Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, will be interviewed live Friday, December 31, on Dave Zirin’s satellite radio program “Edge of Sports.”
The show airs at 12:00 noon Eastern time (9:00 a.m. Pacific time) on Sirius Channel 125 and XM Channel 241. “Edge of Sports” also streams and is archived at http://edgeofsports.com.
Muchnick will be discussing the ongoing Connecticut Labor Department investigation of World Wrestling Entertainment for alleged misclassification of its performers as independent contractors, as well as possible new government probes at the federal level. Connecticut’s long-time attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, will be sworn in next week as the state’s new United States senator after defeating WWE co-founder and former chief executive Linda McMahon in the November election. In addition, Muchnick will talk about WWE’s recent legal threats to him.
Muchnick previously authored WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. He is also the lead respondent in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, a landmark case for freelance writers’ rights, which the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year returned to lower courts for further adjudication.
Web: http://muchnick.net
Blog: http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com
Twitter: @irvmuch
YouTube: http://youtube.com/WrestlingBabylon
Media queries: media@muchnick.net
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Cageside Seats: Autopsy Shows Heart Wasn’t Chris Benoit’s Only Enlarged Organ
[posted 12/24/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
“More on Benoit — his heart wasn’t the only enlarged organ in his body according to his official autopsy report”
Keith Harris, Cageside Seats
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/24/1895472/more-on-benoit-his-heart-wasnt-the-only-enlarged-organ-in-his-body
===============
Also: Thanks to David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats for helping your technically challenged blogger post what I hope are easier-to-read images of the exhibits to Jerry McDevitt’s December 16 letter to me. Here’s the list again:
EXHIBIT 1
“Sports Legacy Institute Announces Findings on Wrestler Chris Benoit’s Brain, September 5, 2007”
http://muchnick.net/sli_transcript_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 2
Sports Legacy Institute news release, September 9, 2007
http://muchnick.net/sli_news_release_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 3
Cary Ichter to Jerry McDevitt, September 11, 2007
http://muchnick.net/ichter091107.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 4
“Fifth Estate, Chris Benoit – Fight to the Death, Aired February 6 on the CBC Network across Canada”
http://muchnick.net/fifth_estate_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 5
“Muchnick Flashback – EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008”
http://muchnick.net/muchnick_blog_on_espn_story.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 6
Bennet Omalu to Cyril Wecht, April 17, 2006
http://muchnick.net/omalu_email_041706.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 7
GQ article, “Game Brain”
http://muchnick.net/gq.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 8
Transcript of Bennet Omalu testimony at Cyril Wecht trial
http://muchnick.net/wecht_trial_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 9
“CHRIS NOWINSKI INTERVIEW, DENNIS AND CALLAHAN RADIO TALK SHOW, WEEK OF OCTOBER 14, 2010”
http://muchnick.net/nowinski_interview_101410.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 10
Bennet Omalu journal article, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a professional American wrestler”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 11
“BENNET OMALU ON HIS INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN FOOTBALL”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_pittmed_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 12
“Dr. Bennet Omalu, Brain Injury Research Institute: B/R Exclusive Interview”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_interview_102210.pdf
“More on Benoit — his heart wasn’t the only enlarged organ in his body according to his official autopsy report”
Keith Harris, Cageside Seats
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/24/1895472/more-on-benoit-his-heart-wasnt-the-only-enlarged-organ-in-his-body
===============
Also: Thanks to David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats for helping your technically challenged blogger post what I hope are easier-to-read images of the exhibits to Jerry McDevitt’s December 16 letter to me. Here’s the list again:
EXHIBIT 1
“Sports Legacy Institute Announces Findings on Wrestler Chris Benoit’s Brain, September 5, 2007”
http://muchnick.net/sli_transcript_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 2
Sports Legacy Institute news release, September 9, 2007
http://muchnick.net/sli_news_release_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 3
Cary Ichter to Jerry McDevitt, September 11, 2007
http://muchnick.net/ichter091107.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 4
“Fifth Estate, Chris Benoit – Fight to the Death, Aired February 6 on the CBC Network across Canada”
http://muchnick.net/fifth_estate_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 5
“Muchnick Flashback – EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008”
http://muchnick.net/muchnick_blog_on_espn_story.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 6
Bennet Omalu to Cyril Wecht, April 17, 2006
http://muchnick.net/omalu_email_041706.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 7
GQ article, “Game Brain”
http://muchnick.net/gq.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 8
Transcript of Bennet Omalu testimony at Cyril Wecht trial
http://muchnick.net/wecht_trial_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 9
“CHRIS NOWINSKI INTERVIEW, DENNIS AND CALLAHAN RADIO TALK SHOW, WEEK OF OCTOBER 14, 2010”
http://muchnick.net/nowinski_interview_101410.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 10
Bennet Omalu journal article, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a professional American wrestler”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 11
“BENNET OMALU ON HIS INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN FOOTBALL”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_pittmed_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 12
“Dr. Bennet Omalu, Brain Injury Research Institute: B/R Exclusive Interview”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_interview_102210.pdf
Murky New Chris Benoit Evidence Doesn’t Change Essence of Campaign to Regulate Pro Wrestling Occupational Health and Safety
[posted 12/24/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Swinging wildly in every direction to deflect the new government scrutiny of pro wrestling triggered by Linda McMahon’s dumb bid for a Senate seat from Connecticut, World Wrestling Entertainment lawyer Jerry McDevitt rolled out a new counter-campaign last week in the form of a blustery letter to me with more attachments than a barnacle. (See “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/new-threats-from-wwe-lawyer-jerry-mcdevitt/.)
McDevitt also talked at length with Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter for an interesting story in his current issue. The piece is viewable online only to subscribers. I have a pending request to Meltzer for permission to run the full text at this blog.
The Meltzer article is, as I said, interesting, and it begins to develop new known information. But the information does nothing to help WWE ward off churning investigations of the company by the state of Connecticut and the federal government. If anything, the previously buried data here on Chris Benoit’s medical history and autopsy findings would be incorporated into a defense by McDevitt in the event the Benoit family were ever to sue WWE – and I don’t think they would be that useful even in that eventuality.
Among other things, Meltzer writes that “the report on Benoit” shows “no serious medical issues except at the age of six, when he was in an automobile accident. His head hit the windshield and he was hospitalized for three days and diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury. However, growing up, he showed no signs of any effects of that accident.”
Meltzer offers no antecedent for the words “the report.” In an email exchange, he confirmed to me that he was referring to verbiage in a recent journal article by Dr. Bennet Omalu, who examined Benoit’s postmortem brain tissue and concluded that he had Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy. In the Observer story, Meltzer fails to mention that the Omalu article was one of the exhibits to McDevitt’s December 16 letter to me.
As I noted at the time in posting McDevitt’s material, I need to do some technical work on my end to make less fuzzy the downloadable versions of the PDF files he sent me. The Omalu article will be my first priority in that area. In the meantime, readers can view the image of Omalu’s article, with poor resolution, at http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf. The relevant passage:
“At the age of 6 years, he was involved in a motor vehicle accident when his head struck the windshield of the automobile in which he was a passenger. He was hospitalized for 3 days, felt to have had a mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), but went on to have no known deleterious effects and no permanent injury.”
I can add a little more to this aspect of Meltzer’s story. My understanding is that Benoit’s childhood car accident was well known by all the researchers who examined his brain, and they concluded that it was a non-factor in his murder-suicide at age 40. The accident was also well known to WWE: it had been recounted years before the tragedy in Georgia in interviews conducted for the company’s DVD compilation of Benoit’s best matches, Hard Knocks (though that material wound up on the cutting-room floor and didn’t make it onto the DVD).
Meltzer, quoting Omalu, also has explosive new information that Benoit had an enlarged heart. Again, the language from Omalu’s article:
“There was cardimegaly (620 g) with left ventricular hypertrophy and bilateral atrioventricular dilation.”
This raises a question I am nowhere close to being able to answer, except to note that it is consistent with serious lapses in the entire official record originally published by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), and the Fayette County 911 Center.
Did the original and official GBI autopsy of Benoit note his enlarged heart, but do so in muted or cryptic language? In the DVD data companion to my book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, I publish the complete public autopsy report. I am now making that document viewable for readers here at http://muchnick.net/chrisbenoitautopsy.pdf.
There are references to Benoit’s heart in two places. The first reference:
“Cardiovascular System: This heart weighs 620 grams and has a normal distribution of widely patent right coronary dominant arteries. The myocardium is uniformly dark-red without pallor, hemorrhage, softening, or fibrosis. The left ventricle wall is 1.6 cm thick and the right is 0.2 cm thick. All four cardiac chambers are dilated. The endocardial surfaces and four valves are unremarkable. The aorta is without atherosclerosis. The venae cavae and pulmonary arteries are without thrombus or embolus.”
The second reference:
“Submitted for histologic analysis are sections of: [...] Heart (2) – There is myocyte hypertrophy.”
So Chris Benoit, like Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, had an enlarged heart. Without any reference to the controversy over CTE, we can say that this makes WWE look not better, but far worse.
Irv Muchnick
Swinging wildly in every direction to deflect the new government scrutiny of pro wrestling triggered by Linda McMahon’s dumb bid for a Senate seat from Connecticut, World Wrestling Entertainment lawyer Jerry McDevitt rolled out a new counter-campaign last week in the form of a blustery letter to me with more attachments than a barnacle. (See “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/new-threats-from-wwe-lawyer-jerry-mcdevitt/.)
McDevitt also talked at length with Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter for an interesting story in his current issue. The piece is viewable online only to subscribers. I have a pending request to Meltzer for permission to run the full text at this blog.
The Meltzer article is, as I said, interesting, and it begins to develop new known information. But the information does nothing to help WWE ward off churning investigations of the company by the state of Connecticut and the federal government. If anything, the previously buried data here on Chris Benoit’s medical history and autopsy findings would be incorporated into a defense by McDevitt in the event the Benoit family were ever to sue WWE – and I don’t think they would be that useful even in that eventuality.
Among other things, Meltzer writes that “the report on Benoit” shows “no serious medical issues except at the age of six, when he was in an automobile accident. His head hit the windshield and he was hospitalized for three days and diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury. However, growing up, he showed no signs of any effects of that accident.”
Meltzer offers no antecedent for the words “the report.” In an email exchange, he confirmed to me that he was referring to verbiage in a recent journal article by Dr. Bennet Omalu, who examined Benoit’s postmortem brain tissue and concluded that he had Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy. In the Observer story, Meltzer fails to mention that the Omalu article was one of the exhibits to McDevitt’s December 16 letter to me.
As I noted at the time in posting McDevitt’s material, I need to do some technical work on my end to make less fuzzy the downloadable versions of the PDF files he sent me. The Omalu article will be my first priority in that area. In the meantime, readers can view the image of Omalu’s article, with poor resolution, at http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf. The relevant passage:
“At the age of 6 years, he was involved in a motor vehicle accident when his head struck the windshield of the automobile in which he was a passenger. He was hospitalized for 3 days, felt to have had a mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), but went on to have no known deleterious effects and no permanent injury.”
