Hearn Claims Benn Offered $250K Hush Money After Zuffa Signing

The fallout between Eddie Hearn and Conor Benn has taken another turn.

The Matchroom Boxing promoter has revealed that following Benn's move to Zuffa Boxing, the fighter reached out and offered him $250,000 to stay quiet and refrain from making negative public comments about the situation. Hearn says he also turned down a separate invitation to become Benn's special advisor in the same breath.

The sequence of events that led here began when Benn parted ways with Hearn and signed with Dana White's Zuffa Boxing operation, leaving Matchroom out of negotiations entirely and blindsiding a promoter who considered himself close to the fighter after years of working together.

Hearn described feeling betrayed at the time and has been publicly vocal about his grievances ever since, including entering into a very public war of words with White that has at various points included talk of the two men settling things in a boxing ring.

Benn subsequently signed a lucrative multi-fight extension with Zuffa Boxing in April, deepening the wound for Hearn and removing any remaining ambiguity about where the fighter's future lies. The $250,000 offer, if accurate, represents an attempt to manage the public narrative around a departure that had already generated significant negative press.

The offer itself raises more questions than it answers. A hush payment implies there is something worth keeping quiet about, and Hearn's decision to reject it and go public with the approach suggests he has no intention of allowing the story to be managed from Benn's side.

Benn has a confirmed September 12 fight against WBC welterweight champion Ryan Garcia in Las Vegas. The business around that fight, and the increasingly complicated relationship between the people involved in his career, shows no sign of quieting down before then.

“Take your special advisor and stick it up your f—king slimy arse. What he did was, Conor Benn offered me money to keep my mouth shut, it said it in the email from his lawyer. We’ll give you this amount of money, I’ll tell you, we’ll give you $250,000 to not say anything negative about us. F—k off,” Hearn