Karo Parisyan Says Neil Melanson is Full of s**t and That He Was Never Addicted to Painkillers

(Video courtesy HDNet)

When Karo Parisyan’s former student and training partner Neil Melanson came forward in the wake of “The Heat” pulling out of his UFC 106 fight with Dustin Hazelett and his subsequent public firing by UFC president Dana White to “reveal” that the Armenian fighter was addicted to pain killers, I couldn’t help but think, “How could a guy who called himself a friend do that to one of his pals?”

Looking at the situation objectively, nobody had ever really heard of Melanson and the interview he did outing Karo got his name in everyone’s mouths, but really didn’t help Parisyan’s so-called problem. If anything, it just gave the already in-motion rumor mill more steam.

Well, according to Parisyan, Melanson’s version of events is a bout as legit as the no-gi grappling black belt he awarded Randy Couture after he tapped out James Toney.

Here’s what Karo said about the allegations during Friday night’s episode of HDNet’s Inside MMA.

“Armenians have a saying. I’m gonna tell you this. It might mean [something] stupid in English — it might not make sense in English, but in Armenian it makes a lot of sense. ‘I’d rather have my eyes pop out of my head than my name come out.’ When your name comes out as, ‘This guy did this,’ it’s the worst thing that can happen. I took two pain pills for my torn hamstring, legally,” he explained. “I had the freaking paper with the prescription. I had a problem; I had a torn hamstring when I was supposed to fight Matt Hughes that never healed. I can open my pants up in front of the whole national television right now and show that dent behind my thigh. I took pain pills. I completely forgot about it [when I was filling out the pre-fight drug screening form] because it was legal. I had the prescription for it.”

Bas Rutten interrupted to say the same thing happened to him, even when he listed the pain killers he had taken the morning of his July 2007 World Fighting Alliance bout with Ruben “Warpath” Villareal.

“I had the same problem. I told them also and they said, ‘You’ve got to bring everything in your dressing room, what you have to bring,’ and I said, ‘Here’s what I took this morning,’ and it was all good,” Bas recalled. “And then the test came back and they said, ‘Oh, you used painkillers.’ I said, ‘Didn’t I just explain to you that I couldn’t kick higher than a low kick and everything was thrown up?’ It’s unbelievable.”

Parisyan said he admits he screwed up by not informing the commission that he took the prescribed drug, which he relied upon to be able to fight against Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 94, but the punishment definitely did not fit the crime.

“When I was in that room in Las Vegas [for the hearing] and we were going over what happened, where they caught me was they asked me, ‘Why didn’t you write that you took pain medication on the piece of paper before the weigh-ins when you have to fill it out?” Parisyan recalled. “I didn’t and they grabbed that paper and they showed me that. They did what they had to do. This is not an enhancement drug. I’m drooling walking out to fight. People do steroids — an enhancement drug to make them do better during the fight and they get a six-month suspension and a $12,000 fine. Dude, I got a $32,000 fine and a nine-month suspension. It kicked me — it broke my back. People need to understand, don’t judge me until you’ve been in the same situation.”