I can add a little more to this aspect of Meltzer’s story. My understanding is that Benoit’s childhood car accident was well known by all the researchers who examined his brain, and they concluded that it was a non-factor in his murder-suicide at age 40. The accident was also well known to WWE: it had been recounted years before the tragedy in Georgia in interviews conducted for the company’s DVD compilation of Benoit’s best matches, Hard Knocks (though that material wound up on the cutting-room floor and didn’t make it onto the DVD).
Meltzer, quoting Omalu, also has explosive new information that Benoit had an enlarged heart. Again, the language from Omalu’s article:
“There was cardimegaly (620 g) with left ventricular hypertrophy and bilateral atrioventricular dilation.”
This raises a question I am nowhere close to being able to answer, except to note that it is consistent with serious lapses in the entire official record originally published by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), and the Fayette County 911 Center.
Did the original and official GBI autopsy of Benoit note his enlarged heart, but do so in muted or cryptic language? In the DVD data companion to my book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, I publish the complete public autopsy report. I am now making that document viewable for readers here at http://muchnick.net/chrisbenoitautopsy.pdf.
There are references to Benoit’s heart in two places. The first reference:
“Cardiovascular System: This heart weighs 620 grams and has a normal distribution of widely patent right coronary dominant arteries. The myocardium is uniformly dark-red without pallor, hemorrhage, softening, or fibrosis. The left ventricle wall is 1.6 cm thick and the right is 0.2 cm thick. All four cardiac chambers are dilated. The endocardial surfaces and four valves are unremarkable. The aorta is without atherosclerosis. The venae cavae and pulmonary arteries are without thrombus or embolus.”
The second reference:
“Submitted for histologic analysis are sections of: [...] Heart (2) – There is myocyte hypertrophy.”
So Chris Benoit, like Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, had an enlarged heart. Without any reference to the controversy over CTE, we can say that this makes WWE look not better, but far worse.
Irv Muchnick
Muchnick Flashback December 2007: WWE Dodges the Congressional Bullet
The piece below is instructive for the challenge that Connecticut’s new senator, Richard Blumenthal, will face in reviving investigations of pro wrestling occupational health and safety.
The most striking omission from this three-year-old essay is concussions: I not only underplayed Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy; I didn’t even mention it. We’ve all learned a lot more since then about the evidence that Mike Benoit (Chris’s father) and Dr. Bennet Omalu were pushing that season.
Irv Muchnick
===============
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling under the headline
“Looks like wrestling will dodge Congress’ steroid bullet,”
http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2007/12/24/4739273.html]
On July 6, Congressman Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, issued a press release and began a round of cable news appearances calling for an investigation of steroids in pro wrestling. This was 12 days after the bodies of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit were discovered.
Four months later Congressman Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois (chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, of which Stearns was ranking minority member), told the Baltimore Sun, “Given recent developments — the impending Mitchell report and reports of widespread abuse in professional wrestling — I believe it’s time we get a formal update on what progress is being made to eradicate steroids from all sports and sports entertainment.”
In between, both the Rush Subcommittee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (chaired by Henry Waxman of California) requested background information from WWE and, to a certain extent, from TNA and other promotions as well.
Quietly, Vince McMahon complied with the requests. He also sank new hundreds of thousands of dollars into lobbying operations coordinated by the company’s main outside law firm, Pittsburgh-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis. How many hundreds of thousands we won’t know until public filings next year.
Loudly, in TV skits, Vince mocked the committees. Backstage his daughter Stephanie and son-in-law Paul “Triple H” Levesque bucked up the nervous talent by telling them that Vince was making defiant plans to show up at the Congressional hearing in a clown wig.
On December 13, baseball’s Mitchell report was released. But by then the legit sports story was no longer pulling the circus subplot in its shadow. Rather, it was downright overwhelming it. Wrestling had dodged another bullet — at least that’s how most insiders would sum up the deferring of the industry’s day of reckoning and reform for another day/month/year/decade, at a point when several/dozens/scores/hundreds more corpses will have piled up from drug overdoses, attacks of artificially enlarged hearts, exotic forms of cancer and homicidal-suicidal binges, all in the name of our uninterrupted junk entertainment.
Human physics, like wrestling politics, are an odd bird. The rise and fall of Congressional wrestling hearings combine elements of the discovery of the Gobbledygooker and the on-and-off last push for Ric Flair. It starts with Stearns, who two years earlier, as chairman of what is now the Rush Subcommittee, had introduced legislation that would have set a single steroid testing standard and uniform penalties for all sports. Stearns began his July press release and parallel soundbytes by noting, “Between 1985 and 2006, 89 wrestlers have died before the age of 50.”
His staff had pulled the stat from a column by FoxSports.com’s Mark Kriegel, headlined “Congress needs to get involved — now.” Kriegel, in turn, was quoting the appendix of my recently published book Wrestling Babylon. Stearns would proceed to cite that factoid, without attribution.
Though I consider my 1985-2006 death list conscientious, I’ve made no grandiose claims for its epidemiological rigor. My list is contextually superior to USA Today’s oft-quoted 65 deaths under age 45, 1987-94, and inferior to Dave Meltzer’s 62 deaths of “major league” wrestlers under age 50 in the last 10 years. I note Stearns’ non-citation without indulgence and for the sole purpose of illustrating what motivates “preliminary” Congressional investigations.
Soon Stearns was arranging a photo opportunity at Dory Funk’s training center, the Funking Conservatory, which is conveniently located in the Congressman’s district in Ocala, Florida. But even if Stearns really wanted to go to the mat and call hearings, he did not have that authority, which has rested with the Democratic majority that won control in the 2006 elections. As ranking minority member; Stearns needed the green light of Chairman Rush. By the end of the year, Stearns wasn’t even ranking minority member at Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection; he had given up that post for the same one on the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.
Now that the immediate hearing prospect has played itself out, perhaps it’s not a bad thing that baseball and wrestling investigations aren’t conjoined. Their drug problems flow from opposite, and counterintuitive, sources. It’s the old existential conundrum fans love to bat around: The last generation’s baseball records have been fake, but wrestling’s avoidable and unacceptable mortality rate has been real. And you can’t legislate irony.
Another key difference is that baseball has a talent union, arguably the most effective labor organization in America, which in a span of four decades has driven its members’ average annual wages from something like $19,000 to more than $2,000,000. Steroids first reached untenable levels because it was in the owners’ interests to look the other way. Then, if they ever were interested in reining in the problem, they found that their employees were collectively strong enough to resist solutions.
Wrestling has no talent union, and for the good and simple reason that the owners not only build the playing fields, they make all the out-or-safe calls. Therefore, I see cleaning up wrestling as something more along the lines of the safety reforms imposed on the movie industry after actor Vic Morrow and two young children were killed in a 1982 accident on a action-film set.
But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I’m assuming that the Congressional committees don’t have a January swerve up their sleeve, or “Mr. Kennedy” isn’t on the verge of murdering Hornswoggle for cheating him out of his patrimony. In an Orwellian world where wellness policies are not well, the other shoe of life’s wrestling angle is not quite ready to drop, after all. At 100+ dead and counting, it’s still in the tease stage.
The most striking omission from this three-year-old essay is concussions: I not only underplayed Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy; I didn’t even mention it. We’ve all learned a lot more since then about the evidence that Mike Benoit (Chris’s father) and Dr. Bennet Omalu were pushing that season.
Irv Muchnick
===============
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling under the headline
“Looks like wrestling will dodge Congress’ steroid bullet,”
http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2007/12/24/4739273.html]
On July 6, Congressman Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, issued a press release and began a round of cable news appearances calling for an investigation of steroids in pro wrestling. This was 12 days after the bodies of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit were discovered.
Four months later Congressman Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois (chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, of which Stearns was ranking minority member), told the Baltimore Sun, “Given recent developments — the impending Mitchell report and reports of widespread abuse in professional wrestling — I believe it’s time we get a formal update on what progress is being made to eradicate steroids from all sports and sports entertainment.”
In between, both the Rush Subcommittee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (chaired by Henry Waxman of California) requested background information from WWE and, to a certain extent, from TNA and other promotions as well.
Quietly, Vince McMahon complied with the requests. He also sank new hundreds of thousands of dollars into lobbying operations coordinated by the company’s main outside law firm, Pittsburgh-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis. How many hundreds of thousands we won’t know until public filings next year.
Loudly, in TV skits, Vince mocked the committees. Backstage his daughter Stephanie and son-in-law Paul “Triple H” Levesque bucked up the nervous talent by telling them that Vince was making defiant plans to show up at the Congressional hearing in a clown wig.
On December 13, baseball’s Mitchell report was released. But by then the legit sports story was no longer pulling the circus subplot in its shadow. Rather, it was downright overwhelming it. Wrestling had dodged another bullet — at least that’s how most insiders would sum up the deferring of the industry’s day of reckoning and reform for another day/month/year/decade, at a point when several/dozens/scores/hundreds more corpses will have piled up from drug overdoses, attacks of artificially enlarged hearts, exotic forms of cancer and homicidal-suicidal binges, all in the name of our uninterrupted junk entertainment.
Human physics, like wrestling politics, are an odd bird. The rise and fall of Congressional wrestling hearings combine elements of the discovery of the Gobbledygooker and the on-and-off last push for Ric Flair. It starts with Stearns, who two years earlier, as chairman of what is now the Rush Subcommittee, had introduced legislation that would have set a single steroid testing standard and uniform penalties for all sports. Stearns began his July press release and parallel soundbytes by noting, “Between 1985 and 2006, 89 wrestlers have died before the age of 50.”
His staff had pulled the stat from a column by FoxSports.com’s Mark Kriegel, headlined “Congress needs to get involved — now.” Kriegel, in turn, was quoting the appendix of my recently published book Wrestling Babylon. Stearns would proceed to cite that factoid, without attribution.
Though I consider my 1985-2006 death list conscientious, I’ve made no grandiose claims for its epidemiological rigor. My list is contextually superior to USA Today’s oft-quoted 65 deaths under age 45, 1987-94, and inferior to Dave Meltzer’s 62 deaths of “major league” wrestlers under age 50 in the last 10 years. I note Stearns’ non-citation without indulgence and for the sole purpose of illustrating what motivates “preliminary” Congressional investigations.
Soon Stearns was arranging a photo opportunity at Dory Funk’s training center, the Funking Conservatory, which is conveniently located in the Congressman’s district in Ocala, Florida. But even if Stearns really wanted to go to the mat and call hearings, he did not have that authority, which has rested with the Democratic majority that won control in the 2006 elections. As ranking minority member; Stearns needed the green light of Chairman Rush. By the end of the year, Stearns wasn’t even ranking minority member at Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection; he had given up that post for the same one on the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.
Now that the immediate hearing prospect has played itself out, perhaps it’s not a bad thing that baseball and wrestling investigations aren’t conjoined. Their drug problems flow from opposite, and counterintuitive, sources. It’s the old existential conundrum fans love to bat around: The last generation’s baseball records have been fake, but wrestling’s avoidable and unacceptable mortality rate has been real. And you can’t legislate irony.
