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BJ Penn says he tried to WALK AWAY from the man he fought outside of a bar in Hawaii last month -- but claims the other guy snapped and attacked, leaving BJ to defend himself.

The UFC Hall of Famer is finally speaking out about that crazy incident outside of the Lava Shack on the Big Island where footage published by TMZ Sports showed Penn in a fist fight with another man. Penn was knocked down in the fight but eventually got up and smothered the man.

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So, what happened? Penn told his side of the story to TSN ...

"I’m at a concert going to meet a friend that I’ve known since we were really young kids and I’m over there and an acquaintance of mine, he gets mad about something, you know something was said or it was an old past thing and then he wants to fight about it," Penn says.

"I was like, 'No, no, I don’t want to fight, we’re friends, everything is cool.' He even walks outside and I’m thinking, this is silly I’m going to go get him, calm him down and get him to come back inside and enjoy the concert, we’ve got some other friends there."

"I walk outside to go give the guy a hug and then he hits me twice and I’m like, 'No, calm down!' I try to give him another hug and he hits me a couple more times and he hits me again."

BJ Penn gives his side of the story of what took place in videos of him in an altercation released recently by @TMZ.



“The last thing I want to do is get into any type of trouble, my custody case, me seeing my kids depends on all this stuff"



Link: https://t.co/gIQsB5ctwo pic.twitter.com/LG37xGLY1X — Aaron Bronsteter (@aaronbronsteter) September 4, 2019 @aaronbronsteter

"Finally my adrenaline picked up because he was hitting me so much so I said, 'Go ahead and hit me again.'"

Penn continues ... "I thought the guy would eventually just say forget it BJ, whatever, walk away, but he hit me -- and he hit me good and knocked me down -- and then when I got back up he tried it again and I just had to defend myself and that’s what you see in the second video."

Penn claims the videos were "edited" to cut out moments where Penn was trying to hug the other man. TMZ Sports did not cut a single frame out of the clips. We posted what we were able to obtain in its entirety.

During the TSN interview, Penn also touched on the OTHER recent bar fight he got into outside of a strip club on Oahu in June, another incident captured on video.

Play video content JUNE 2019 TMZSports.com

"There was another video on TMZ of me holding somebody on the ground ... I’m in the middle of a custody case right now and from that last one I already got a lot of flak from the custody evaluator, from their lawyer of course, from my lawyer."

"The last thing I want to do is get into any type of trouble, my custody case, me seeing my kids depends on all this stuff and it’s just really strange how things just happen and you never see this kind of stuff, but here I am in a custody case and this happened twice."