NFL legend Aaron Rodgers reunited with his family after at least a decade of estrangement, though one member of the Rodgers clan was seemingly missing.
On Monday, July 20, Aaron, 42, shared an Instagram carousel of himself posing with his parents, Ed and Darla Rodgers, and older brother, Luke Rodgers. While the family was all smiles in these new photos, Aaron’s younger brother, The Bachelorette star Jordan Rodgers, was noticeably absent.
“Another bonding week,” Aaron captioned the carousel.
Aaron’s rift with his family reportedly dates back at least a decade. When Jordan, 37, competed on future wife Jojo Fletcher’s season of The Bachelorette, he revealed to her that he wasn’t in touch with Aaron.
“Like I said, I have a great relationship with my brother Luke. Me and Aaron don’t really have that much of a relationship,” he said in the 2016 episode. “It’s just kind of the way he’s chosen to do life and I’ve chosen to stay close with my family and my parents and my brother. Yeah, it’s not ideal and I love him and I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in his shoes and have the pressure he has, the demands from people that he has. Don’t have hard feelings against him, it’s just how things go right now.”
The Bachelorette memorably left two empty chairs for Aaron and his then-girlfriend Olivia Munn at a family dinner — which the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback took issue with.
“They go on a bulls*** show and leave two empty chairs,” Aaron said on his 2024 Netflix series Enigma. “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 season, I was never asked to go to. Not that I would’ve gone.”
Aaron was not in attendance when Jordan and Fletcher, 35, tied the knot at the Sunstone Winery in Santa Ynez, California, in May 2022.
In another Aaron Rodgers: Enigma scene, Aaron briefly touched on the origins of his rift with Jordan.
“It wasn’t like I was super duper close with everybody in the family. I was close with my little brother,” Aaron said of his brother. “But in actuality, it goes back to stuff from high school that kind of made me feel distant. Stuff in college, stuff post-college.”
He also pointed to his “rigid” religious upbringing as a point of contention.
“I grew up in a very white, dogmatic church and that just didn’t really serve me,” he recalled in Enigma. “It was very rigid in structure. I’m not a rigid person. Shame, guilt, judgment. It was like, ‘We have the truth. Our way or the highway. Our way is heaven; your way is hell.’ Even talking to my parents, it was very black and white. Like, somebody has to be wrong, somebody has to be right. I just slowly uncoupled from that in high school.”
More recently, Aaron blasted his family for speaking publicly about their rift for years before he finally decided to address the situation.
“If you look at the saga with my family, for years it was one-sided,” Rodgers said on The Pat McAfee Show in March. “They were making shots in the media saying bulls***.”
He added, “I never said anything until it got to the point where I’m like, ‘Alright, enough is enough.’”
It is not clear whether anyone in Aaron’s family was in attendance when he married wife Brittani in 2024.
