Aaron Rodgers Opens Up About Family Drama in New Netflix Doc

Aaron Rodgers opens up about the dysfunction in his family that caused him to “re-parent” himself.

Netflix has released a new three-part docuseries, Aaron Rodgers; Enigma, that details the issues that he’s had with his family over the years — particularly, the rift that he had with his parents.

“At times when you have some dysfunction or some separation in your family life, you have to kind of re-parent yourself and give yourself what you didn’t get or wanted to hear more of when you were a kid, and I think for me, I just wanted to hear, ‘I’m proud of you,’" said Rodgers in the docuseries’ second episode.

"I had to find a way to be my own parent in those moments and say, 'Hey, fuck being perfect. I'm proud of who you are and what you’ve accomplished on and off the field.' And forgiveness for all the mistakes, because I was just trying to do the best I could and a lot of times it wasn't good enough,” he added.

Although Rodgers’ relationship troubles with his family became well known later in his career, the NFL player explained that it started for him before he even got into the NFL. "It wasn't like I was super-duper close with everybody in the family," he said. "In actuality, it goes back to stuff from high school that made me feel distant. Stuff from college, stuff post-college. And I was quiet about it. Because I thought the best way to do it, was just, don't talk about it publicly. And what do they do?"

One situation that caused an issue was when his family excluded him and his then-girlfriend Olivia Munn from an episode of The Bachelorette in 2016 where Rodgers’ younger brother, Jordan was competing.

In this particular episode, Jordan had made it to the show’s “final two” suitors and she went to his hometown (Chico, Calif.) to meet his family. When she ate with the family, there were two chairs left purposely empty for both Aaron and Munn.

“And what do they do? They go on a bullshit show and leave two empty chairs,” explained Rodgers.“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. But a dinner that was during the [football] season, I was never asked to go to. Not that I would’ve gone."