#SpeakingOut: Industry-wide sexual misconduct (assault/harrassment/grooming/etc) accusations and their repercussions

[Mad Dog]

54 minutes ago, C.S. said:

With a lawyer like this, Riddle is in great hands. 

1. The lawyer is too stupid to scan a document or draft a press release. Instead, he took a photo of a piece of paper with his phone.

2. On top of that, the lawyer is too stupid to use a clean sheet of paper.

BROOOOO!!!

I deal with lawyers a lot. Most of them are technological imbeciles in my experience. 

[Coffey]

Man, the title saying "several" doesn't even feel big  enough anymore...

Pro wrestling couldn't avoid the eye of scrutiny forever. We knew that the hammer was coming eventually. So many people in wrestling have gotten away with so much for so long. Vince McMahon himself being a rich, white man in a niche world where the outside looking in casually just brushed the wrestling world off as not mattering, or ever getting any sort of media coverage, doesn't matter when the people are on social media & not TV news outlets that can be bought off.

The Jimmy Snuka shit came to light years later & went to trial. It would be great to see some of the old sleeze from McMahon himself, such as the rape allegations from the female referee Rita Chatterton get another look.

NXT UK is doomed. NWA just released all their talent from their contracts. AEW & WWE are both releasing official statements. Wrestlers are getting lawyers & people are getting fired. And it's only the second day...

[Matt D]

I'm seeing coverage places I wouldn't normally see coverage. I half wonder if this might not be the moment it does reach Vince, to be honest. I think we're going to hit Trump's rally and potential protests this weekend and there'll just be so much news it gets drowned out from a mainstream perspective though.

[C.S.]

29 minutes ago, Coffey said:

NWA just released all their talent from their contracts.

Where did you hear this?

[The Thread Killer]

I know it was announced on Reddit but I haven’t seen it anywhere else. I wouldn’t be surprised. The NWA was basically a two-man outfit with Lagana doing all the day-to-day work. They didn’t even have an office, he worked out of his home. With him gone the whole thing is pretty much screwed.  

[KawadaSmile]

AEW released a statement on Jimmy Havoc and reactions have been mixed: 

 

And, as @Coffey said, the title needs an adjustment.

[C.S.]

21 minutes ago, The Thread Killer said:

I know it was announced on Reddit but I haven’t seen it anywhere else. I wouldn’t be surprised. The NWA was basically a two-man outfit with Lagana doing all the day-to-day work. They didn’t even have an office, he worked out of his home. With him gone the whole thing is pretty much screwed.  

Lagana was the "hired help" - a stupid and goofy weirdo at best and something much darker at worst. His departure will be a massive inconvenience for the NWA, no doubt, but it won't be a fed-killer unless Corgan is ready to throw in the towel. Otherwise, Lagana can and will be replaced.

15 minutes ago, KawadaSmile said:

And, as @Coffey said, the title needs an adjustment.

Someone must have just adjusted it between your post and mine, because it was already changed by the time I came in to post.

[KawadaSmile]

5 minutes ago, C.S. said:

Someone must have just adjusted it between your post and mine, because it was already changed by the time I came in to post.

Well, that would be me, bubba. Hope it makes the situation justice

[C.S.]

5 minutes ago, KawadaSmile said:

Well, that would be me, bubba. Hope it makes the situation justice

It's perfect, Bubba.

[Migs]

21 hours ago, Migs said:

Yeah, paging through that account is such a mess. There's a lot of brave people coming forward with stories (and receipts) being mixed with "I heard this guy is sketchy." Jimmy Havoc sounds like a real shitty boyfriend, but I feel a little bad for him that he's apparently on a list with someone who was propositioning 12 year olds. 

Well, gonna backtrack here, because now there's a pretty straightforward rape allegation against Havoc. https://twitter.com/katsandcrows/status/1274005735458983941?s=20

[C.S.]

3 minutes ago, Migs said:

Well, gonna backtrack here, because now there's a pretty straightforward rape allegation against Havoc. https://twitter.com/katsandcrows/status/1274005735458983941?s=20

But AEW "wishes Jimmy Havoc all the best."

As bad as WWE is with its selective releases, that's real amateur hour on AEW's part.

[Al]

1 hour ago, Mad Dog said:

I deal with lawyers a lot. Most of them are technological imbeciles in my experience. 

That whole thing misses the best part. The first version the lawyer posted was printed on a sheet of labels.

[Migs]

3 minutes ago, C.S. said:

But AEW "wishes Jimmy Havoc all the best."

As bad as WWE is with its selective releases, that's real amateur hour on AEW's part.

The discussion on Twitter is that sending him to rehab is to mitigate a suicide risk and possibility of violence. (It's also possible that statement was released before this came out, I dunno.)

[Mad Dog]

5 minutes ago, Al said:

That whole thing misses the best part. The first version the lawyer posted was printed on a sheet of labels.

