Rener Gracie and Tom DeBlass recently agreed to have a live discussion about the $46 million BJJ injury lawsuit that made headlines recently, and now that’s taken place. The story has unfolded slowly over the last few weeks and it all started when a judgement was made in a recent trial, awarding a BJJ student who was injured in a class $46 million. While that in itself would have been quite shocking, one of the main things that emerged from the trial was the fact that Rener Gracie was actually involved as an expert witness for the plaintiff.
Naturally, this sparked massive amounts of conversation online and several prominent figures in the community weighed in on the news and shared their opinions with the public. One of those figures was Tom DeBlass, who was actually one of those to share the footage of the incident when it first became available to the public. Not all of the conversation was focused on the case itself though, and there was also a fair amount of criticism directed at Rener himself for his involvement. That led to him sharing a video that explained his testimony in the case, and his actual opinion on whether the injury was the result of negligence or not.
Rener also answered another of the criticisms that were made against him when he decided to donate the entire fee he was paid for his work as an expert witness to charity. There was still plenty of unanswered questions floating around though of course, and that’s what led to the live discussion between Rener Gracie and Tom DeBlass. The pair managed to get together and arrange to have a long-form conversation about the news and it turned out to be both enlightening and educational for the wider BJJ community.
The full live discussion between Rener Gracie and Tom DeBlass was uploaded to the official Instagram accounts of both men:
