Dana White Shuts Down Pereira's Claim That the UFC Scripts DC

Alex Pereira says the UFC leaned on commentators like Daniel Cormier to "manipulate" fans into backing the Ciryl Gane vs. Josh Hokit heavyweight title fight. Dana White isn't buying a word of it. Speaking to reporters after the season 10 finale of Contender Series on Tuesday night, the UFC boss flatly denied ever directing Cormier — or anyone on his broadcast team — to push a narrative.

White framed it as pure paranoia, saying he's never told DC what to say and that the company simply doesn't operate that way. For context on the scale he's talking about: the UFC has more than 700 fighters under contract, and White noted only two of them are "sideways" with the promotion right now.

Where This Actually Comes From

The grievance is personal. Pereira dropped his interim heavyweight bid to Gane by second-round TKO, and he's spent the weeks since lobbying for a rematch, blaming illegal blows for the loss. That's a man at 13-4 (11 KO) and ranked #3 at light heavyweight fighting out of his natural division — and clearly not over how it ended. Gane, meanwhile, sits at 14-2 and holds the division's #1 spot heading into his title shot against Hokit.

Cormier already rejected the accusation outright earlier in the week, so White's comments were the second denial inside 48 hours. White went further, insisting he actually dislikes commentators taking shots at fighters, and that whatever gets said on a broadcast plays out organically rather than from a script.

The Strickland Tell

The Pereira flare-up landed at the same moment middleweight champ Sean Strickland was airing his own complaints, and White used that to make his point. If the UFC really policed what its people said, he argued, Strickland would've been cut three years ago and none of this would be a conversation. It's a tidy rebuttal: the company's most loose-lipped champion is still employed, which is hard to square with the idea of a tightly managed message.

For Pereira, the path forward is clear-cut whether or not the UFC meets his rematch demand — he's booked against Sergei Pavlovich at UFC 335. A win keeps the heavyweight door open. More noise about scripts and conspiracies probably won't.