Another key difference is that baseball has a talent union, arguably the most effective labor organization in America, which in a span of four decades has driven its members’ average annual wages from something like $19,000 to more than $2,000,000. Steroids first reached untenable levels because it was in the owners’ interests to look the other way. Then, if they ever were interested in reining in the problem, they found that their employees were collectively strong enough to resist solutions.
Wrestling has no talent union, and for the good and simple reason that the owners not only build the playing fields, they make all the out-or-safe calls. Therefore, I see cleaning up wrestling as something more along the lines of the safety reforms imposed on the movie industry after actor Vic Morrow and two young children were killed in a 1982 accident on a action-film set.
But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I’m assuming that the Congressional committees don’t have a January swerve up their sleeve, or “Mr. Kennedy” isn’t on the verge of murdering Hornswoggle for cheating him out of his patrimony. In an Orwellian world where wellness policies are not well, the other shoe of life’s wrestling angle is not quite ready to drop, after all. At 100+ dead and counting, it’s still in the tease stage.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Knocking Heads Together: WWE Is the Next Frontier of Sports Concussion Reform
How grimly appropriate that Brett Favre, this year’s poster boy for pro football angst both on and off the field, would be one of the two players sustaining what were delicately termed “head injuries” in last night’s nationally televised game. After the Chicago Bears-Minnesota Vikings matchup got moved to an outdoor stadium with a rock-hard surface while the weather-punctured roof of the Minneapolis Metrodome awaits repair, the sour joke around the National Football League had been that an 80 percent chance of snow was exceeded only by a 90 percent chance of concussions.
But at least the NFL is vaguely grounded in reality. Stung by critical Congressional hearings last year, Roger Goodell’s unstoppable brand lurches toward solutions – even if a straight line may never exist between a violent contact sport and competitive civility.
From where I sit, the new regime of fines and suspensions for difficult-to-define headhunters has done more good than harm. Moreover, earlier this year the league gave $1 million to Boston University for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy research. And NFL Charities just announced nearly a million more for groups studying both youth concussions and the phenomenon of dementia in former players.
Contrast this NFL reality check with the persistent culture of denial at World Wrestling Entertainment. Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph Maroon, a long-time NFL brain-trauma consultant, serves as WWE’s medical director, a post created in 2008 in an expansion of the company’s drug-testing procedures and talent “wellness policy.”
Despite the fact that pro wrestling, in contrast with football, is choreographed, the former’s participants suffer an early death rate magnitudes higher. Yet not even the 2007 murder-suicide of WWE star Chris Benoit could get Congress off the schneid on investigations of wrestling, whose global reach and mega-profits are the nearly exclusive province of one company and one family: the McMahons of Connecticut.
This year former WWE chief executive Linda McMahon, wife of potentate Vince McMahon, even poured $50 million of their nearly billion-dollar fortune into an embarrassingly unsuccessful run for a Senate seat. (Not embarrassing enough, however, for Linda to refrain from immediate noise about a run for the state’s other Senate seat in 2012.)
Into the teeth of this wealth and propaganda machine, Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal had a messy passage to election. Victory was ultimately secured, in significant measure, by the spotlight shone on WWE’s morbid occupational health and safety record.
Now Blumenthal is obliged to help clean up junk entertainment’s industrial death mill. A good place for the 112th Congress to start would be resumption of the post-Benoit investigation undertaken by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee’s chairman at the time, Congressman Henry Waxman, perplexingly stopped short of public hearings; he probably either bent to the will of WWE’s well-greased lobbyists.or simply calculated that the public was more enthralled by the human growth hormone injection marks on the derriere of baseball’s Roger Clemens.
Whatever the source, WWE is clearly nervous. Last week lawyer Jerry McDevitt sent me a rambling 13-page letter, with more than a hundred pages of exhibits, accusing me of defamation as well as, perhaps, mopery and gawkery. (See “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/new-threats-from-wwe-lawyer-jerry-mcdevitt/.)
The most remarkable aspect of McDevitt’s serial saber-rattling, three and a half years after the Benoit tragedy, is that WWE still doesn’t accept Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy as a clear and present danger. McDevitt directs most of his ire at Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist whose study of Benoit’s postmortem brain tissue helped put CTE on the map.
In the WWE mouthpiece’s master innuendo, Omalu and his West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute colleague, Dr. Julian Bailes, have failed to establish to WWE’s satisfaction that the Benoit study tissue samples were from Benoit’s brain. At the appropriate time, a straightforward DNA test will easily confirm the chain of custody.
Bailes and Omalu used to work with Boston’s Sports Legacy Institute, which was started by a WWE performer, Harvard grad Chris Nowinski, who had been forced to retire due to many concussions. In his letter to me, McDevitt insinuates that Omalu’s falling out with the Boston group was based on questions by Dr. Robert Cantu and other researchers there about the integrity of Omalu’s work.
Nonsense. The Boston-West Virginia rivalry has everything to do with egos and competition for grants and attention – there is no serious dispute among the scientific experts as to the core conclusion that CTE is a discrete pathology. Dr. Cantu himself spoke at Nowinski’s 2007 press conference announcing Omalu’s Benoit findings; Cantu called the wrestler’s brain tissue damage some of the worst he had ever seen.
As for this blog, McDevitt’s big beef is that I reported a year ago this month that WWE lied to ESPN in a story about the brain study of a second dead wrestler, Andrew “Test” Martin. Unlike Benoit, Martin – who succumbed to a prescription pill addiction at 33 – did not commit homicide or suicide, but he, too, was found to have CTE. WWE glibly told the ESPN reporter that it had never been given access to the Benoit research. Left untold was that in 2008 medical director Maroon had accepted an invitation to the West Virginia lab, where Drs. Bailes and Omalu showed him the Benoit slides.
As the story continues to unfold, Maroon could find his association with the WWE deny-all crowd imperiling his reputation and legacy. To Maroon’s credit, his team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has helped develop neurological baseline testing and new athletic concussion prevention and treatment protocols. To Maroon’s discredit, he came off poorly at the House Judiciary Committee’s NFL concussion hearings, which rocketed the issue into public consciousness.
And in addition to enabling WWE’s lie to ESPN, Maroon told a Connecticut newspaper during the Linda McMahon for Senate campaign, “We have no talent now on steroids” – a quote so wildly at variance with the truth that the leading wrestling journalist, Dave Meltzer, called it “mind-boggling.” In a poll of Meltzer’s readers at the Wrestling Observer website, 76 percent of the respondents selected “dishonest” as a description of this statement.
Moving forward, will Maroon be part of the problem or part of the solution?
Irv Muchnick
But at least the NFL is vaguely grounded in reality. Stung by critical Congressional hearings last year, Roger Goodell’s unstoppable brand lurches toward solutions – even if a straight line may never exist between a violent contact sport and competitive civility.
From where I sit, the new regime of fines and suspensions for difficult-to-define headhunters has done more good than harm. Moreover, earlier this year the league gave $1 million to Boston University for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy research. And NFL Charities just announced nearly a million more for groups studying both youth concussions and the phenomenon of dementia in former players.
Contrast this NFL reality check with the persistent culture of denial at World Wrestling Entertainment. Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph Maroon, a long-time NFL brain-trauma consultant, serves as WWE’s medical director, a post created in 2008 in an expansion of the company’s drug-testing procedures and talent “wellness policy.”
Despite the fact that pro wrestling, in contrast with football, is choreographed, the former’s participants suffer an early death rate magnitudes higher. Yet not even the 2007 murder-suicide of WWE star Chris Benoit could get Congress off the schneid on investigations of wrestling, whose global reach and mega-profits are the nearly exclusive province of one company and one family: the McMahons of Connecticut.
This year former WWE chief executive Linda McMahon, wife of potentate Vince McMahon, even poured $50 million of their nearly billion-dollar fortune into an embarrassingly unsuccessful run for a Senate seat. (Not embarrassing enough, however, for Linda to refrain from immediate noise about a run for the state’s other Senate seat in 2012.)
Into the teeth of this wealth and propaganda machine, Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal had a messy passage to election. Victory was ultimately secured, in significant measure, by the spotlight shone on WWE’s morbid occupational health and safety record.
Now Blumenthal is obliged to help clean up junk entertainment’s industrial death mill. A good place for the 112th Congress to start would be resumption of the post-Benoit investigation undertaken by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee’s chairman at the time, Congressman Henry Waxman, perplexingly stopped short of public hearings; he probably either bent to the will of WWE’s well-greased lobbyists.or simply calculated that the public was more enthralled by the human growth hormone injection marks on the derriere of baseball’s Roger Clemens.
Whatever the source, WWE is clearly nervous. Last week lawyer Jerry McDevitt sent me a rambling 13-page letter, with more than a hundred pages of exhibits, accusing me of defamation as well as, perhaps, mopery and gawkery. (See “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/new-threats-from-wwe-lawyer-jerry-mcdevitt/.)
The most remarkable aspect of McDevitt’s serial saber-rattling, three and a half years after the Benoit tragedy, is that WWE still doesn’t accept Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy as a clear and present danger. McDevitt directs most of his ire at Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist whose study of Benoit’s postmortem brain tissue helped put CTE on the map.
In the WWE mouthpiece’s master innuendo, Omalu and his West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute colleague, Dr. Julian Bailes, have failed to establish to WWE’s satisfaction that the Benoit study tissue samples were from Benoit’s brain. At the appropriate time, a straightforward DNA test will easily confirm the chain of custody.
Bailes and Omalu used to work with Boston’s Sports Legacy Institute, which was started by a WWE performer, Harvard grad Chris Nowinski, who had been forced to retire due to many concussions. In his letter to me, McDevitt insinuates that Omalu’s falling out with the Boston group was based on questions by Dr. Robert Cantu and other researchers there about the integrity of Omalu’s work.
Nonsense. The Boston-West Virginia rivalry has everything to do with egos and competition for grants and attention – there is no serious dispute among the scientific experts as to the core conclusion that CTE is a discrete pathology. Dr. Cantu himself spoke at Nowinski’s 2007 press conference announcing Omalu’s Benoit findings; Cantu called the wrestler’s brain tissue damage some of the worst he had ever seen.
As for this blog, McDevitt’s big beef is that I reported a year ago this month that WWE lied to ESPN in a story about the brain study of a second dead wrestler, Andrew “Test” Martin. Unlike Benoit, Martin – who succumbed to a prescription pill addiction at 33 – did not commit homicide or suicide, but he, too, was found to have CTE. WWE glibly told the ESPN reporter that it had never been given access to the Benoit research. Left untold was that in 2008 medical director Maroon had accepted an invitation to the West Virginia lab, where Drs. Bailes and Omalu showed him the Benoit slides.
As the story continues to unfold, Maroon could find his association with the WWE deny-all crowd imperiling his reputation and legacy. To Maroon’s credit, his team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has helped develop neurological baseline testing and new athletic concussion prevention and treatment protocols. To Maroon’s discredit, he came off poorly at the House Judiciary Committee’s NFL concussion hearings, which rocketed the issue into public consciousness.
