Danaher Helps Remove Man Who Harassed BJJ Star Danielle Kelly
Video making the rounds this week shows a scene most BJJ gyms never have to deal with in public: coach John Danaher and competitor Dan Manasoiu calmly walking an uninvited visitor out of Kingsway…
Video making the rounds this week shows a scene most BJJ gyms never have to deal with in public: coach John Danaher and competitor Dan Manasoiu calmly walking an uninvited visitor out of Kingsway Jiu Jitsu. According to reporting from BJJEE, the man had reportedly been leaving persistent, unwanted comments toward Jiu Jitsu competitor Danielle Kelly online before showing up at the gym itself.
Kelly addressed it herself once the clip started circulating. "Creepers will not be tolerated," she wrote, thanking Danaher and her teammates for "quickly taking care of the situation," while adding a line that will land uncomfortably close to home for a lot of training partners reading it: "Unfortunately these types of things happen no matter how much you try to avoid. People are crazy out there. Be safe." The full account, as first reported, is available via BJJEE.
There isn't much more to the story than that, and there doesn't need to be. What happened at Kingsway is short, unglamorous, and exactly what should happen: a coach and a teammate noticed a problem, moved toward it instead of away from it, and handled it without turning it into a bigger scene than it needed to be.
The academy as the first line of defense
Online harassment aimed at visible BJJ competitors isn't new, but the internet has made the distance between a stranger's comment section and a stranger's presence at your gym shorter than it used to be. Danielle Kelly trains, teaches, and competes in public — that's the job of a high-level Jiu Jitsu athlete in 2026, where Instagram and YouTube reach are as much a part of a career as medals are. The tradeoff nobody signs up for is that visibility online can occasionally follow you back to a physical room.
What made Kingsway's response notable wasn't drama — it was the opposite. Danaher, one of the sport's most recognizable coaches, and Manasoiu, a competitor training in the room, treated an uninvited and unwelcome presence as exactly what it was: a threat to a teammate's safety, not a confrontation to be filmed for content. That instinct — protect the person in the room first, sort out the rest after — is the same instinct good gyms have always tried to build into their culture, even if it rarely gets tested this literally.
Jiu Jitsu gyms have always been about who's got your back
Ask most people why they stuck with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu past the first few brutal months and the answer usually isn't the armbars. It's the room. It's the fact that fifteen or twenty people who started as strangers gradually become the people who notice when something is off, who show up for you outside the gym, who treat "we take care of our own" as more than a slogan on a rash guard. Kelly's own words point straight at that — she didn't credit a security guard or a policy. She credited her coach and her teammates.
That culture isn't automatic. It gets built, roll by roll, over years, the same way technique does. A gym where people actually look out for each other doesn't happen because a sign on the wall says "respect" — it happens because the coaches model it when it matters, in moments exactly like this one. Danaher removing that visitor himself, rather than delegating it or ignoring it, is a small data point in a much larger pattern: how a coach handles the uncomfortable, non-technical moments says as much about a school as anything taught on the mats.
What it means for the rest of us
Most people training BJJ will never deal with anything close to this. But every gym, from a competition powerhouse like Kingsway down to a small neighborhood academy, benefits from asking the same question this incident raises: if someone showed up uninvited and made a training partner uncomfortable, would the room notice, and would it act? The answer shouldn't depend on whether the person involved has a following.
It's also worth sitting with Kelly's own reminder that these things happen "no matter how much you try to avoid." That's not really a Jiu Jitsu-specific problem, but Jiu Jitsu gyms are unusually well-positioned to handle it — they're rooms full of people trained to stay calm under pressure and to physically manage a bad situation without letting it spiral. Kingsway didn't need to escalate anything. Two people walked a problem to the door, and that was enough.
See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.