Long before Matt Brown was getting celebrated by a UFC tribute video for his retirement, the one-time The Ultimate Fighter alum spent much of his youth getting into trouble.
Struggles with drug addiction and multiple stints behind bars dotted Brown’s life before he finally cleaned up his act and became the professional fighter who set the record for most knockouts in UFC welterweight history. During a recent Q&A on social media, Brown mentioned one particular incident from his time in jail that could have easily ended his life.
It was jail, not prison. I never got in any fights but I teetered on the edge of getting murdered by a prison queen. I’ll have to tell that story some time lol https://t.co/AFk70NOLcX
— Matt Brown (@IamTheImmortal) May 11, 2024
Brown detailed the full ordeal on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer. According to him, a desire to show he was the alpha male in jail nearly backfired in tragic fashion.
“I got sentenced to six months in the Green County jail and it was a brand new jail,” Brown explained. “I had never been in a jail like this before. There’s 60 prisoners or whatever you want to call them to a pod. That’s a lot of motherf*ckers in a single pod. Because I got sentenced to six months, it was the first two or three days, I got on the kitchen squad.
“One of the things I was wanting to do was prove to the whole jail, like, let everybody know straight away, they’re not going to be f*cking with me. I wanted to prove myself right away.”
The way Brown decided to prove himself was singling out the biggest, baddest looking person in the jail and refusing to give him food. In theory, Brown expected that would set him up for a confrontation, and eventually a fight that would allow him to showcase his toughness in front of the other inmates.
“I’m handing out trays one day and I picked this one guy, who looked like kind of a mean dude, and he was a little bit bigger than the rest of the guys,” Brown said. “So I’m like, ‘I’m going to let him know, he ain’t getting food today.’
“So he comes up and I was like, ‘Go on, you ain’t getting no tray.’ He just looked at me [and said], ‘OK,’ and walked off. I was like, oh shit, that didn’t really work. I wanted to kind of get into it with him a little bit.”
Later that same day, Brown was relocated into a new pod inside the jail, which was the same location where the mean-looking dude he refused to feed was also housed.
While the plan to set the tone for his jail stay in the lunchroom didn’t work, Brown expected the guy he singled out would eventually make his way over and they’d throw down there instead. That didn’t happen either, but it wasn’t long before another inmate made his way over to inform Brown that the situation was far more dire than he ever imagined.
“I’m sitting there and he’s not even looking at me or anything,” Brown recounted. “I’m like, ‘We’re going to end up f*cking getting into it at some point, right?’ I mean, he’s a big dude, so I was kind of preparing myself. I’m watching him and he’s not even paying attention to me. Finally, this guy comes up and he’s like, ‘Bro, you f*cked with the wrong dude.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He [said], ‘That guy is a prison queen.’
“Most people probably don’t know what prison queen means. What that means is he’s married to men in prison and he does not want to leave prison. His entire life is in prison. Like, all of his husbands or whatever. He’s like, ‘Bro, he’s absolutely going to stab you in your sleep. Because he does not care one bit about being in prison. Like, he’s lived his whole life in prison.’ It was like, ‘Do not sleep tonight.’”
That warning was all Brown needed to realize he messed up rather badly in an attempt to exert dominance over the jail he had to call home for the next few months.
“He never did stab me, obviously, but I stayed up for about three or four days,” Brown said. “I ended up getting moved pods again because I was freaking out the whole time. I didn’t sleep for at least three or four days. Finally, I just requested, like, ‘Can I just get to a different pod? Because this isn’t working.’ They let me do it because I was behaving and everything.”
The only time Brown was able to get any sleep during that period of time was sneaking away to the bathroom and catching a quick nap. Otherwise, he was wide awake just waiting for some jail house retribution.
“I knew something was up right there [when he just walked away in the cafeteria],” Brown said. “I was like, ‘Either that was really easy and this dude’s a complete bitch, or I’m probably getting murdered.’
“It almost backfired very badly. I’ve always had that mentality, like, when I come into a new room, I’ve got to let people know. When I was young — I’m a little bit more mature about it now — but when I was young, if I went to a party, I would usually try to f*ck with the biggest dude there. The culture I grew up in was just different. That’s what we did was fight.”
Brown never crossed paths with that inmate again, but a chance encounter after he was released let him know how close he came to death during his time in jail.
“I didn’t talk to him again ever. He never did anything so maybe it was a close call, maybe not,” Brown said. “Maybe being exaggerated. But funny enough, his cousin or his brother — I can’t remember, this is a long time ago — but a family member of his was also [an inmate] and he was the most popular tattoo artist in town. I ended up going with a friend of mine, this guy was released for about a month or so. Basically, when he was released, everybody would go get tattoos from him.
“So I was sitting there just talking to him while he was tattooing a friend of mine. We were just talking about jail and stuff, and he ended up telling me, ‘Yeah, [my family member] is a prison queen.’ I was like, ‘Is his name, whatever the guy’s name was?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s my [family member].’ I was like, oh shit! We started talking about it and I was like, ‘Would he have killed me?’ He was like, ‘He’s killed more than one man before, yeah.’”