And in addition to enabling WWE’s lie to ESPN, Maroon told a Connecticut newspaper during the Linda McMahon for Senate campaign, “We have no talent now on steroids” – a quote so wildly at variance with the truth that the leading wrestling journalist, Dave Meltzer, called it “mind-boggling.” In a poll of Meltzer’s readers at the Wrestling Observer website, 76 percent of the respondents selected “dishonest” as a description of this statement.
Moving forward, will Maroon be part of the problem or part of the solution?
Irv Muchnick
Muchnick Flashback (January 2010): The Second Time WWE Lawyer McDevitt Got Mad at Me
Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 1), January 21, 2010
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-1/
***
Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 2), January 22, 2010
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-2/
***
Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 3), January 23, 2010
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-3/
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-1/
***
Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 2), January 22, 2010
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-2/
***
Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 3), January 23, 2010
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-3/
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Cageside Seats: ‘McDevitt Won’t Concede That Chris Benoit Had CTE’
“Jerry McDevitt tries to discredit Irv Muchnick again, won’t concede that Chris Benoit had CTE”
Keith Harris at Cageside Seats
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/19/1885970/jerry-mcdevitt-tries-to-discredit-irv-muchnick-again-wont-concede
Keith Harris at Cageside Seats
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/19/1885970/jerry-mcdevitt-tries-to-discredit-irv-muchnick-again-wont-concede
McDevitt-Muchnick Exchange Is A WordPress Top Post Today
[posted 12/18/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Yesterday’s item at the Wrestling Babylon/Chris & Nancy blog, “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” is No. 88 on the WordPress.com Top Posts of the day list for Saturday, December 18, 2010.
Yesterday’s item at the Wrestling Babylon/Chris & Nancy blog, “New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt,” is No. 88 on the WordPress.com Top Posts of the day list for Saturday, December 18, 2010.
All-Time Top 10 Most Visited Posts at This Blog
[posted 12/18/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
1. Muchnick Book Bonus: ‘In Bed With the WWF — Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling’, May 15, 2010
2. New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt, December 17, 2010
3. EXCLUSIVE: WWE Wrestler Eddie ‘Umaga’ Fatu Died of ‘Acute Toxicity’, March 1, 2010
4. Eddie ‘Umaga’ Fatu Autopsy: 406 Pounds, Enlarged Heart, March 18, 2010
5. Source: WWE’s General Counsel Suspended for Sexual Harassment, May 10, 2010
6. Linda Loses: Why Vince McMahon Blew a Gasket Yesterday, October 15, 2010
7. Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (complete text as a single post), December 28, 2009
8. Why Linda McMahon’s WWE Wrestlers Won’t Unionize: The Bret Hart Story, December 29, 2009
9. New York Times Falls for Both the Little Carnies and the Über Carnies, July 18, 2010
10. Maybe ‘Stand Up for WWE’ Campaign Isn’t About Linda McMahon Senate Campaign, October 18, 2010
1. Muchnick Book Bonus: ‘In Bed With the WWF — Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling’, May 15, 2010
2. New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt, December 17, 2010
3. EXCLUSIVE: WWE Wrestler Eddie ‘Umaga’ Fatu Died of ‘Acute Toxicity’, March 1, 2010
4. Eddie ‘Umaga’ Fatu Autopsy: 406 Pounds, Enlarged Heart, March 18, 2010
5. Source: WWE’s General Counsel Suspended for Sexual Harassment, May 10, 2010
6. Linda Loses: Why Vince McMahon Blew a Gasket Yesterday, October 15, 2010
7. Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (complete text as a single post), December 28, 2009
8. Why Linda McMahon’s WWE Wrestlers Won’t Unionize: The Bret Hart Story, December 29, 2009
9. New York Times Falls for Both the Little Carnies and the Über Carnies, July 18, 2010
10. Maybe ‘Stand Up for WWE’ Campaign Isn’t About Linda McMahon Senate Campaign, October 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt
Yesterday I received a package from Jerry McDevitt of K&L Gates, attorney for World Wrestling Entertainment. Below is the text of my response. At the bottom of this post are links to McDevitt’s letter and exhibits.
Dear Mr. McDevitt:
I have read your December 16 emails (13-page cover letter attachment and the 110 pages of exhibits). Thank you for sharing this material. After transmitting this response to you, I will post this text along with links to the text of your own letter plus attachments.
The pertinence of much of your package is not immediately obvious to this layman. Nonetheless, as a believer in the value of transparency, I think it is good to have as much as possible in the public record. In that spirit, I am publishing your material in full. Various cited third parties, such as Benoit estate attorney Cary Ichter and West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute attorney Robert Fitzsimmons, are invited to share their sides of some of your stories.
Let’s move on to your demands for retractions and related points.
***
On page 2 you complain that I am factually wrong when I disparage the World Wrestling Entertainment Wellness Program by stating the opinion that WWE and Vince McMahon ultimately control the work of their contractor David Black and Aegis Labs. (Please note that page references here correspond to the pagination of the hard-copy version of your letter, not to the posted PDF file of its text.)
My opinion is based, first, on the inherent difficulties any contractor faces in processing controversial information on behalf of, or delivering complex advice to, the client footing the bills.
In addition, many specific concerns in connection with this opinion were the focus of interviews conducted in 2007 by staff investigators for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Dr. Tracy Ray, the physician who at the time was contracted to assist WWE with claims of therapeutic use exemptions, said that “there was shadiness in almost every case that I’ve reviewed.”
David Black said to the committee staff, “Oh, sure, I would agree that that’s not good,” when asked why Randy Orton appeared to be excused from sanctions after a particular apparent violation of terms of the Wellness Policy. In general, portions of the Ray and Black testimony support the notion that the WWE medical and drug-testing contractors were in the business of forwarding recommendations for ultimate disposition by others, rather than acting as independent agents.
***
On page 3 you complain about my Randy Orton reporting. I am not privy to the communications between the Albany district attorney’s office and WWE, and therefore do not claim to know the veracity of or to contradict your statement that “no action was taken against Randy Orton because he was not on any customer list for Signature Pharmacy ever provided to us by District Attorney Soares.” I do know, however, that Orton was in many published media reports of lists of Signature customers, and some of those reports included detailed shipment dates and names of drugs. And as noted above, your own David Black, in response to direct questions about what happened with Mr. Orton, agreed with Congressional investigators that the handling of that matter by WWE was “not good.”
***
On page 4 you begin a long and rather unfocused complaint about the evolution of my views on Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy and on CTE’s perceived centrality to the Benoit murder-suicide. Like many others who have followed the mounting evidence on CTE, both anecdotal and scientific, I have indeed moved considerably closer to the views of Michael Benoit since the publication of my book (though, I must say, not close enough to satisfy Mr. Benoit). While every individual case has its own unique factors and emphases, I believe we are finding that CTE is a key ingredient of what I term the “cocktail of death.”
I welcome the opportunity you have given me here to advocate again for more aggressive research on and investigation of the interplay of abuse of steroids and other drugs (primarily prescription pharmaceuticals), occupational brain trauma, and other factors. I helped put Mr. Benoit in touch with the Richard Blumenthal campaign because I did and do believe that Linda McMahon’s campaign for a United States Senate seat was an appropriate and useful platform for public education on this issue. Others reading our exchange can make their own judgments as to the wisdom of my activism in this area.
As you note, I have written in CHRIS & NANCY and elsewhere that I believe Cary Ichter had a conflict of interest in his work on the Georgia State Athletic Commission. If anything, my disagreements over the years with (among others) Mr. Ichter, Mr. Benoit, and Dr. Bennet Omalu only reinforce the independence of my journalism and do not support your statements that I am motivated by partisanship.
***
On page 6 you note that the Sports Legacy Institute’s early media outreach was undertaken without the benefit of published peer-reviewed scientific literature. I have never reported or suggested otherwise, so I am not sure what point you are making here.
***
On page 7 you begin your explanation of what I have called WWE’s lie to ESPN, and your medical director Dr. Joseph Maroon’s unfortunate enabling of that lie. In a nutshell, the explanation is that you question the chain of custody of what Dr. Omalu and others have represented as Chris Benoit brain specimens; in turn, this would mean that the statement, “WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them,” is accurate. I disagree. If WWE told ESPN reporter Greg Garber that Dr. Maroon attended the October 2008 meeting in West Virginia with Dr. Omalu and Dr. Julian Bailes – months after Dr. Maroon was named WWE medical director – and ESPN chose not to include that crucial fact in its story, then please so inform me and I will report as much.
***
Your background on Dr. Omalu, starting on page 8, is of no immediate relevance to any grievance you might have with my reporting. Your take on Dr. Omalu’s role in the Dr. Cyril Wecht trial, in which you guided your client’s exoneration, is very interesting, but this is not anything on which I have reported in detail or depth. Nor have I have reported on the turf battles and professional differences of the various leading players in CTE research.
(With respect to Dr. Wecht, you assert in passing that I have “systematically defamed” him but do not say how. I believe my only mentions of Dr. Wecht have been quotes from Michael Benoit about Dr. Wecht’s contact with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Kris Sperry, during the murder-suicide investigation.)
Again, thank you for reading my blog and adding your voice to this important public discussion.
Sincerely,
Irvin Muchnick
P.S. Technical note: Due to limitations on my end, the second-generation versions of your exhibits, which are being posted, have poor resolution. I will be fixing that problem. If having clearer online images of these documents is a priority for you, please have your office email back to me each individual exhibit as its own PDF file.
JERRY McDEVITT’S LETTER
http://muchnick.net/mcdevitt121610.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 1
“Sports Legacy Institute Announces Findings on Wrestler Chris Benoit’s Brain, September 5, 2007”
http://muchnick.net/sli_transcript_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 2
Sports Legacy Institute news release, September 9, 2007
http://muchnick.net/sli_news_release_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 3
Cary Ichter to Jerry McDevitt, September 11, 2007
http://muchnick.net/ichter091107.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 4
“Fifth Estate, Chris Benoit – Fight to the Death, Aired February 6 on the CBC Network across Canada”
http://muchnick.net/fifth_estate_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 5
“Muchnick Flashback – EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008”
http://muchnick.net/muchnick_blog_on_espn_story.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 6
Bennet Omalu to Cyril Wecht, April 17, 2006
http://muchnick.net/omalu_email_041706.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 7
GQ article, “Game Brain”
http://muchnick.net/gq.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 8
Transcript of Bennet Omalu testimony at Cyril Wecht trial
http://muchnick.net/wecht_trial_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 9
“CHRIS NOWINSKI INTERVIEW, DENNIS AND CALLAHAN RADIO TALK SHOW, WEEK OF OCTOBER 14, 2010”
http://muchnick.net/nowinski_interview_101410.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 10
Bennet Omalu journal article, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a professional American wrestler”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 11
“BENNET OMALU ON HIS INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN FOOTBALL”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_pittmed_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 12
“Dr. Bennet Omalu, Brain Injury Research Institute: B/R Exclusive Interview”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_interview_102210.pdf
Dear Mr. McDevitt:
I have read your December 16 emails (13-page cover letter attachment and the 110 pages of exhibits). Thank you for sharing this material. After transmitting this response to you, I will post this text along with links to the text of your own letter plus attachments.
