Following CM Punk’s physical altercation with Jack Perry prior to the main event of last Sunday’s All In pay-per-view event, an internal investigation was launched, which resulted in AEW announcing that Punk is no longer with the company, as the promotion terminated his contract.
Punk reportedly had a heated argument with Tony Khan following the incident and threatened to leave the promotion immediately.
Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed the situation on Wrestling Observer Radio. Meltzer did mention that there’s more to Punk’s AEW release than what’s been reported, but nothing as significant as what’s already been revealed.
Meltzer said, “Did it before the show as opposed to waiting till Monday, which you could have done. But I guess he just felt he needed to get it out as soon as possible. But they had video surveillance footage. They already interviewed all the eyewitnesses. They had an outside investigation. They interviewed a lot of the wrestlers who were not eyewitnesses, just about the basic situation of what was going on there. And that was when they had the lawyers recommend he be gone, whatever the disciplinary committee is. And I don’t know who recommended that he’d be gone. And Tony Khan made the decision for him to be gone. I know people who were interviewed that were not there, and it was about the background, just the history and things like that along with the….”
Alvarez added, “They were asked how things had changed over the last year and what they thought the solution to problems would be. A lot of questions not related to the actual incident, but to all of the incidents and everything that had happened over the past year or so.”
Meltzer continued, “He got fired over what happened Sunday. But the lawyers and everybody else talked about a lot more than Sunday. They talked about everything, the stuff that’s come out. Lots of stuff that hasn’t come out. I mean, should it have been sooner? With the benefit of hindsight? Of course, it should have been a year ago. But hindsight is always whatever. When he came back, it wasn’t going to work. It didn’t work. It was a disaster. Let’s be serious. It was a disaster. And, you know, there’s so much more to it than it’s come out. But a lot of the big stuff has, and the biggest thing was what happened on Sunday and just can’t keep having this stuff happen every second week. I think he had multiple deals. He had a performance contract and an employee contract, I believe. But I’m sure that will all be clarified in the next 48 hours or so.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