I had to deal with a file a lawyer sent over yesterday and they somehow got a 24 page PDF to be over 100 mb which made it a pain in the ass to get to anyone. 

[C.S.]

1 minute ago, Migs said:

The discussion on Twitter is that sending him to rehab is to mitigate a suicide risk and possibility of violence. (It's also possible that statement was released before this came out, I dunno.)

Nah, it came out nine hours ago and AEW's tweet was two hours ago.

Sending him to rehab is not the issue - that's probably a smart, sound decision - but wishing an accused rapist "all the best" is seriously tone deaf and exposes what a "young" company AEW still is. 

[KawadaSmile]

 

yiiiiiiikes

[goodhelmet]

I was just about to post a link to the same thing

https://www.ringsidenews.com/2020/06/19/velveteen-dream-accused-of-being-a-child-predator-as-more-victims-emerge/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[peachchaos]

Another rough day in a seemingly endless string of hard times. It’s a shame it ever had to come to this point but this will be for the best. A lot of this goes way beyond wrestling and yet I don’t feel comfortable supporting a fandom for an industry that has been so dark for so long. For its entire existence, wrestling has been a boy club dominated by bullies and predators who brag in shoot interviews about sexual conquests and mean spirited pranks. For this all to be exposed is nothing new to any of us; they’ve been flaunting this in our faces for decades. And they kayfabed themselves into believing this had to be part of the business. That, to me, is the saddest part. That isn’t manhood. It certainly isn’t work. We are looking at young men and women who have suffered varying degrees of abuse, assault, and worst of all they were never going to talk about any of this until now. Of course this isn’t just in wrestling. Of course there will be some false accusations and some names that don’t deserve to get dirty will get dragged through the mud. None of this is fun. I watch and follow wrestling to escape all this nonsense. Seriously, I use it when I need to disassociate completely.  Today sucked. I’ve watched the Danielson-Ki tap out match probably 20 times because I don’t know what else to do. 
 

I won’t name names but I have no problem losing some heroes. This isn’t a moment for us to cry about losing our favorite action figures. I’m also getting over the shock of each individual name showing up and looking forward to industry wide reform on so many levels. These next few months as shows start back up will be very telling. 
 

Also worth noting the main twitter account announcing these things went down about an hour ago.

[SirEdger]

I think it went down way sooner than that. Like somewhere this afternoon.

[El-P]

It sucks that it has to happen, but it's great that it's happening.

Also, remember Ashley Massaro. Back then, nothing budged. No one said jackshit. Hopefully this case resurfaces too, because there's something really ugly about it.

As far as "losing heroes", no pro-wrestler is a hero to me. I don't care. We all know and for years we all pretended it was allright. How many "Flair showed his dick" stories do we have to listen until we realize that it is actually not *that* funny ? How many "but he throws a great punches" do we have to hear again ? Someone should compile some extracts of those old RF Video shoot interviews about ribbing and ring rats, how awful is this, really ? There's a totally toxic culture that we basically have accepted because hell, everything can't be perfect.

But most of all, I hope this doesn't stop in front of the gates of the big dogs. We all know who are we talking about...

[MoS]

Dream better hope he can show the screenshots are doctored, because this is textbook grooming. 

[DMJ]

- I figure Dream will be getting released in short order and that someone knew there was fire where there was smoke when the first allegations sprang up before Takeover. As tone deaf as it may sound, its not going to be a major loss considering Dream lost his "aura" and "specialness" a long time ago (a point that alot of us brought up before the allegations even started).

 

- As El-P said, I've long given up on viewing pro-wrestlers as heroes and am alright living in my cognitive dissonance when it comes to wrestling. Call it separating the "art" from the "artist," but I can still enjoy Led Zeppelin and other 70s rock music knowing full well that these rock stars were routinely having sex with high school freshmen. John Lennon admitted to hitting women. I can look past the misogyny and glorification of blatant man-on-woman violence of 90s hip-hop (Dr. Dre, for example) while I view someone like Chris Brown as the scum of the earth. I don't think I could ever enjoy a Louis C.K special anymore, either. That's cognitive dissonance - I know its irrational and inconsistent and I could try to reason it out and make excuses but truthfully, if I'm being 100% honest, all the reasoning would amount to me ignoring the horribleness or compartmentalizing it away because I like 90s West Coast hip-hop and I like Ric Flair matches and promos. 

It is much, much easier to say fuck Jack Gallagher, Velveteen Dream, Jimmy Havoc, Matt Riddle, and most everyone else that has been "outed" because I have far less of a connection to them than I do a Ric Flair. 

