“One security guard was bleeding. Total chaos,” Ariel Helwani wrote on X on Thursday, describing the scene at the RAF 14 press conference, where Arman Tsarukyan and Dillon Danis stopped talking and started swinging. Helwani called it an ugly scene and noted that Khamzat Chimaev was part of it.
Footage shared by Real American Freestyle’s own account, and passed around by Championship Rounds and Red Corner MMA, showed a pileup that Red Corner described as involving Danis, Chimaev, Tsarukyan and multiple members of their teams. In a separate clip, Chimaev can be heard shouting at Danis: “Hey you don’t know who is your daddy btch! I’ll fck you up.”
The grappling match went ahead anyway. MMA Fighting posted full RAF 14 results on Friday, the day after the press conference.
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Who’s involved
Tsarukyan is no sideshow act. He’s 24-3 in MMA, ranked No. 2 at lightweight in Knockout Daily’s rankings, and his last fight was on September 19, 2026. He trains out of American Top Team. Born to an Armenian family in Akhalkalaki, Georgia, and raised in Khabarovsk, he holds Master of Sports rank in freestyle wrestling and gave up a junior hockey career with Amur before MMA took over. His UFC debut was a Fight of the Night loss to Islam Makhachev in 2019, and the wrestling-heavy pace of that fight made a lot of people pay attention early.
Danis, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who came up through Marcelo Garcia’s academy in New York, is signed to RAF’s cruiserweight division and holds the Misfits MMA light heavyweight title. He’s 2-0 in Bellator with first-round submissions over Kyle Walker and Max Humphreys. Chaos follows him. He was in the middle of the UFC 229 melee after Khabib Nurmagomedov went over the cage toward him, which cost him a $7,500 fine and a seven-month suspension. Thursday was a familiar picture with a new cast.
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There’s an odd footnote here, too. Danis was born to a Honduran mother and an Armenian father, which means two men with Armenian roots ended up at the center of a brawl that pulled in half of Tsarukyan’s camp.
The weight
Getting to the mat wasn’t easy for Danis either. Happy Punch posted on Friday that he went through hell cutting weight for the match.
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The obvious questions now belong to the commission and the promotion. A bleeding security guard, a ranked UFC lightweight in a shoving match and Chimaev on camera making threats is the kind of footage that tends to get reviewed. So far, none of the sources show any discipline announced against anyone. And somewhere in Arizona, one guard is still tending to whatever got opened up on Thursday.