The pertinence of much of your package is not immediately obvious to this layman. Nonetheless, as a believer in the value of transparency, I think it is good to have as much as possible in the public record. In that spirit, I am publishing your material in full. Various cited third parties, such as Benoit estate attorney Cary Ichter and West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute attorney Robert Fitzsimmons, are invited to share their sides of some of your stories.
Let’s move on to your demands for retractions and related points.
***
On page 2 you complain that I am factually wrong when I disparage the World Wrestling Entertainment Wellness Program by stating the opinion that WWE and Vince McMahon ultimately control the work of their contractor David Black and Aegis Labs. (Please note that page references here correspond to the pagination of the hard-copy version of your letter, not to the posted PDF file of its text.)
My opinion is based, first, on the inherent difficulties any contractor faces in processing controversial information on behalf of, or delivering complex advice to, the client footing the bills.
In addition, many specific concerns in connection with this opinion were the focus of interviews conducted in 2007 by staff investigators for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Dr. Tracy Ray, the physician who at the time was contracted to assist WWE with claims of therapeutic use exemptions, said that “there was shadiness in almost every case that I’ve reviewed.”
David Black said to the committee staff, “Oh, sure, I would agree that that’s not good,” when asked why Randy Orton appeared to be excused from sanctions after a particular apparent violation of terms of the Wellness Policy. In general, portions of the Ray and Black testimony support the notion that the WWE medical and drug-testing contractors were in the business of forwarding recommendations for ultimate disposition by others, rather than acting as independent agents.
***
On page 3 you complain about my Randy Orton reporting. I am not privy to the communications between the Albany district attorney’s office and WWE, and therefore do not claim to know the veracity of or to contradict your statement that “no action was taken against Randy Orton because he was not on any customer list for Signature Pharmacy ever provided to us by District Attorney Soares.” I do know, however, that Orton was in many published media reports of lists of Signature customers, and some of those reports included detailed shipment dates and names of drugs. And as noted above, your own David Black, in response to direct questions about what happened with Mr. Orton, agreed with Congressional investigators that the handling of that matter by WWE was “not good.”
***
On page 4 you begin a long and rather unfocused complaint about the evolution of my views on Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy and on CTE’s perceived centrality to the Benoit murder-suicide. Like many others who have followed the mounting evidence on CTE, both anecdotal and scientific, I have indeed moved considerably closer to the views of Michael Benoit since the publication of my book (though, I must say, not close enough to satisfy Mr. Benoit). While every individual case has its own unique factors and emphases, I believe we are finding that CTE is a key ingredient of what I term the “cocktail of death.”
I welcome the opportunity you have given me here to advocate again for more aggressive research on and investigation of the interplay of abuse of steroids and other drugs (primarily prescription pharmaceuticals), occupational brain trauma, and other factors. I helped put Mr. Benoit in touch with the Richard Blumenthal campaign because I did and do believe that Linda McMahon’s campaign for a United States Senate seat was an appropriate and useful platform for public education on this issue. Others reading our exchange can make their own judgments as to the wisdom of my activism in this area.
As you note, I have written in CHRIS & NANCY and elsewhere that I believe Cary Ichter had a conflict of interest in his work on the Georgia State Athletic Commission. If anything, my disagreements over the years with (among others) Mr. Ichter, Mr. Benoit, and Dr. Bennet Omalu only reinforce the independence of my journalism and do not support your statements that I am motivated by partisanship.
***
On page 6 you note that the Sports Legacy Institute’s early media outreach was undertaken without the benefit of published peer-reviewed scientific literature. I have never reported or suggested otherwise, so I am not sure what point you are making here.
***
On page 7 you begin your explanation of what I have called WWE’s lie to ESPN, and your medical director Dr. Joseph Maroon’s unfortunate enabling of that lie. In a nutshell, the explanation is that you question the chain of custody of what Dr. Omalu and others have represented as Chris Benoit brain specimens; in turn, this would mean that the statement, “WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them,” is accurate. I disagree. If WWE told ESPN reporter Greg Garber that Dr. Maroon attended the October 2008 meeting in West Virginia with Dr. Omalu and Dr. Julian Bailes – months after Dr. Maroon was named WWE medical director – and ESPN chose not to include that crucial fact in its story, then please so inform me and I will report as much.
***
Your background on Dr. Omalu, starting on page 8, is of no immediate relevance to any grievance you might have with my reporting. Your take on Dr. Omalu’s role in the Dr. Cyril Wecht trial, in which you guided your client’s exoneration, is very interesting, but this is not anything on which I have reported in detail or depth. Nor have I have reported on the turf battles and professional differences of the various leading players in CTE research.
(With respect to Dr. Wecht, you assert in passing that I have “systematically defamed” him but do not say how. I believe my only mentions of Dr. Wecht have been quotes from Michael Benoit about Dr. Wecht’s contact with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Kris Sperry, during the murder-suicide investigation.)
Again, thank you for reading my blog and adding your voice to this important public discussion.
Sincerely,
Irvin Muchnick
P.S. Technical note: Due to limitations on my end, the second-generation versions of your exhibits, which are being posted, have poor resolution. I will be fixing that problem. If having clearer online images of these documents is a priority for you, please have your office email back to me each individual exhibit as its own PDF file.
JERRY McDEVITT’S LETTER
http://muchnick.net/mcdevitt121610.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 1
“Sports Legacy Institute Announces Findings on Wrestler Chris Benoit’s Brain, September 5, 2007”
http://muchnick.net/sli_transcript_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 2
Sports Legacy Institute news release, September 9, 2007
http://muchnick.net/sli_news_release_090507.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 3
Cary Ichter to Jerry McDevitt, September 11, 2007
http://muchnick.net/ichter091107.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 4
“Fifth Estate, Chris Benoit – Fight to the Death, Aired February 6 on the CBC Network across Canada”
http://muchnick.net/fifth_estate_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 5
“Muchnick Flashback – EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008”
http://muchnick.net/muchnick_blog_on_espn_story.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 6
Bennet Omalu to Cyril Wecht, April 17, 2006
http://muchnick.net/omalu_email_041706.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 7
GQ article, “Game Brain”
http://muchnick.net/gq.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 8
Transcript of Bennet Omalu testimony at Cyril Wecht trial
http://muchnick.net/wecht_trial_transcript.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 9
“CHRIS NOWINSKI INTERVIEW, DENNIS AND CALLAHAN RADIO TALK SHOW, WEEK OF OCTOBER 14, 2010”
http://muchnick.net/nowinski_interview_101410.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 10
Bennet Omalu journal article, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a professional American wrestler”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_journal_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 11
“BENNET OMALU ON HIS INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN FOOTBALL”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_pittmed_article.pdf
***
EXHIBIT 12
“Dr. Bennet Omalu, Brain Injury Research Institute: B/R Exclusive Interview”
http://muchnick.net/omalu_interview_102210.pdf
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Muchnick Flashback: WWE Docs Governed by ‘Private’ Pitt Med Center Ethics Policy
The post below was originally published here on March 31.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center doctors Joseph Maroon and Bryan Donohue, who head the clinical team for World Wrestling Entertainment’s “wellness policy,” have never responded to my requests for answers or comments. Nor have UPMC officials or the university’s chancellor, Mark A. Nordenberg.
The Pittsburgh media have ignored the story.
The Connecticut media have done a great job of informing everyone that WWE founder and former CEO Linda McMahon will almost certainly be running again for a Senate seat there.
Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal, who defeated McMahon in November for his seat, is all over the decision by CBS to black out Connecticut affiliates from last night’s New York Giants football game.
And a happy holiday season to all.
*****
This blog is exploring how a cluster of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physicians came to join the medical staff of World Wrestling Entertainment, the company of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon.
In my view, these three doctors – WWE medical director and neurologist Joseph Maroon, cardiologist Bryan Donohue, and endocrinologist Vijah Bahl – have done little except give political cover to this billion-dollar publicly traded corporation and to the McMahon family, which runs and profits from it.
At the moment, I am especially interested in Dr. Donohue, who is supposed to be supervising cardiovascular screening of WWE talent under a 2007 revision of the company Wellness Policy. In December 2009, six months after being fired by WWE for refusing to go to drug rehab, wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu died at age 36 of a massive coronary brought on by a toxic mix of prescription medications. Fatu’s autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart.
In addition, Dr. Donohue’s overall portfolio of outside business interests may be a bit too entrepreneurial for my blood. Leveraging his medical credentials, he recently started a hype-happy company in the largely unregulated supplement industry.
In 2008 the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center published a new ethics policy, which has been widely praised for controlling the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on the clinical decisions of doctors.
However, when I viewed the text of the policy online, I noticed it included links to general University of Pittsburgh guidelines for faculty conflicts of interest — and those links did not work.
Yesterday I spoke to Frank Raczkiewicz, a UPMC media relations director, about getting access to the blocked documents. Raczkiewicz referred me to Dr. Barbara Barnes, the UPMC vice president who authored the ethics policy.
Dr. Barnes told me that the links within the UPMC ethics policy to the University of Pittsburgh policies were designed not to be publicly accessible because the latter are “internal” documents.
In our phone conversation yesterday, Dr. Barnes did not have time to get into the substance of my reporting on the relationship between UPMC and WWE. I emailed her with my contact information but did not hear back.
Later yesterday I sent around to all the principals an email with the following text:
TO:
Ed Patru / Linda McMahon for Senate campaign, media relations
Robert Zimmerman / World Wrestling Entertainment, media relations
Bryan C. Donohue, M.D.
Joseph C. Maroon, M.D.
Barbara E. Barnes, M.D. / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Vice President of Continuing Medical Education, Contracts and Grants and Intellectual Property
Frank Raczkiewicz / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, media relations
I am about to post to my blog a report headlined, “Umaga Autopsy Turns Focus to Linda McMahon’s WWE Cardio Program and Docs.” The post — to which I invite all of your comments (see my contact information below) — includes the following points:
* The autopsy report on wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu — a WWE performer until six months before his December 2009 death from a heart attack caused by prescription drug toxicity — showed that he had an enlarged heart. This raises questions about the cardiovascular screening under the WWE Wellness Policy. Dr. Maroon is WWE’s medical director. Dr. Donohue is the consulting cardiologist.
* Dr. Maroon, Dr. Donohue, and a third member of the WWE medical team, Dr. Vijay Bahl, have UPMC practices. This raises questions about the UPMC ethics policy that took effect in February 2008.
* The UPMC ethics policy seems primarily aimed at the issue of pharmaceutical companies’ inducements to doctors, which can compromise patient care. However, there are also general conflict-of-interest issues, as well as specific ones involving physicians’ relationships with the non-regulated supplement industry. Dr. Donohue is a co-founder of a supplement company, which he aggressively promotes in media appearances. Dr. Maroon has written a book touting the same supplement and is cited prominently on its website.
