Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

The NFL returns tonight, and unfortunately, we are kicking off the season by having to listen to Aaron Rodgers say some truly heinous things about his ex-girlfriends. The Steelers quarterback appeared on his teammate Cam Heyward’s podcast Not Just Football on Thursday and decided to rip into Shailene Woodley and Danica Patrick for basically no reason.

It started when Rodgers was asked, “What do most people get wrong about you?” Instead of saying, “People think I’m past my prime, but I feel better than ever,” or whatever a normal guy might say, he decided to bring up Woodley and Patrick.

“I dated two women who nobody gives a fuck about unless they drop my name,” Rodgers began. “And they like to say their version of the history of what happened, and so I’m just this monster of a partner, and it’s just fucking horse shit.”

Right. Well, it didn’t take any prodding for Rodgers to share his version of what went down in his relationships with both Woodley and Patrick. “I date Shailene, I propose, and she says yes,” Rodgers said of his engagement to Woodley in late 2020. “She maybe felt like she was forced to make a decision; she could have said no. But not a couple of days after that, she tells me before we get married, like, ‘I got to go fuck this guy.’”

“’Cause her story is, I ruined her life and gave her crazy depression because I left her, but in actuality, she told me that and took off the ring by March,” Rodgers went on. “I proposed in December, took off the ring by March, and we had a couple of times when we tried to get reunited and nothing ever happened, and there wasn’t even a relationship in ’22 to break off. She literally told me, ‘I don’t want to be with you.’”

To be clear, Woodley has not exactly accused her ex of ruining her life. She told Outside in 2024 that their relationship “was not right. But it was beautiful.” The actress added that she had “a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022” but was polite enough to not explicitly say it was her breakup with Rodgers. She described having been in a “toxic situation” and experiencing “the lowest low of my life” in the wake of it.

As for Patrick, whom he dated from 2018 to 2020, Rodgers accused her of being “depressed and not fun to be around” but insisted, “I didn’t leave her because I was trying to be there and be a good partner.” “There was no intimacy,” he added. “There was nothing.” Rodgers also said that they went into couples counseling after he told her he didn’t want to buy a house in Malibu together, only for COVID to hit and for them to be “stuck together.” The couple broke up in July 2020.

Last year, Patrick called her relationship with Rodgers “emotionally abusive,” adding, “People could never imagine that I would lack any confidence or belief in the simple things about who I am. Everything was torn to bits. Yeah, he leaves a trail of blood.” During his rant, Rodgers took issue with this account. “She tells a story that, ‘I was so blindsided by getting left by you, and he leaves a trail of blood around.’ I’m like, what are you talking about? That is not what happened by any means,” he said.

According to Rodgers, these women vulnerably discussing a trying time in their lives were actually just their attempts to get attention. “No one knows what they’re doing,” Rodgers said. (I can tell you off the top of my head that Woodley just won an Emmy for her role on Paradise, but whatever.) “The height of their fame was when they were with me. They get clicks when they say my name.” He then went on a bizarre tangent about how random workers were thanking him for sticking it to Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2020.

Luckily for Rodgers, he’s free of all that now. He has a loving wife named Brittani, a woman who has never been seen in public but whom Rodgers swears he met back in 2017. (Her last name is still unknown, purportedly for her privacy.) “My biggest regret is not begging her to stay or just proposing to her right there,” Rodgers said of his first brush with his wife. That certainly would have saved Woodley and Patrick a lot of suffering.

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