Raj Dhesi, aka Jinder Mahal, is a free agent who recently appeared on Insight with Chris Van Vliet to discuss a variety of topics.
During it, the former WWE star discussed a racially insensitive promo he had to perform in 2017 while feuding with Shinsuke Nakamura. He mocked Nakamura’s speech style and addressed him as ‘Mr. Miyagi.’
WWE faced criticism at the time and later issued a statement on the matter. Mahal refused to do the promo, but Vince McMahon insisted because he believed it would be pure entertainment and not cause any problems. Once he did it, the social media team informed Mahal of the backlash, and McMahon initially wanted him to issue a statement on Twitter, but he changed his mind.
Mahal said, “Yeah, there was. There was one promo in particular, and recently, I actually just seen Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career, it was a promo with Yoshitatsu. Same thing, kind of like a racial promo. So that day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer, ‘This is from Vince. He wants you to say this.’ I was like, ‘Aw man, I don’t want to say this. Is there anything else we can do?’ He said, ‘No, it’s come from Vince.’ So I even asked Vince (McMahon), ‘Vince, this is gonna get negative backlash.’ He said, ‘No, don’t worry, who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, just entertainment.’ So, [I] did the promo, was not happy with it and not proud of myself for doing it. Really wish that I could take that moment back, but, unfortunately I can’t and right when we came back, it got a lot of negative backlash. I remember coming back from Gorilla. I was still hanging out by Gorilla, and one of the social media managers came up to me and said, ‘Hey, this is getting a lot of bad PR, and Vince wants for you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool,’ and he came up with something, maybe the PR team wrote it, someone. He came up with a statement, and as we were about to tweet it, he said, ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind. He said no.’ So it was just one of those things where… it is what it is. [I’m] Not proud of doing it. But on the plus side, I don’t think something like that, a promo like that will ever happen again in WWE. Things change, the regime changed, everything is much, much different now. That was a different era, a different time. Under Vince, his style was different and sometimes he was stuck in his ways.”
Mahal went on to say that unlike other forms of entertainment, people are unable to distinguish between characters in wrestlers.
He said, “You separate the performer from the on-screen character, but for some reason, in wrestling, in WWE, it doesn’t happen. And that’s the explanation that was given to me and I guess I was like, ‘Alright, fine. Okay, we’ll do it…’ I had asked, ‘Can we do something else? Is there anything else we can do?’ I was told, ‘No. This is what Vince wrote,’ and you can either do it, or you take your ball and go home.”
You can check out the interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
