‘PVZ’ Breaks Foot During Instagram Stunt

Combat sports may be dangerous, but not as dangerous as performing social media stunts apparently.

Paige VanZant hasn’t competed in combat sports since a July 2021 decision loss to Rachael Ostovich at BareKnuckle FC 19. After a mysterious last-minute fight cancellation for BKFC London, the promotion had hopes that “12 Guage” would return for their big annual KnuckleMania event in February, but alas … Paige just revealed on her social media accounts that she broke her foot and won’t be doing anything without crutches for a while.

A video on Instagram showed her at the doctor’s office in front of an x-ray of her foot. “When they say you might have broken three bones and not just one…” the caption said as she did a lil TikTok dance to The Weekend’s Creepin’ with the lyrics “I don’t wanna know.”

As for how the injury happened? Well, let’s just say being an Influencer can be dangerous business. VanZant was up in Anchorage, Alaska and decided to make a video jumping off her balcony into some soft-looking snow. Unfortunately, the snow wasn’t quite as soft as expected, and the land cracked a metatarsal bone in her foot. She shared a video of the crash landing too, with the caption “Awesome way to end the year!!”

Fortunately for Paige, she’s hit that level of popularity on social media with her 3M+ Instagram and 580K+ OnlyFans subscribers that she doesn’t really have to fight any more. BKFC president Dave Feldman was saying he had his doubts PVZ would return to the Bare Knuckle arena even before she broke her foot.

“We were talking about putting her on KnuckleMania [in February], and we’re going to be talking to her manager again next week,” Feldman said in early December. “We’ll see what happens with that. I’d love to have her back if she wants to come back and fight and test herself one more time. She’s doing other things and she’s doing very, very well at those and making a lot of money. So I don’t know. If she wants to come back, she’s welcome to, but we don’t know for sure if she’s coming back. She does have a place here. We’ll see shortly.”

VanZant also signed with pro wrestling promotion AEW in March 2022, appearing multiple times in promos leading up to her tag team wrestling debut in May at Double or Nothing (watch the highlights here). She put on a solid showing, but may have priced herself out of regular rotation by declaring AEW needed to “pay me the PPV dollars to show up.”

For now, the social media dollars will have to do until PVZ recovers from this broken foot.