AEW terminated CM Punk’s contract following his physical altercation with Jack Perry prior to last Sunday’s All In pay-per-view event.
As PWMania.com previously reported, Punk had a heated argument with Tony Khan following the incident and threatened to leave the promotion immediately. Monitors reportedly fell on Khan during the outburst.
Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed the situation on Wrestling Observer Radio. Meltzer noted that he toned down Punk’s lunge at AEW President Tony Khan at All In because it was more than that. This would be consistent with Khan expressing concern for his safety while discussing the situation at Collision.
Alvarez said, “He [Tony Khan] said the incident was regrettable. It endangered people backstage. That includes the production. My security, safety, and life were in danger at a wrestling show. I don’t feel anyone should feel that way at work. I don’t think the people I work with should feel that way. I had to make a very difficult choice today. So there had been, and I think you put it in The Observer, the stories about when the whole thing went down, people had said that he lunged at Tony.
Meltzer replied, “It was probably stronger than that….lunging was, again, far too kind. If you saw the actual wording of what was said, lunging was like I was toning it down. It was more than lunging.”
Alvarez stated, “And I had heard that when he moved towards Tony, whatever word you want to use, that the monitors there were like monitors that fell on Tony Khan. As you noted, there was security camera footage. So this was not something people were like, well, ‘How come there wasn’t security camera footage of the brawl?’ Well, it’s because that was inside a locker room. They don’t have cameras in the locker room. But this was gorilla, and they had cameras all over the place.”
Meltzer added, “Well, I mean, the gorilla, the setup is at Wembley where they have that. It’s where they do interviews and things like that for soccer games, football all the time, and other sports and other entertainment. So, yes, there’s always cameras in that. It was in a position where there’s always cameras running. So that was there. This one had a lot of witnesses. The other one had some witnesses. This one had a lot of witnesses.”
Alvarez continued, “Well, the thing with the first one was that there were a small number of people in the room. But as soon as everything happened, then a whole bunch of people came into the room. There weren’t a whole bunch of people in the room when it began. Whereas with this one, there were people all over the place.”
Meltzer added, “Not just and not just wrestlers. There were production people. You had witnesses.”
Alvarez said, “All over the place, and it was filmed. This was a tough one to claim, you know?”
Meltzer stated, “And there were unaffiliated people. I mean, I think the thing probably the best description was the one it’s on. It’s in the Observer. You know, I mean, we got the Jack Perry story. We got the Phil Brooks story. Okay. So they’re both there. But the third story and there’s a couple of other stories, but the key one was the unaffiliated nonwrestler story. That is what I would call, I don’t know, it’s the most reliable, but it’s neither party, but it’s someone who saw it. And it’s a non-wrestler. It’s not someone who has any stakes in the game or part of either clique or anything, anything close to that. It’s just someone who was there working as many people were and saw what happened and other people that were also there. But I’ll get into that later this week.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
