Former UFC women’s strawweight champion Jessica Andrade has launched a lawsuit against her former coach and manager, Gilliard Parana, accusing him of siphoning roughly two million dollars from her personal bank account.
The shocking allegations were first reported by MMA Fighting, with Andrade telling the site that a lawsuit was ongoing over money transfers utilizing TransferWise (now known as simply Wise).
“We have a lawsuit going about TransferWise and the money that was transferred to other people I’ve never seen in my life,” Andrade told MMA Fighting. “That happened when he was taking care of my finances, and I had no access to anything. At one point he said, ‘Jessica, look, let me handle this for you, you don’t have to worry about any of this.’ And as always, I trusted him. He removed my access to the account. He said, ‘You don’t need to look at your accounts, you’ll have a monthly salary.’ I was making good money in the beginning, but in the end I don’t know how [that money ran out].”
Parana, who retired as a coach and manager earlier this year, allegedly told Andrade that the missing money was a result of her spending too much money shopping on online retailer Amazon. The fighter contests that.
“I made $2 million and spent $10,000 on Amazon. Where did the rest of the money go? It makes no sense, and it’s being investigated now, and we’ll find out where every penny went,” stated Andrade, who faces Natalia Silva this weekend. Now living in Las Vegas, Andrade also pointed out that jurisdiction could become a factor in the case.
“The lawsuit is moving in the United States and he’s in Brazil, so I don’t know how it’s going to work. He was quite smart, he left before things happened.”
Jessica Andrade’s allegations, including that she was locked out of her bank account by Parana, were disputed by the coach. Parana responded to news of the lawsuit with a lengthy statement to MMA Fighting, which reads in part “It was never like the way she’s insinuating, that I stole a single cent from her, much less the amount she’s talking about, which is completely baseless.”
“Anyone who has a brain and knows how to do math will see that she really doesn’t spend her money on just a few purchases on Amazon. She has a lot of expenses, and there are so many that she even gets lost in the calculations. Jessica is not incapable. Jessica is not a 15-year-old girl. And Jessica is not illiterate. Jessica was never forbidden from going to the bank, from calling the bank and from finding out how her accounts were. Jessica always had full access to her things and was always intelligent enough to know everything that happened in her financial life.”
Andrade (26-12), who sits on a two-fight win streak at present, reigned as women’s strawweight champion in the UFC in 2019, defeating Rose Namajunas to win the title before immediately losing it to Weili Zhang. “Bate Estaca” later challenged Valentina Shevchenko in an unsuccessful bid for flyweight gold in 2021.
Also in 2021, Andrade turned heads by admitting she had sold nude photos via explicit content site Only Fans, which helped pay for her house and car. She later stated that she hated her experience with the site; eventually, nude photos of the former champ had leaked to the general public.
As she noted in her new statements to MMA Fighting, it now seems she’ll have to fight a little longer just to make up for the allegedly embezzled funds.
