu on her porch. The bird, now grown and named Marshall Mathers, recently appeared in Episode 3 of the UFC 316 Embedded series.
Until now, the only public hint of a connection between Harrison and Spong came in a series of menacing tweets Martin posted in 2023. “Kayla won’t look so pretty in the world when the truth is out,” he wrote. “I will be releasing shit on Kayla H, Ali A, and Tyrone Spong shortly.” No such revelation followed, however.
Harrison’s 2024 court petition produced swift results. A day after she filed it, a Florida judge ordered Spong to stay away from her home, her Coral Springs church, and American Top Team, the Coconut Creek gym where she trains. Bodycam video showed a sheriff’s deputy serving the injunction on Spong, who initially questioned the deputy’s right to stand in the undefeated boxer’s private driveway. “No stalking, cyberstalking, no criminal offenses,” the deputy told Spong. “Don’t call her, write her, send her texts, emails. No Facebook, Instagram, X, whatever the stuff is.”
Harrison voluntarily dismissed the complaint without explanation in November 2024, a move that legally dissolved the injunction. Neither she, 38-year-old Spong, nor their attorneys responded to Kneebar News’ requests for comment.
Harrison, 35, has faced cycles of abuse since childhood. In Fighting Back, a 2018 book she co-authored to help parents protect their children from sexual abuse, Harrison recounted the appalling story of her first judo coach, Daniel Doyle. Fifteen years her senior, Doyle began grooming the Ohio native when she was 8 years old, forced sex on her at age 12, and used fear, flattery, romantic manipulation, and isolation to maintain the sexual relationship until she was 16. The abuse ended when Harrison confided in a fellow judo student, who persuaded her to tell mother Jeannie Yazell. Yazell promptly alerted police about Doyle’s actions, but not before smashing the windows of his car.
Harrison reluctantly testified against Doyle, and in 2008 he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. But the trauma — which Harrison said “stole my innocence” — led to internalized anger, cutting, suicide attempts, self-hatred, guilt, bulimia, anorexia, flashbacks, nightmares, and a voluntary psychiatric stay at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, where she had relocated for a fresh start.
USA Today broke the story of Harrison’s abuse in 2011. Since then, she has fought back like a champ — launching a foundation in 2013 to help survivors of sexual abuse recover through sports, publishing her book, and raising awareness in interviews with outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and ESPN. Having support from family and teammates — and setting challenging goals, including winning Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016, as well as PFL and UFC belts — has helped her heal.
But as often is true for survivors of childhood abuse, Harrison’s years-long recovery has included both triumphs and setbacks. Right before the 2012 London Olympics, for example, she broke off an engagement to “the most patient [and] understanding man,” and then blamed herself for that and other unsuccessful relationships. “I find myself wondering if there’s something wrong with me,” she wrote Fighting Back. “I wonder if I’m just too messed up to be loved.” Years later, Harrison withstood an abusive relationship with Martin and, according to her court filing, with Spong — whose own championship dreams fell short in May when UFC alum Sam Alvey knocked him out in a Karate Combat heavyweight championship bout.
Today, Harrison’s outlook reflects hard-won growth.
“I think when I was younger, I definitely competed from a place of fear, and I always felt like in order to be worthy of love, I needed to win,” she said in a UFC 316 Embedded interview. “But I don’t operate from that place anymore. It’s peace. And I had a very ugly, nasty road to get to that kind of awakening.”
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