For years, Danica Patrick had largely been the one publicly describing what went wrong between her and Aaron Rodgers.

She said their 2020 breakup blindsided her. She later characterized the relationship as emotionally abusive and said the experience had eroded her confidence.

Now Rodgers is telling a dramatically different story.

In a candid new interview, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback pushed back against Patrick’s account of their relationship, describing a romance that he says had already broken down long before they officially separated.

According to Rodgers, there was little intimacy left, the couple had already tried counseling, and he had declined Patrick’s suggestion that they buy a Malibu property together.

To hear him tell it, this was not a sudden breakup that came without warning.

And he appears frustrated that, six years later, a very different version has become part of the public narrative surrounding him.

Rodgers Finally Responds to Patrick’s Claims

Rodgers, 42, discussed the relationship during the Sept. 10 episode of teammate Cam Heyward’s Not Just Football podcast.

Patrick, now 44, and Rodgers dated publicly from 2018 until July 2020.

Looking back, Rodgers painted an unhappy picture of the relationship’s final period. He said Patrick had recently retired from racing and, in his view, was going through a difficult emotional period. Rather than immediately walking away, Rodgers said he tried to remain supportive.

But he claimed their connection gradually deteriorated.

“There was no intimacy. There was nothing,” Rodgers said while recalling the relationship.

One moment Rodgers highlighted involved real estate.

He said he was considering buying a home in Malibu when Patrick asked whether he wanted to purchase it together with her.

His answer was no.

Rodgers also recalled Patrick proposing couples therapy. They went, he said, but the relationship ultimately ended during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those details are important because they form the foundation of Rodgers’ response to one of Patrick’s biggest claims: that the breakup caught her completely off guard.

Patrick Said the Relationship “Wore Me Down”

Patrick gave her version of the relationship in May 2025 during an appearance on The Sage Steele Show.

Asked about the most painful experience of her life, Patrick pointed to her breakup with Rodgers.

She said the split felt sudden and especially devastating because they had been living together and their lives had become deeply intertwined.

Patrick then made a far more serious allegation.

She described the relationship as “emotionally abusive,” saying it had worn down her sense of confidence to a point people who knew her public persona might never have imagined.

Patrick said that after the relationship ended, she had to rebuild her connection with herself.

She also used a particularly harsh phrase to describe Rodgers’ impact on people around him, saying that he “leaves a trail of blood.”

Rodgers clearly remembered those comments.

During his new interview, he directly disputed the idea that Patrick had been blindsided or that her characterization accurately reflected how their relationship ended.

His response was essentially that the warning signs were already everywhere: the lack of intimacy, counseling and his refusal to make another major financial commitment together.

Rodgers said Patrick’s description was “not what happened by any means.”

Patrick’s representatives did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on Rodgers’ new remarks.

But Rodgers Also Admits He Was Emotionally Unavailable

Perhaps the most revealing part of Rodgers’ explanation is that he did not portray himself as completely emotionally present during the relationship.

Instead, he connected his difficulties with Patrick to a woman the public knew very little about at the time: Brittani, the woman who eventually became his wife.

Rodgers says he first met Brittani in 2017, before beginning his relationship with Patrick.

At the time, Brittani was living in Austin but was preparing to return to Europe.

Rodgers now says one of his greatest regrets was allowing her to leave without doing more to persuade her to stay — or even proposing.

The separation affected him deeply, he said.

Although they remained in contact at times, Brittani eventually became engaged to another person. Rodgers said that experience contributed to him becoming emotionally unavailable during the relationships that followed.

“I was emotionally unavailable,” Rodgers acknowledged, saying he believed he had already met the person who had changed his life.

That admission adds a complicated layer to his dispute with Patrick.

Rodgers rejects her description of how their relationship unfolded, but he also acknowledges that his heart was not entirely available during those years.

He said he instead poured much of himself into football.

Their Paths Looked Very Different After the Breakup

After Rodgers and Patrick separated in July 2020, Rodgers soon entered another highly publicized relationship.

He began dating actress Shailene Woodley and eventually became engaged to her.

Their relationship also ended, and Rodgers has now suggested that the public account surrounding that breakup similarly failed to reflect what actually happened behind closed doors.

For Rodgers, the Patrick and Woodley relationships appear to fit into a broader frustration he has expressed about his celebrity image.

He believes outsiders have taken fragments of his personal life — his breakups, estrangement from relatives and other controversies — and built a version of him without knowing the private circumstances behind those events.

During the podcast, he complained that people often use his family estrangement as evidence that he must be difficult personally.

His argument is that the public has repeatedly seen the outcome of his private conflicts without understanding what led to them.

That does not settle the dispute between Rodgers and Patrick.

It simply means that, for perhaps the first time in such detail, both sides’ accounts are now publicly available.

Rodgers Eventually Found His Way Back to Brittani

The biggest twist in Rodgers’ relationship timeline came years later.

After separate relationships and engagements, he and Brittani eventually reconnected.

Rodgers announced in 2025 that he was married but initially kept his wife’s identity highly private. He has since said they eloped and has credited Brittani with changing the way he approaches relationships.

He has also credited his wife with helping him reconsider his long-running estrangement from members of his family.

Rodgers said experiencing what he views as unconditional love from Brittani changed his perspective and helped open him emotionally in ways he had not experienced before.

In his telling, that relationship also helped him understand something uncomfortable about the years when he was dating other women.

He believed he was supposed to be with somebody else.

Two Completely Different Memories of the Same Relationship

That leaves Rodgers and Patrick with sharply conflicting versions of a relationship that ended six years ago.

Patrick remembers the breakup as sudden and profoundly damaging. She says the relationship diminished her confidence and has described Rodgers’ behavior in extremely negative terms.

Rodgers says the relationship was already visibly deteriorating, that the couple had virtually no intimacy and that they had even gone to counseling before separating.

Patrick says she was blindsided.

Rodgers essentially says she should not have been.

There is no outside observer who can definitively resolve every private moment between them.

But Rodgers’ new comments dramatically change the public conversation because he is no longer allowing Patrick’s account to stand without an answer.

And perhaps the most striking part of his response is not the attack on his ex.

It is what Rodgers admitted about himself.

Years before Patrick, he believes he had already met the woman he ultimately wanted to marry.

When that woman moved thousands of miles away, Rodgers says something in him effectively shut down.

He continued dating.

He became engaged.

He kept playing football at an elite level.

But emotionally, he now says, part of him remained somewhere else.

That may not settle the argument over who hurt whom.

But it does offer a very different explanation for why one of the most high-profile sports relationships of the late 2010s ultimately fell apart.