[El-P]

I totally second the sentiment expressed by @DMJ about the music industry, I had been thinking about the same thing, and coincidentally, also about Led Zeppelin because they are some of the most infamous of that era. Dre is a great exemple also, although I was always bothered by the outright misogyny/homophobia in some hip-hop genres, my own cognitive dissonance being helped somewhat by the fact I'm not an English speaking person and some stuff fly over my head (well, in Dre's albums, not much) but I very often thought about I would never be able to enjoy it the same way if the same lyrics were in French (some stuff on 2001 are just making me ashamed of listening to it just as it is, really, and I love this album).

To me the whole thing raises another issue is that, to speak strictly about pro-wrestling, the entire "legacy" we always refer to is built on a whole lot of really scummy people, not to say a majority of them. And that's an issue when you honor the past, really. I'm not saying this because I'm trying to get internet point (not me, come on, you know me around this place), but one reason I basically decided to only watch current stuff (apart from ten years old TNA, which is not a really different era than now) is that at one point, it was getting too uncomfortable for me to watch stuff from the past because of the stuff we know about, and everything we don't know. Yeah, you can always enjoy a good Rockers match, but then I think about those stories of drugging women told by Jannetty while Rob Feinstein is laughing about it (ponder that for a minute) and realize that these are just godawful people and I just don't *need* to watch any of this stuff, ever again. I've watched it before, I loved it *then* but I really don't need and even less want to try and get pleasure out of watching those truly awful people *now*. What does good ol' christian boy Shawn Micheals has to say about all these years of basically sexual harassing girls and drug raping fans ?

I'll make an analogy that will seem truly bizarre, but which is not to me. Let's take the Tour de France. Their entire legacy, at the very least from the early/mid-80's, is basically totally fake, because of doping. Yet everyone is forced to refer to its "legend", because they are selling the audience a product of entertainment and the "legend" is a big part of its brand marketing. But it makes no sense whatsoever to pretend things are clean now when you still refer to those doped-as-fuck cyclist of the last 25 years (and I'm being generous) as legends and great sportsmen and the like and when those people are all over the announcing booths. Yeah, it's great if things change in pro-wrestling. But then we still are gonna refer to the Rock'n' Roll Express as the greatest team ever, and they sure were, but as Meltz put it quite bluntly once "If there isn't a 15 years old in the back getting down on the boys, it's not the territories." This was the reality of things and it's impossible to ignore. I'm sure not everyone back then was rotten either, but still. So yeah, let's make pro-wrestling a safer place and shit, but if we're still namedropping Art Barr, Buddy Rose, Jerry Lawler, Dick Murdock and all those guys who were great wrestlers and also pieces of crap in the commentaries because that's what pro-wrestling has been built on, yeah, there is a cognitive dissonance on the broader level. And it's kind of an unsolvable issue as of now.

Anyway, I'm ranting, just wanted to throw that out there.

[KawadaSmile]

All those music comparisons remind me of Racionais MCs, the biggest rap group over here in Brazil. With nearly 30 years of career, they sure had their share of mysoginistic lyrics. What did they decided to do? Revisit their content, change lyrics, offer apologies and try to be better. I know sometimes that isn't enough, but it's the least one can do.

 

On the other hand, there are apologies like Travis Banks'

 

 

[Migs]

1 hour ago, DMJ said:

- As El-P said, I've long given up on viewing pro-wrestlers as heroes and am alright living in my cognitive dissonance when it comes to wrestling. Call it separating the "art" from the "artist," but I can still enjoy Led Zeppelin and other 70s rock music knowing full well that these rock stars were routinely having sex with high school freshmen. John Lennon admitted to hitting women. I can look past the misogyny and glorification of blatant man-on-woman violence of 90s hip-hop (Dr. Dre, for example) while I view someone like Chris Brown as the scum of the earth. I don't think I could ever enjoy a Louis C.K special anymore, either. That's cognitive dissonance - I know its irrational and inconsistent and I could try to reason it out and make excuses but truthfully, if I'm being 100% honest, all the reasoning would amount to me ignoring the horribleness or compartmentalizing it away because I like 90s West Coast hip-hop and I like Ric Flair matches and promos. 

It is much, much easier to say fuck Jack Gallagher, Velveteen Dream, Jimmy Havoc, Matt Riddle, and most everyone else that has been "outed" because I have far less of a connection to them than I do a Ric Flair. 

A lot of it I think has to do with the type of art being made and how it relates to the allegations. I was a giant, giant Ryan Adams fan, but it's been real hard listening to his music since the allegations against him came out. Not because I can't separate art from artist in the abstract, but because his art was mainly about him, and specifically about him being a sad bastard in relationships. So the art was entwined with the artist, and if your vibe is that the artist is lying... the songs don't work as well. To use the example here, Led Zeppelin songs are mostly not about the things they're accused of doing. Louis CK's comedy requires sympathy for him, so it's out. I don't really want to watch a David Starr match right now, but if it came up, I'd probably be okay. It feels like a double standard to be okay with one and not the other, but I don't think it's irrational.