* Dr. Maroon’s professional associations in pro football — as a doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers and as a member of the National Football League’s concussion policy committee — are also noted. I point out the case of Richard Rydze, yet another UPMC physician who was dropped by the Steelers after he was found to have purchased huge quantities of growth hormone from the Internet gray-market dealer Signature Pharmacy. I also review my previously published reports that Dr. Maroon’s NFL concussion work has been criticized as too passive, and that he and WWE last year gave ESPN misleading information about his access to the postmortem brain studies of WWE performer Chris Benoit, who committed double murder/suicide in 2007.
Irvin Muchnick
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center doctors Joseph Maroon and Bryan Donohue, who head the clinical team for World Wrestling Entertainment’s “wellness policy,” have never responded to my requests for answers or comments. Nor have UPMC officials or the university’s chancellor, Mark A. Nordenberg.
The Pittsburgh media have ignored the story.
The Connecticut media have done a great job of informing everyone that WWE founder and former CEO Linda McMahon will almost certainly be running again for a Senate seat there.
Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal, who defeated McMahon in November for his seat, is all over the decision by CBS to black out Connecticut affiliates from last night’s New York Giants football game.
And a happy holiday season to all.
*****
This blog is exploring how a cluster of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physicians came to join the medical staff of World Wrestling Entertainment, the company of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon.
In my view, these three doctors – WWE medical director and neurologist Joseph Maroon, cardiologist Bryan Donohue, and endocrinologist Vijah Bahl – have done little except give political cover to this billion-dollar publicly traded corporation and to the McMahon family, which runs and profits from it.
At the moment, I am especially interested in Dr. Donohue, who is supposed to be supervising cardiovascular screening of WWE talent under a 2007 revision of the company Wellness Policy. In December 2009, six months after being fired by WWE for refusing to go to drug rehab, wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu died at age 36 of a massive coronary brought on by a toxic mix of prescription medications. Fatu’s autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart.
In addition, Dr. Donohue’s overall portfolio of outside business interests may be a bit too entrepreneurial for my blood. Leveraging his medical credentials, he recently started a hype-happy company in the largely unregulated supplement industry.
In 2008 the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center published a new ethics policy, which has been widely praised for controlling the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on the clinical decisions of doctors.
However, when I viewed the text of the policy online, I noticed it included links to general University of Pittsburgh guidelines for faculty conflicts of interest — and those links did not work.
Yesterday I spoke to Frank Raczkiewicz, a UPMC media relations director, about getting access to the blocked documents. Raczkiewicz referred me to Dr. Barbara Barnes, the UPMC vice president who authored the ethics policy.
Dr. Barnes told me that the links within the UPMC ethics policy to the University of Pittsburgh policies were designed not to be publicly accessible because the latter are “internal” documents.
In our phone conversation yesterday, Dr. Barnes did not have time to get into the substance of my reporting on the relationship between UPMC and WWE. I emailed her with my contact information but did not hear back.
Later yesterday I sent around to all the principals an email with the following text:
TO:
Ed Patru / Linda McMahon for Senate campaign, media relations
Robert Zimmerman / World Wrestling Entertainment, media relations
Bryan C. Donohue, M.D.
Joseph C. Maroon, M.D.
Barbara E. Barnes, M.D. / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Vice President of Continuing Medical Education, Contracts and Grants and Intellectual Property
Frank Raczkiewicz / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, media relations
I am about to post to my blog a report headlined, “Umaga Autopsy Turns Focus to Linda McMahon’s WWE Cardio Program and Docs.” The post — to which I invite all of your comments (see my contact information below) — includes the following points:
* The autopsy report on wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu — a WWE performer until six months before his December 2009 death from a heart attack caused by prescription drug toxicity — showed that he had an enlarged heart. This raises questions about the cardiovascular screening under the WWE Wellness Policy. Dr. Maroon is WWE’s medical director. Dr. Donohue is the consulting cardiologist.
* Dr. Maroon, Dr. Donohue, and a third member of the WWE medical team, Dr. Vijay Bahl, have UPMC practices. This raises questions about the UPMC ethics policy that took effect in February 2008.
* The UPMC ethics policy seems primarily aimed at the issue of pharmaceutical companies’ inducements to doctors, which can compromise patient care. However, there are also general conflict-of-interest issues, as well as specific ones involving physicians’ relationships with the non-regulated supplement industry. Dr. Donohue is a co-founder of a supplement company, which he aggressively promotes in media appearances. Dr. Maroon has written a book touting the same supplement and is cited prominently on its website.
* Dr. Maroon’s professional associations in pro football — as a doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers and as a member of the National Football League’s concussion policy committee — are also noted. I point out the case of Richard Rydze, yet another UPMC physician who was dropped by the Steelers after he was found to have purchased huge quantities of growth hormone from the Internet gray-market dealer Signature Pharmacy. I also review my previously published reports that Dr. Maroon’s NFL concussion work has been criticized as too passive, and that he and WWE last year gave ESPN misleading information about his access to the postmortem brain studies of WWE performer Chris Benoit, who committed double murder/suicide in 2007.
Irvin Muchnick
Monday, December 13, 2010
Wrestler Dave Taylor Discusses Just About Everything Except ...
... what he and his wife were doing outside Chris Benoit’s house in unincorporated Fayetteville, Georgia, on June 25, 2007.
See “Gary Mehaffy interviews David Taylor,” Wrestling Observer/Figure 4 online, http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/18680/ (subscribers only).
In order to find out what Dave Taylor and his wife were doing outside Chris Benoit’s house in unincorporated Fayetteville, Georgia, on June 25, 2007, you have to read Chapter 10 of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.
Irv Muchnick
See “Gary Mehaffy interviews David Taylor,” Wrestling Observer/Figure 4 online, http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/18680/ (subscribers only).
In order to find out what Dave Taylor and his wife were doing outside Chris Benoit’s house in unincorporated Fayetteville, Georgia, on June 25, 2007, you have to read Chapter 10 of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.
Irv Muchnick
Keith Harris of Cageside Seats on the Lurking Death Story in Mixed Martial Arts
Yet another reason why I say that you should care about death in pro wrestling even if you don’t care about pro wrestling:
“Why isn’t Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy (CTE) being discussed more by the MMA media and athletic commissions?”
Keith Harris, Cageside Seats, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/12/1872208/why-isnt-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-cte-being-discussed-more-by
Irv Muchnick
“Why isn’t Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy (CTE) being discussed more by the MMA media and athletic commissions?”
Keith Harris, Cageside Seats, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/12/12/1872208/why-isnt-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-cte-being-discussed-more-by
Irv Muchnick
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Blumenthal Chooses Planned Parenthood Exec for Chief of Senate Staff
Count me among those who think Connecticut commentator Kevin “Don’t Call Linda McMahon My Mouthpiece” Rennie has a point when he says a compromised smell emits from Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal’s choice of Laura Rubiner, vice president for public policy at Planned Parenthood, as his chief of staff.
The Blumenthal Senate campaign had an embarrassing moment when Ben Smith of Politico published a leaked memo showing that Planned Parenthood was helping the Blumies gather images of “misogyny” in what we know is the highly cultured content of McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment, where she had been CEO.
The campaign and PP either worked volunteers needlessly or wasted money on paid staffers who conducted this deep, deep undercover work via such hard-to-penetrate sources as YouTube. I wrote at the time, and still maintain, that this information was about as instrumental to Blumenthal as a hat rack to a moose. Linda lost the election decisively because the minimum wage gaffe exposed that she couldn’t talk her way out of a policy paper bag, and because her opponent finally focused his fire on the somewhat lacking occupational health and safety standards at her junk-entertainment company, which has resulted in many dead people.
Admittedly, the Rennie crowd seems to have no hard proof of any Blumenthal-Planned Parenthood collusion outside the boundaries of the law. Just as McMahon’s adversaries have no evidence that WWE resources contributed to Vince McMahon’s wife’s $50 million “self-funded” run for high political office. (Cue laugh track.)
Nor, by the same token, do I have proof that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, had a hand in quashing a federal investigation of WWE based on the findings of Congressman Henry Waxman, then chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I only know that Emanuel, when himself in the House, was among the multitude of both Democrats and Republicans who have received campaign donations from the McMahon family. I also know that investigations of this sort don’t usually go away by themselves; someone, whether Emanuel or someone else, likely made a discreet contact or two with the right influence peddlers who carried the message that this was one fight that shouldn’t be taken to the mat.
The 112th Congress, with a new Republican majority in the House and a continuing Democratic majority in the Senate – the latter due, in no small measure, to Blumenthal’s “firewall” win over the wrestling lady in Connecticut – marks a new day with a new mix of political exigencies and legislative priorities.
Irv Muchnick
The Blumenthal Senate campaign had an embarrassing moment when Ben Smith of Politico published a leaked memo showing that Planned Parenthood was helping the Blumies gather images of “misogyny” in what we know is the highly cultured content of McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment, where she had been CEO.
The campaign and PP either worked volunteers needlessly or wasted money on paid staffers who conducted this deep, deep undercover work via such hard-to-penetrate sources as YouTube. I wrote at the time, and still maintain, that this information was about as instrumental to Blumenthal as a hat rack to a moose. Linda lost the election decisively because the minimum wage gaffe exposed that she couldn’t talk her way out of a policy paper bag, and because her opponent finally focused his fire on the somewhat lacking occupational health and safety standards at her junk-entertainment company, which has resulted in many dead people.
Admittedly, the Rennie crowd seems to have no hard proof of any Blumenthal-Planned Parenthood collusion outside the boundaries of the law. Just as McMahon’s adversaries have no evidence that WWE resources contributed to Vince McMahon’s wife’s $50 million “self-funded” run for high political office. (Cue laugh track.)
Nor, by the same token, do I have proof that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, had a hand in quashing a federal investigation of WWE based on the findings of Congressman Henry Waxman, then chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I only know that Emanuel, when himself in the House, was among the multitude of both Democrats and Republicans who have received campaign donations from the McMahon family. I also know that investigations of this sort don’t usually go away by themselves; someone, whether Emanuel or someone else, likely made a discreet contact or two with the right influence peddlers who carried the message that this was one fight that shouldn’t be taken to the mat.
The 112th Congress, with a new Republican majority in the House and a continuing Democratic majority in the Senate – the latter due, in no small measure, to Blumenthal’s “firewall” win over the wrestling lady in Connecticut – marks a new day with a new mix of political exigencies and legislative priorities.
Irv Muchnick
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Echoes of Benoit in UFC Fighter Sonnen’s Testosterone Replacement Therapy Claim
Last week brought the story of mixed martial artist Chael Sonnen’s appeal hearing before the California State Athletic Commission of his suspension and fine for his failed August drug test.
In a nutshell: Sonnen claimed, none too convincingly, that he had a thoroughly cleared therapeutic use exemption (TUE) for prescribed testosterone. In a messy compromise, a divided commission halved the length of Sonnen’s suspension, from a year to six months, and upheld his $2,500 fine. For details, I recommend the coverage of Dave Meltzer of Yahoo Sports, at http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news;_ylt=Ak_8uZogiSnShXi0XrLaW9E9Eo14?slug=dm-steroidhearings120210.
