Aaron Rodgers broke his silence on his two-year relationship with Danica Patrick (Getty Images)
But what he said on September 10 on the *Not Just Football* podcast, hosted by Pittsburgh Steelers teammate Cam Heyward, landed differently. Rodgers revealed that he met his now-wife Brittani in 2017, before his relationship with Patrick ever began. Because i was trying to be there and be a good partner,” he told Heyward, she was depressed and not fun to be around, but I didn’t leave her. Because there’s just narratives out there which, by the way, forever, what people hit me on all the time was he’s such a f—ing a–hole, even his family hates him, “I feel like this needs to be told. Because i’d met the person that was going to change my life, “I was emotionally unavailable for those seven or eight years.
He dismantled hers, described a relationship with no spark, and then, almost as an afterthought, revealed that he had already met the woman who would become his wife before any of it began.
He said the relationship drifted from there, losing whatever foundation it had started with. And I’m buying a house in Malibu and she goes, ‘Would you want to buy it together?’ and I said no. That is not what happened by any means,” he said. Rodgers was responding, at least in part, to an interview Patrick gave on *The Sage Steele Show* in May 2025, in which she called him “emotionally abusive” and said the relationship “wore me down to nothing. Nobody knew anything that was going on with it,” he said. “At the time, she was leaving the states and going back to Europe and my biggest regret is not begging her to stay or just, like, proposing right there,” he said. After that, I just poured everything into football,” he said. He disputes the versions his exes have told publicly, but does not pretend he was a faultless partner.
Aaron Rodgers has never been great at staying quiet. Six years after his split with Danica Patrick , Rodgers did not just offer his side of the story. Aaron Rodgers was direct. “I dated Danica. She had just retired. “Then it was going a certain direction, obviously. There was no intimacy. There was nothing. ” What clearly irritated Rodgers most was not the breakup itself, but how it had been framed publicly ever since. “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? Her words had been sitting out there for over a year. Rodgers had not forgotten them. Here is where the interview gets genuinely interesting, and a bit more complicated than a simple point-counterpoint. Her departure hit him hard. He admitted it sent him into a tailspin. That is a significant admission sitting right in the middle of an interview that otherwise reads as an attack on Patrick. Rodgers is, in effect, saying he was not fully present in any of the relationships that followed — with Patrick, and later with Shailene Woodley .