Julianna Peña has responded to Amanda Nunes’ criticism of her lack of ‘trash-talk’ while the pair appeared on the latest season of The Ultimate Fighter. 

Peña, who beat Nunes to claim the Women’s Bantamweight Championship last year, recently acted as a coach on the hit reality television show, opposite her rival. 

The two are set for a rematch at UFC 277 on July 30th in Dallas, where Nunes will aim to win back the belt she’d previously held since 2016. 

According to Nunes, Peña had little to say while on The Ultimate Fighter and the Brazilian questioned why she was more vocal in the build-up to their first encounter. 

“I don’t know if she was used to seeing me all the time and that’s why she pumped the brakes on that stuff,” Nunes said. 

“I even told her, ‘Don’t you talk online? I’m in front of you now, open your mouth.’ But it was cool. [Normally] I don’t talk too much but I asked her, ‘What’s up?’ That’s what TUF is all about, it’s a reality [show] and people want drama.

“I even tried to poke her a little bit to see if I could get something out of her but didn’t get much. … I didn’t understand much of it. I really expected something completely different than what she was on the show.”

Peña, however, has now explained why she spoke less, stressing that she’d been on the show before and didn’t feel it necessary to trash-talk.

“All the other stuff that sh [Nunes] said, like, ‘oh, I didn’t s**t talk’ and ‘I was trying to get people to want to like me’ or something like that, I’m like, ‘no, I’ve done the show before, so I kinda know how the production goes,’” she said. 

“I already beat you. You hadn’t been submitted, you hadn’t been stopped, you had this title reign of the G.O.A.T. and you got embarrassed, and you got so frustrated that you fired your entire team. You quit your gym that you’d been at for 10 years. You had to go [and] see a sports psychologist.”

“Like, why kick a dog when it’s down? That’s just not my style, that’s not my character, and I already know how much it hurt her.

“I already did my trash-talking in the ring. There’s nothing really more for me to say.”

Peña responds to Nunes’ injury claim 

Nunes claimed after her first fight against Peña that she was injured in the build-up to the contest, but the Venezuelan has fired back at her rival. 

“They got every excuse in the book for why I won. And so, my whole premise behind wanting to do the rematch was just to solidify that I am here to stay. That this is my time, this is my era. The Amanda era is done. It’s the Julianna Peña era now,” she said. 

“I’ve had two knee surgeries, one on each knee. I’ve never used me getting choked unconscious, I was like, ‘Oh, it was because of my knees.’

“You gotta say whatever you can to motivate yourself and to pump yourself up and to sleep at night so that you can say, ‘Yes, it was my knees, and next time, I’m gonna get it done.’

“You gotta say whatever you gotta say, and I understand that.”