For our purposes here, the Sonnen case has a number of applicable lessons. World Wrestling Entertainment’s Chris Benoit had a TUE, and that is why he was said to have “passed” his WWE drug tests under the company “wellness policy” prior to his double murder/suicide in June 2007. The postmortem toxicology would show that Benoit had a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of 59-to-1.
Sonnen’s August test, triggering his suspension, was 16.9-to-1. “Normal levels are 1-1, and allowable levels in most sports ... is 4-to-1,” Meltzer points out. Moreover, in legit sports, even when TUE’s are granted, they are for the purpose of bringing abnormal hormone levels up to allowable levels; they do not excuse levels above 4-to-1.
A key takeout from the California athletic commission is that a government agency at least has tried to do its job and its mission is a good one. The length and rigor of last Thursday’s hearing were understandably panned – but, heck, at least it was a public hearing and this important conversation is out there where it belongs. Regulation doesn’t make things perfect. It makes things better. That is rather important when lives and public health are at stake.
Contrast that complicated but just process with the complete opacity of WWE’s internal procedures, all of which are in the end tightly controlled by Vincent Kennedy McMahon. After the Benoit toxicology report and during the 2007 Waxman Committee staff interviews, the WWE drug-testing administrator, David Black, made the ludicrous claim that testosterone-to-epitestosterone readings are meaningless. How much did he get paid for that whopper?
At the time WWE also employed a half-hearted colleague of Dr. James Andrews’ sports surgery clinic in Alabama – a doctor named Tracy Ray – to review wrestlers’ TUE claims for McMahon’s final review. But Ray was not an endocrinologist and he didn’t really tackle the problem. “There is shadiness in almost every case,” he conceded to Congressional investigators.
For as long as people were looking over his shoulder, McMahon reached out to perhaps the most prominent expert in the field, Dr. David Auchus, to redesign WWE’s standards for TUE’s. But after Auchus submitted his recommendations, WWE paid him for his time and never contacted him again. The endocrinologist who is part of the medical staff now, Dr. Vijay Bahl, is – guess what? – yet another physician out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. That is the same institution that has given WWE the flawed work of medical director Joseph Maroon and cardiologist Bryan Donohue.
No company in combat sports, whether real or “worked,” should be trusted to regulate itself.
Irv Muchnick
In a nutshell: Sonnen claimed, none too convincingly, that he had a thoroughly cleared therapeutic use exemption (TUE) for prescribed testosterone. In a messy compromise, a divided commission halved the length of Sonnen’s suspension, from a year to six months, and upheld his $2,500 fine. For details, I recommend the coverage of Dave Meltzer of Yahoo Sports, at http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news;_ylt=Ak_8uZogiSnShXi0XrLaW9E9Eo14?slug=dm-steroidhearings120210.
For our purposes here, the Sonnen case has a number of applicable lessons. World Wrestling Entertainment’s Chris Benoit had a TUE, and that is why he was said to have “passed” his WWE drug tests under the company “wellness policy” prior to his double murder/suicide in June 2007. The postmortem toxicology would show that Benoit had a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of 59-to-1.
Sonnen’s August test, triggering his suspension, was 16.9-to-1. “Normal levels are 1-1, and allowable levels in most sports ... is 4-to-1,” Meltzer points out. Moreover, in legit sports, even when TUE’s are granted, they are for the purpose of bringing abnormal hormone levels up to allowable levels; they do not excuse levels above 4-to-1.
A key takeout from the California athletic commission is that a government agency at least has tried to do its job and its mission is a good one. The length and rigor of last Thursday’s hearing were understandably panned – but, heck, at least it was a public hearing and this important conversation is out there where it belongs. Regulation doesn’t make things perfect. It makes things better. That is rather important when lives and public health are at stake.
Contrast that complicated but just process with the complete opacity of WWE’s internal procedures, all of which are in the end tightly controlled by Vincent Kennedy McMahon. After the Benoit toxicology report and during the 2007 Waxman Committee staff interviews, the WWE drug-testing administrator, David Black, made the ludicrous claim that testosterone-to-epitestosterone readings are meaningless. How much did he get paid for that whopper?
At the time WWE also employed a half-hearted colleague of Dr. James Andrews’ sports surgery clinic in Alabama – a doctor named Tracy Ray – to review wrestlers’ TUE claims for McMahon’s final review. But Ray was not an endocrinologist and he didn’t really tackle the problem. “There is shadiness in almost every case,” he conceded to Congressional investigators.
For as long as people were looking over his shoulder, McMahon reached out to perhaps the most prominent expert in the field, Dr. David Auchus, to redesign WWE’s standards for TUE’s. But after Auchus submitted his recommendations, WWE paid him for his time and never contacted him again. The endocrinologist who is part of the medical staff now, Dr. Vijay Bahl, is – guess what? – yet another physician out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. That is the same institution that has given WWE the flawed work of medical director Joseph Maroon and cardiologist Bryan Donohue.
No company in combat sports, whether real or “worked,” should be trusted to regulate itself.
Irv Muchnick
Muchnick YouTube Channel’s Greatest Hits
Irvin Muchnick Confronts Wrestling Legend Bret Hart (CNN’s Nancy Grace, 6/29/07 ): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmw7Fmhwgg
Irvin Muchnick Discusses Linda McMahon and Death in Wrestling on WTNH (news report by Mark Davis, 3/23/10): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/0/GHWU1eBJgyk
Irvin Muchnick Discusses Benoit on KRON 4 Evening News 10-4-09 (interview by Gary Radnich): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/a/u/1/hGuVVszpep4
Irvin Muchnick on French TV’s “L’Effet Papillon” (France’s Canal+ network, 5/25/08; script text translation at http://muchnick.net/FrenchScript.pdf): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/18/0KDqolTYGY8
Irvin Muchnick on “The O’Reilly Factor” (6/27/07 ): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/25/asTdiVWf4gM
Irvin Muchnick Discusses Linda McMahon and Death in Wrestling on WTNH (news report by Mark Davis, 3/23/10): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/0/GHWU1eBJgyk
Irvin Muchnick Discusses Benoit on KRON 4 Evening News 10-4-09 (interview by Gary Radnich): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/a/u/1/hGuVVszpep4
Irvin Muchnick on French TV’s “L’Effet Papillon” (France’s Canal+ network, 5/25/08; script text translation at http://muchnick.net/FrenchScript.pdf): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/18/0KDqolTYGY8
Irvin Muchnick on “The O’Reilly Factor” (6/27/07 ): http://www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/u/25/asTdiVWf4gM
WWE's Holiday Gift: 'Tables, Ladders, and Chairs'
[posted 12/4/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
World Wrestling Entertainment – company of once-and-future Senate candidate Linda McMahon – closes out 2010 with the charming annual pay-per-view event “Tables, Ladders, and Chairs.”
Let’s focus on chairs. Last year’s promotional video for the event featured wrestler Chris Jericho taking a chair shot to the skull, which released animated cuckoo birds encircling his head. But that was then – this is now. The promo for TLC ’10 shows cartoon stick figures going at it, but the chair shots are thoughtfully delivered below the neck.
WWE announced in January 2010, a convenient month after TLC ’09, that chair shots to the head were banned. This “evolving” standard was in tune with Linda McMahon’s flop of a Senate campaign.
Funny, but most of us had read Vince McMahon’s 2007 interview with CNN’s investigative documentary unit to mean that chair shots to the head were banned then. But I guess it depends on what the meaning of “is” is. (The same year, Vince and Linda’s daughter Stephanie, a WWE executive and the wife of wrestler Triple H, told Congressional investigators that she had never seen a WWE performer suffer a concussion in the ring.)
Meanwhile, in October 2008 another wrestler, Lance Cade, got nailed with a beautifully squared-up chair to the head on live television. Cade would die in August 2010 from “heart failure,” at age 29.
In Connecticut, Public Act 10-62, “An Act Concerning Student Athletes and Concussions,” passed earlier this year, has taken effect. The law requires coaches applying for certification by the state Board of Education (a body on which you may have noticed Linda McMahon serving in 2009-10, unless you blinked) to demonstrate that they have been trained in recognizing head inquiries, and establishes protocols for the return to action of athletes so injured.
There were hearings for a similar federal bill before the House Committee on Education and Labor. I am trying to find out how that legislation’s prospects might be affected by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives in the 112th Congress.
A September 23 news release by outgoing committee chair George Miller listed the National Football League among the supporters of the proposed law. World Wrestling Entertainment was not listed. WWE’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, works for both the NFL and WWE, but he told Pittsburgh City Paper last week that he thinks it’s still too early to say what the consequences are from the syndrome being called Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy.
Irv Muchnick
World Wrestling Entertainment – company of once-and-future Senate candidate Linda McMahon – closes out 2010 with the charming annual pay-per-view event “Tables, Ladders, and Chairs.”
Let’s focus on chairs. Last year’s promotional video for the event featured wrestler Chris Jericho taking a chair shot to the skull, which released animated cuckoo birds encircling his head. But that was then – this is now. The promo for TLC ’10 shows cartoon stick figures going at it, but the chair shots are thoughtfully delivered below the neck.
WWE announced in January 2010, a convenient month after TLC ’09, that chair shots to the head were banned. This “evolving” standard was in tune with Linda McMahon’s flop of a Senate campaign.
Funny, but most of us had read Vince McMahon’s 2007 interview with CNN’s investigative documentary unit to mean that chair shots to the head were banned then. But I guess it depends on what the meaning of “is” is. (The same year, Vince and Linda’s daughter Stephanie, a WWE executive and the wife of wrestler Triple H, told Congressional investigators that she had never seen a WWE performer suffer a concussion in the ring.)
Meanwhile, in October 2008 another wrestler, Lance Cade, got nailed with a beautifully squared-up chair to the head on live television. Cade would die in August 2010 from “heart failure,” at age 29.
In Connecticut, Public Act 10-62, “An Act Concerning Student Athletes and Concussions,” passed earlier this year, has taken effect. The law requires coaches applying for certification by the state Board of Education (a body on which you may have noticed Linda McMahon serving in 2009-10, unless you blinked) to demonstrate that they have been trained in recognizing head inquiries, and establishes protocols for the return to action of athletes so injured.
There were hearings for a similar federal bill before the House Committee on Education and Labor. I am trying to find out how that legislation’s prospects might be affected by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives in the 112th Congress.
A September 23 news release by outgoing committee chair George Miller listed the National Football League among the supporters of the proposed law. World Wrestling Entertainment was not listed. WWE’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, works for both the NFL and WWE, but he told Pittsburgh City Paper last week that he thinks it’s still too early to say what the consequences are from the syndrome being called Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy.
Irv Muchnick
Threats to This Blog
[posted 12/4/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
From June 13, 2009, through December 3, 2010 (yesterday), the comments form at this blog has received a series of 17 anonymous communications from three Internet Protocol addresses at Verizon Wireless. I believe these all may have come from the same Verizon customer. Because the messages recently intensified in frequency and language, and possibly crossed from rhetorical rants to threats of physical harm or death, I turned the file over to Verizon, the San Francisco office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Berkeley Police Department.
