Bodybuilder Rich Piana has created a stir online after footage of him slap boxing a disabled fan was posted online.
As reported by BroScience, Piana did have his reasons for the bizarre incident – the man who he hit had been trolling Piana and his wife pretty hard online.
Which he explained in a Facebook post following the hefty slap.
Another pic taken after the incident- A order 66 is when @lordvader25 orders all of his followers to attack your social…
Posted by Rich Piana on Sunday, May 1, 2016
Jason Genova -AKA @lordvader25- had released an ‘order 66’ calling on his online followers to fill Piana and wife Sara’s social media pages with hundreds of abusive messages.
But after investigating Piana realised that Jason was the man behind all of the accounts.
He explained:
Then what I figured out is these 100’s of people that will attack others for no reason on social media don’t really exist!! @lordvader25 makes up 100’s of fake accounts and then orders these people “the fake accounts to attack us! He literally is doing all this on his own he does not have 100’s of people that will do whatever he wishes for!! Lol!
Think about it? I have 780,000 followers over 160 athletes and I don’t have 100’s of people that will attack others on my command. He has caused so much damage and fucked with so many people for NO reason!!
His reasoning for attacking me was I never invited him to be an athlete on my 5% team? Well I didn’t even know who he was or never even seen a pic of him then 100’s of threatening comments just started appearing on all my social media. I started deleting and blocking one after the other for hours and they just kept coming but eventually they stopped. Then the next day it started all over again but not nearly as many. Then I realized it was him because he could not make new profiles fast enough.
So when the pair met Piana decided to settle the matter…
What Piana had failed to recognise was that powerlifter Jason was disabled.
He posted again to highlight he was unaware of this fact, and had he known, his actions would probably have been very different.
This pic was taken after the slap boxing and I have to say I had no idea that @lordvader25 had any disability's at all!…
Posted by Rich Piana on Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Piana said:
If I knew he had any kind of disabilities I would never of asked him to engage in a slap boxing match with me…He truly Loves this sport and is trying to be the best he can be!
What he wanted from the beginning was to film a video together and he still wants that to happen more than anything. So we need to make that shit happen! Maybe him slapping the shit out of me? I mentioned that to him and he said no he just wants to do a training video.
Well it looks like everyone learned a valuable lesson on this occasion, and hopefully we will get to see the pair’s training video soon!