Your bag is empty.
Lucero Acosta’s night was not going well – and that was before her boob popped out during her mixed martial arts fight.
It was her debut fight for the upstart Professional Fighters League in Chicago, and Acosta was exhausted in the third round of her Oct. 16 flyweight bout with Shannon Clark. As Acosta was on the mat, Clark rained down a flurry of elbow strikes, forearm smashes and punches, busting open a cut above Acosta’s right eye. While Acosta, a seven-year pro known as “La Loba,” was trying to survive the onslaught from the ground attack, she felt a breeze against her exposed chest.
“They got a breeze, and I felt it,” she said in Spanish to Playboy. “As soon as I turned around, my boob was out.”
Yes, Acosta had flashed the live audience and those live-streaming the event after her top shifted while Clark was on top of her. About 30 seconds later, Clark won via TKO, snapping Acosta’s four-match winning streak dating back to 2022.
But the night wasn’t a total loss for Acosta, who is also an OnlyFans model. After the fight, she wrote on Instagram that the wardrobe malfunction had netted her $500,000 on OnlyFans. “Extra payment on @onlyfans because we showed our nipples during the @pflmma live,” she wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post, according to the New York Post.
“There’s nothing I could do about [my breast popping out], so I simply take it as a humor,” she said in an interview this week. “It was like, ‘Oh wow, that happened.'”
Acosta, 32, declined to comment on whether the figure was her total earnings or new subscriber revenue due to the incident. She said her coach, Nestor Flores, who joined her for the interview and translated her answers, had asked her not to comment on the money she earned on OnlyFans as a result of her breast popping out.
“People can think however they want to think,” she said. Flores added, “Everybody says that she gained more than what she actually lost in the fight.”
A native of Tijuana, Mexico, Acosta moved to the United States in 2018 and met her husband in El Centro, Calif., she said. She was undocumented at the time, so she worked as a waitress, cleaned houses and also helped sell tamales at a women’s shelter to make enough money to survive. But not long after moving to the States, the then-24-year-old’s life changed forever when she said she was the victim of domestic violence in her marriage. The turmoil made her want to learn self-defense – and pushed her to the fight game.
“After the stuff happened with the domestic violence, that’s when I wanted to be a fighter,” Acosta said.
After she left her husband, and eventually got her green card, it wasn’t long before she met Flores at his gym in San Diego. She had gone pro only after about six months as an amateur, so Flores saw the raw potential. He also noticed she lacked the fundamentals needed for having a shot at a long career.
“She had no clue whatsoever of what she wanted to do,” he said. “She’s come a long way, and she’s a student of the game … She didn’t choose MMA. MMA chose her.”
Around the time of her fifth professional fight in 2022, Acosta joined OnlyFans, which allowed her “to pay the rent and my daily expenses, while completely focusing on MMA training,” she said. On her OnlyFans account, which has nearly 48,000 likes, the tag line on her page says, “Vivo para Ganar!!,” or, “I Live to Win!!”
Acosta had already experienced viral fame after a video of her training underwater in a bikini made headlines earlier this year. That was the furthest thing from her mind when she and Flores were strategizing her gameplan for Clark. The goal was to keep the fight off the mat and not fall prey to Clark’s exceptional ground-and-pound game. But fatigue caught up with Acosta, and she found herself exhausted and bloodied on the mat in the third round.
She was also partially topless.
“I figured that the ref would kind of give a slight pause and fix it, and adjust it real quick,” Acosta said. “When the ref didn’t do that, I had to protect myself and went into the fetal position to cover myself up.”
When asked whether the wardrobe malfunction was intentional, she laughed.
“Shannon wanted to pull my boob out,” Acosta joked. “It wasn’t me.”
In the days after the viral moment, she has emphasized that she wants to be an MMA champion someday and eventually get into boxing. Acosta also noted her ultimate goal of wanting to be an advocate for domestic-violence survivors like herself.
“I don’t know why it happened to me,” she said, “but I can learn from it.”
