Kay Hansen spent a good portion of her teenage years in the spotlight, after jumping headfirst into MMA in her mid-teens.
As an amateur, she competed just weeks after her 18th birthday, then turned pro later that year — her very first fight coming under the Invicta FC banner.
Her father was frequently seen by her side, serving a her coach early on— but in a new documentary, Hansen has opened up about the abusive environment she grew up in, after splitting apart from her family at age 16.
In a statement on social media announcing the documentary’s release, Hansen wrote that “This documentary was a big step for me, not necessarily as a fighter, but as a person. My successes and struggles have all been in the public eye for many years, but everyone has a story behind the scenes. I was raped/SA [sexually assaulted] by my father as a teenager for years. Fighting/training was my escape, and the only form of reality I really had control over.”
Hansen went more in depth into the allegations against her father in the 23-minute behind the scenes look at her life. “When I was 16, my parents got in a huge fight, it resulted in my father leaving. I decided to go with him,” Hansen revealed in Diary: Kay Hansen, a film produced with the participation of Invicta FC.
“When we split, we didn’t really have anywhere to go. We were homeless, we lived out of my dad’s truck. That’s when the sexual assault and rape started,” Hansen revealed. “I was dealing with all of this early on in my professional MMA career, and no one really knew about it. I didn’t really talk about it too much.”
According to Hansens’ spouse, Aaron Garcia, who met Hansen years prior, “every aspect of her life was controlled” by her father. “Her social media was controlled by him, what she could and couldn’t post. Financially, he controlled everything in there.”
Hansen was in essence cut off from the rest of the family, including her mother and sisters. Fighting became therapy, she explained in the documentary, released on Tuesday.
“I took a lot of my anger out when it comes to fighting.” Coaches would tell her to take a break, but Hansen appeared incapable of doing so. She also buried her traumatic experiences. All this led to her burning out, though physically, she continued to train. “I was training three, four times a day, I was eating 500 calories maybe a day. I was really going through some mental stuff, and I was just shoving it down. And I really didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to think about the repercussions, and I really didn’t want to think about what I’d been through.”
Hansen has since rekindled her relationship with her mother. A four-fight veteran of the UFC, she re-signed with Invicta upon her release from the promotion last April, but has yet to return to the cage.
“The Kay Hansen of today is healing, she is learning how to love and accept herself, and in that same process, I am trying to convey what I’ve been through to help other people,” Hansen says towards the end of the doc, vowing to continue climbing in fighting.
