Sean O’Malley went on Bradley Martyn’s podcast and talked about cheating on his wife, Danya Gonzalez. He was more specific than most fighters would be.
The former UFC bantamweight champion, who calls his wife Dany, said the low point came at the end of 2024. He had lost the title to Merab Dvalishvili in September and gone under the knife in October. By December, by his own account, he was in bad shape at home.
“I got to come clean,” O’Malley said, as quoted by Essentially Sports. “I lost in September. I got surgery in October, which was the combination of losing and surgery. It was just bad.”
He said a mushroom trip that December convinced him to get off social media. He described those platforms as being mostly about women for him and said that was part of what wrecked him.
The Florida birthday
O’Malley also walked through his 32nd birthday in Florida. Friends pushed him to go out. A buddy FaceTimed him with a group of blondes, and O’Malley said he had just come from an event full of attractive women. He told Martyn he was “battling demons” the whole time and framed the night as a spiritual exam.
“This was like God’s test to me,” he said. “I don’t know if God is hooking me up or testing his toughest goddamn soldier.”
The two years since that party roughly match the timeline Essentially Sports gave for the cheating story.
This is also old territory for him on Martyn’s show. In 2023, right after he beat Aljamain Sterling at UFC 292 to win the belt, O’Malley went on Martyn’s RawTalk podcast. He called himself the king of the house and said he treats Danya like a queen. He also blamed his testosterone for acts of infidelity.
Still together
O’Malley said Gonzalez has threatened to leave more than once, and he admitted she had every reason to.
“But hey, it made us stronger,” he said. “We got kids, and it’s been good. I’m very, very lucky and grateful that we are still together.”
He described her ultimatums as fair. “Which is rightfully so,” he said.
According to Essentially Sports, the two met when O’Malley was just breaking into pro MMA. They reportedly married around 2017 and have never fully separated. They have two kids: a daughter, Elena Louise, born in 2020, and a son, Matteo Montana, born last year.
On the fight side, the Sterling win in 2023 made him champion, and the Dvalishvili loss in September 2024 ended that reign. He then got a rematch. The two met again for the bantamweight title at UFC 316 at the Prudential Center in Newark on June 7, 2025. The source material doesn’t list his next booking.
My take: O’Malley has always answered whatever he’s asked, and I usually like that in a fighter. But this answer involved his wife and kids, and it went out on a microphone. He also made a point of saying he took the social media apps off his phone, while telling this story on a podcast.
