Aaron Rodgers has more to say on Fauci, ESPN, family and football
Aaron Rodgers sits down with USA TODAY Sports’ Jarrett Bell at Steelers training camp to discuss why he stands by his previous comments and what’s ahead for him in the 2026 NFL season.
As he kicks off his final NFL season, Aaron Rodgers is taking the opportunity to air out his grievances about his past relationships.
The 42-year-old Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback leveled several accusations against exes Shailene Woodley and Danica Patrick in a sit-down with teammate Cam Heyward on his “Not Just Football” podcast.
The four-time NFL MVP, who was engaged to Woodley until early 2022 and dated Patrick for two years before they split in 2020, told Heyward that he “dated two women who nobody gives a f— about unless they drop my name. And they like to say their version of the history of what actually happened, and so I’m just this monster of a partner.”
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Woodley and Patrick for comment.
Rodgers mused that when he proposed at the end of 2020, “[Woodley] maybe felt like she was forced to make a decision; she could have said no.” A couple of days after they were engaged, he alleged, she expressed interest in being intimate with another unnamed man prior to their wedding.
“Her story is I ruined her life and gave her crazy depression because I left her, but the actuality is, she told me that [statement] and she took off the ring by March,” Rodgers said. “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.”
He indicated she was the one to end their relationship, saying, “She literally told me ‘I don’t want to be with you’ after we tried to have some sort of reconciliation in 2021.”
The Super Bowl champion, who is now married to a woman named Brittani, criticized the “narratives out there that are just not true” and added, “The height of their fame was when they were with me. They get clicks when they say my name, just like the idiots on TV get clicks when they say my name because I’m a lightning rod.”
Woodley has largely refrained from speaking about their relationship over the years. In 2024, the “Big Little Lies” star told Outside magazine that “I haven’t shared much about my relationship with Aaron because it always makes me cry. It was not right. But it was beautiful.”
Without offering specifics, she said “I had a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022” and “felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy.” However, she chose to stay in “toxic situation.”
In 2021, she told told Net-a-Porter’s Porter in an interview that she “dated somebody in America who was very, very famous” and found the public scrutiny “violating.”
Aaron Rodgers slams Danica Patrick’s claim he ‘leaves a trail of blood’
Rodgers dated Patrick when she had just retired from her trailblazing professional racing career. He said, “she was depressed and not fun to be around. But I didn’t leave her because I was trying to be there and be a good partner.”
He then pushed back against her comments in a 2025 interview, in which she alleged their time together was “emotionally abusive” and that Rodgers “leaves a trail of blood.”
“I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? That is not what happened by any means,'” he said.
Rodgers’ comments come days after Woodley won her first Emmy Award for her work on Season 2 of Hulu’s “Paradise.”