Aaron Rodgers Talks Complicated Reasons Behind His Family’s Estrangement

Aaron Rodgers is opening up about his complicated family dynamic and estrangement. The New York Jets quarterback, 41, spoke about growing up with father Ed Rodgers and mother Darla Rodgers in his Netflix docuseries Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, which premiered on Dec. 17.

“I was very fortunate when I was a kid to have parents who believed I had a very low pain tolerance,” the athlete says in his docuseries. “There’s some lessons that were hard to learn as a child, and you react or you adapt to whatever it is. I felt like there was many times where my parents felt like I was a little soft. And because of that, I made sure I was the toughest motherf—ker that I knew.”

Aaron continued to explain he has long felt misunderstood by his family members. “When I became real famous, family members said, ‘Your life is too big. We need you to be smaller. Be smaller, like, don’t talk about your life,’” he said. “It always hurt me because I just feel like, you don’t see me. And so as I found my voice to kind of question things, I also found doing things that, compared to what I grew up in, would be considered an alternative lifestyle.”

The Rodgers family drama made headlines in 2016 when Aaron’s brother, Jordan Rodgers, revealed on The Bachelorette that the NFL star was estranged from the rest of his family.

“It wasn’t like I was super duper close with everybody in the family. I was close with my little brother,” Aaron revealed in his doc. “But in actuality, it goes back to stuff from high school that kind of made me feel distant. Stuff in college, stuff post-college.”

While Aaron wanted to be “quiet” about his family issues as a person in the public eye, Jordan decided to bring up the drama on the ABC dating show. “And what do they do? They go on a bulls—t show and leave two empty chairs,” Aaron said, referring to the two empty seats meant to represent him and then-girlfriend Olivia Munn during Jordan’s hometown date with now-wife JoJo Fletcher.

“They all agreed this was a good thing to do, to leave two empty chairs at a stupid dating show that my brother just went on to get famous — his words, not mine. That he ended up winning,” Aaron continued. “But a dinner that was during the season, I was never asked to go to. Not that I would’ve gone.”

Aaron Rodgers: Enigma is currently streaming on Netflix.