On the latest installment of AEW’s “Close Up with Renee Paquette,” FTR member Cash Wheeler spoke at length about issues surrounding his arrest earlier this year on charges of aggravated assault with a firearm.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview.
On being arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a firearm and continuing to perform on AEW TV until the case was dropped in May: “It was a very rough patch. From August, when I found out about it, to May when everything finally got dismissed, as it should have been the whole time. It was a long stretch. There was a point in time where I couldn’t think about life after May because I knew everything hinged on that. That was the be all, end all. I told my lawyers when it happened; I would not take any sort of plea deal, I would not plead guilty to any charge. I was not guilty and I would not take any sort of plea. On the flip of that, it means I faced the full repercussions if they do find me guilty.”
On what would have happened had he been found guilty: “I don’t know for sure because it’s based on priors and history, which I don’t have. The maximum, if the judge sees fit, is five years in prison. I knew that, but I also knew that I didn’t do it and I was not going to sit here and be like, ‘I’ll take any charge to not go to jail.’ If I do that, AEW has to get rid of me. I can never leave the country again. Everything I ever worked for, over something that never happened. The way it all went about, I don’t see how it ever got that far. I didn’t find out about it until a week after the fact. They never pulled me over and found anything. They never came to my house and searched. They never had a witness, a picture, a video. All they had was one guy’s statement and that was it. I found out a week later that there was already an arrest warrant for me.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
