- A viral clip shows a Queens instructor working a takedown into knee on belly on a man who had just signed up at his academy.
- The gym says the man began harassing women at the school days after arriving, and they moved quickly once complaints surfaced.
- The moment is one data point in a wider, well-documented problem of harassment in Jiu-Jitsu — one survey found 159 of 258 women reported it.
- The instructor’s response, and the reporting advice that follows, point toward how gyms can actually prevent this.
A viral clip is making the rounds in the BJJ community this week after members of a Queens academy realized exactly who they had been training alongside.
The footage comes from JiujitsuNYC, run by Professor Alvaro Tautiva on Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights. It shows the instructor working a takedown into knee on belly control against a man who had recently signed up as a student. The context, laid out in the gym’s Instagram post, is the real story.
What Happened At JiujitsuNYC
According to the academy, the man arrived looking to learn Jiu-Jitsu, and nothing about him immediately stood out. Staff chalked his early behavior up to eccentricity.
“We noticed something was off with him after the first couple of days,” the gym wrote. “We still had no idea about his history. We just thought he was an oddball, and that’s not a crime within itself, but then he started harassing some of the women in our academy, so we dealt with him rather quickly.”
That changed the calculus fast. Once complaints surfaced, the gym says the priority became two things: protecting its members, and making sure it did not arm someone dangerous with a martial art.
Unfortunately, this guy came to our academy trying to learn Jiujitsu. Thank goodness we found out about his past and didn’t make this guy dangerous by teaching him a martial art. But we did have to restrain him.
– JiujitsuNYC, via Instagram –
The takedown into knee on belly became the visual — a positional demonstration of control, not punishment.
A Recurring Problem Bigger Than One Gym
As striking as the clip is, it is one instance of a pattern the sport has been forced to confront for years.
A widely cited survey by a Brazilian sports outlet across 2017 and 2018 found that, of 258 women who responded, 159 reported experiencing harassment in Jiu-Jitsu. The breakdown is uncomfortable: roughly half said the behavior came from a teammate, and more than a third named their own professor. Most of it happened on the mats.
The numbers line up with a string of public cases. Former MMA athlete and black belt Ericka Almeida reported an abusive relationship with her former coach, a case taken up by Brazilian federal police.
A series called “Vozes do Tatame” — Voices From The Mat — was created to encourage women to share their stories under the hashtag #QueroLutarEmPaz, or “I Want To Fight In Peace.”
Beyond Brazil, the Lloyd Irvin team faced well-documented accusations in 2013, and black belt Marcel Gonçalves was sentenced after pleading guilty to having sex with a teenage student.
The point is not that grappling is uniquely dangerous. It is that gyms are close-contact spaces with built-in trust and power imbalances, and the sport has too often failed to act on that.
What Prevention Actually Looks Like
The JiujitsuNYC response is instructive precisely because it moved fast. The gym noticed something was off early, took the first complaints seriously, and acted — removing the person and going public rather than letting the situation quietly fester.
For students, the practical advice that has circulated alongside these cases is straightforward. Tell someone on the team you trust. If there are texts, calls or messages, save them.
Then escalate — to the academy’s leadership, to police or the justice system, and to a lawyer or help-line where available. The common thread in every case that gets resolved is that someone spoke up before a situation could escalate further.
For gym owners, the lesson is structural. A safe academy does not treat red flags as personality quirks, and it does not wait for a headline to set expectations about how members are treated.
A Community That Shows Up For Its Own
There is a quieter detail in this story. Tautiva’s academy is not a faceless chain — it is a neighborhood fixture in Jackson Heights, the kind of gym his own family helped paint and plaster before it opened, a place that fought to survive the pandemic by holding classes on the open street and offering free lessons for local kids.
That matters because prevention in Jiu-Jitsu rarely comes down to one dramatic takedown. It comes down to exactly the kind of vigilance a community school can provide: people who know their members, notice when something is off, and refuse to look the other way. The viral clip will fade. That standard is what actually keeps people safe.