Here is a log of the messages:
- June 13, 2009 (7:20 PM), Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.194.101 , pool-173-56-194-101.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- June 13, 2009 (7:22 PM), Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.194.101 , pool-173-56-194-101.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- June 13, 2009 (7:28 PM), Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.194.101 , pool-173-56-194-101.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- June 13, 2009 (7:45 PM), Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.194.101 , pool-173-56-194-101.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- June 22, 2009, Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.194.101 , pool-173-56-194-101.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- October 17, 2009, Author “TED,” Email, IP: 173.56.202.119 , pool-173-56-202-119.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- October 28, 2010, Author “ted,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 12, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 15, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 18, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 20, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 22, 2010 (2:46 PM), Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 22, 2010 (2:50 PM), Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 27, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- November 29, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- December 1, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
- December 3, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email, IP: 173.52.247.125 , pool-173-52-247-125.nycmny.east.verizon.net
From June 13, 2009, through December 3, 2010 (yesterday), the comments form at this blog has received a series of 17 anonymous communications from three Internet Protocol addresses at Verizon Wireless. I believe these all may have come from the same Verizon customer. Because the messages recently intensified in frequency and language, and possibly crossed from rhetorical rants to threats of physical harm or death, I turned the file over to Verizon, the San Francisco office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Berkeley Police Department.
Here is a log of the messages:
- June 13, 2009 (7:20 PM), Author “TED,” Email
- June 13, 2009 (7:22 PM), Author “TED,” Email
- June 13, 2009 (7:28 PM), Author “TED,” Email
- June 13, 2009 (7:45 PM), Author “TED,” Email
- June 22, 2009, Author “TED,” Email
- October 17, 2009, Author “TED,” Email
- October 28, 2010, Author “ted,” Email
- November 12, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 15, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 18, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 20, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 22, 2010 (2:46 PM), Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 22, 2010 (2:50 PM), Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 27, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- November 29, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- December 1, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
- December 3, 2010, Author “mcmahon 4 life,” Email
Not Yet Clear Whether Connecticut Investigation of WWE Is Wide-Ranging and Significant
[posted 12/3/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Connecticut Labor Department attorney Heidi Lane and spokesman Paul Oates have talked me through some of the intricacies of state law with respect to the current reported state audit of World Wrestling Entertainment.
I reemphasize that the department does not itself say that WWE is under investigation. That is my own independent conclusion, though a fair one – since the company itself revealed it in the course of Linda McMahon’s unsuccessful Senate campaign against Richard Blumenthal, other sources confirm it, and Oates “neither confirms nor denies” it.
Questions still remain with respect to the size and scope of the audit, and how and to what extent the public will become aware of its outcomes.
The investigation is being conducted out of the department’s Unemployment Insurance Tax Division, which I am informed is prohibited from disclosing information concerning individual employers.
Lane explained to me that there are several different laws in Connecticut dealing with misclassification of employees. WWE is not a target of a potential “stop work order” – a category created by statute in 2007 to thwart employers who knowingly misrepresent employees as independent contractors or provide false, incomplete, or misleading information to an insurance company on the number of employees for the purpose of paying a lower Workers’ Compensation premium.
A new law, passed earlier this year and stemming from recommendations of the Joint Employee Commission on Misclassification, increased the penalties for failure to have Workers’ Compensation for employees. That took effect in October.
Lane told me: “The Unemployment Insurance Tax Division in the course of its everyday functions performs thousands of audits yearly and hundreds of them concern misclassification issues. Misclassification investigations are started in a number of ways. If an individual files a claim for unemployment benefits and he or she does not have wage credits because their employer treated them as independent contractors instead of employees, the division will undertake an investigation to determine if the claimant is an employee or independent contractor. At times, these investigations may turn into full audits of the company. This division is also responsible for performing random audits pursuant to the federal requirements.”
In the case of WWE, I believe the investigation flowed from a “random audit.” Lane said the UI division has received three specific “referrals” for investigations, and earlier said that there have no Form DOL-83 referrals (a recently enacted procedure) listing World Wrestling Entertainment.
If an administrative ruling or negotiation conducted within the state government bureaucracy were to lead to a structural change in WWE’s practices – that is, if wrestlers stopped being classified as independent contractors and started being called employees, with employee-level benefits – then I’m sure we’d all know about it quickly. That is not the kind of secret that could stay hidden long from the pages of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter or Pro Wrestling Torch.
Short of such an outcome, however, I’m not sure what would be accomplished.
A month from today Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general, will become Connecticut’s junior United States senator, and at that point any involvement on his part in the state probe would officially become informal. (Blumenthal already has said that he had nothing to do with the state audit.) My view is that, in terms of both transparency and substance, his implied obligation to the voters to look into reform of the pro wrestling industry’s occupational health and safety standards goes beyond whatever is happening right now in discussions between the Connecticut Labor Department and WWE’s lawyers.
Irv Muchnick
Connecticut Labor Department attorney Heidi Lane and spokesman Paul Oates have talked me through some of the intricacies of state law with respect to the current reported state audit of World Wrestling Entertainment.
I reemphasize that the department does not itself say that WWE is under investigation. That is my own independent conclusion, though a fair one – since the company itself revealed it in the course of Linda McMahon’s unsuccessful Senate campaign against Richard Blumenthal, other sources confirm it, and Oates “neither confirms nor denies” it.
Questions still remain with respect to the size and scope of the audit, and how and to what extent the public will become aware of its outcomes.
The investigation is being conducted out of the department’s Unemployment Insurance Tax Division, which I am informed is prohibited from disclosing information concerning individual employers.
Lane explained to me that there are several different laws in Connecticut dealing with misclassification of employees. WWE is not a target of a potential “stop work order” – a category created by statute in 2007 to thwart employers who knowingly misrepresent employees as independent contractors or provide false, incomplete, or misleading information to an insurance company on the number of employees for the purpose of paying a lower Workers’ Compensation premium.
A new law, passed earlier this year and stemming from recommendations of the Joint Employee Commission on Misclassification, increased the penalties for failure to have Workers’ Compensation for employees. That took effect in October.
Lane told me: “The Unemployment Insurance Tax Division in the course of its everyday functions performs thousands of audits yearly and hundreds of them concern misclassification issues. Misclassification investigations are started in a number of ways. If an individual files a claim for unemployment benefits and he or she does not have wage credits because their employer treated them as independent contractors instead of employees, the division will undertake an investigation to determine if the claimant is an employee or independent contractor. At times, these investigations may turn into full audits of the company. This division is also responsible for performing random audits pursuant to the federal requirements.”
In the case of WWE, I believe the investigation flowed from a “random audit.” Lane said the UI division has received three specific “referrals” for investigations, and earlier said that there have no Form DOL-83 referrals (a recently enacted procedure) listing World Wrestling Entertainment.
If an administrative ruling or negotiation conducted within the state government bureaucracy were to lead to a structural change in WWE’s practices – that is, if wrestlers stopped being classified as independent contractors and started being called employees, with employee-level benefits – then I’m sure we’d all know about it quickly. That is not the kind of secret that could stay hidden long from the pages of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter or Pro Wrestling Torch.
Short of such an outcome, however, I’m not sure what would be accomplished.
A month from today Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general, will become Connecticut’s junior United States senator, and at that point any involvement on his part in the state probe would officially become informal. (Blumenthal already has said that he had nothing to do with the state audit.) My view is that, in terms of both transparency and substance, his implied obligation to the voters to look into reform of the pro wrestling industry’s occupational health and safety standards goes beyond whatever is happening right now in discussions between the Connecticut Labor Department and WWE’s lawyers.
Irv Muchnick
Further Reading on WWE Wellness Policy, Concussions, Dr. Joseph Maroon, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
[posted 12/2/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
The cover story in the current Pittsburgh City Paper on the World Wrestling Entertainment wellness policy is very poor, possibly the least informative and coherent article of that length yet published on this subject. Writer Charlie Deitch lays out the company line while omitting huge swaths of pertinent history – such as the elimination of steroid testing for ten years, the non-suspension of star Randy Orton after he appeared on the Signature Pharmacy customer list, the hole-riddled testimony of the McMahon family to the staff of the Waxman Committee, and the full background stories of very recent dead wrestlers Umaga and Lance Cade.
Really, a line-by-line critique would give City Paper’s effort here more attention than it deserves. Those of you who would like to read it for yourselves can go to http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A88609.
Those of you interested in hard reporting on the Pittsburgh doctors who administer for profit, while arguably somewhat ameliorating, the WWE death mill, see the links below from this blog over the last year.
Irv Muchnick
December 14, 2009
EXCLUSIVE: LINDA McMAHON’S WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR MET WITH CHRIS BENOIT BRAIN EXPERTS IN 2008
***
December 30, 2009
PAGING DR. JOSEPH MAROON, MEDICAL DIRECTOR FOR SENATE CANDIDATE LINDA McMAHON’S WWE
***
March 18, 2010
WHERE DOES WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR FIT IN SHAKEUP OF NFL’S CONCUSSION COMMITTEE?
***
March 18, 2010
EDDIE “UMAGA” FATU AUTOPSY: 406 POUNDS, ENLARGED HEART
***
March 19, 2010
WATCH THE CARDIOVASCULAR CONSULTANT FOR LINDA McMAHON’S WWE PIMP AN UNREGULATED SUPPLEMENT ON YOUTUBE
***
March 19, 2010
HOW NOT TO GET A GIG WITH WWE’S CRACK MEDICAL TEAM
***
March 30, 2010
UMAGA AUTOPSY TURNS FOCUS TO LINDA McMAHON’S WWE CARDIO PROGRAM AND DOCS
***
March 31, 2010
WWE DOCS GOVERNED BY “PRIVATE” PITT MED CENTER ETHICS POLICY
***
March 31, 2010
WWE MEDICAL TEAM BIOS – 5 OUT OF 8 ARE FROM PITT MED CENTER
***
April 6, 2010
WWE CARDIOLOGIST BRYAN DONOHUE’S SUPPLEMENT COMPANY HAS PR FIRM THAT DOESN’T DISCLOSE HIS EQUITY INTEREST
***
June 20, 2010
DR. JOSEPH MAROON SIGHTING IN EXCELLENT NEW HAVEN REGISTER ARTICLE ON WWE AND STEROIDS
***
June 28, 2010
BRAIN INJURIES IN LINDA McMAHON’S WWE AND THE NFL – WHERE SPORTS AND “SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT” OVERLAP
***
July 7, 2010
NFL EXPLAINS: MAROON STILL ON COMMITTEE, ONLY CONCUSSION “LEADERSHIP” HAS CHANGED
***
August 18, 2010
TREATMENT OF WWE PERFORMER CHARLIE HAAS IS A STUDY OF LINDA McMAHON’S CHARACTER
***
September 9, 2010
MORE ON THE 2008 MEETING OF LINDA McMAHON’S WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT THE WEST VIRGINIA BRAIN INSTITUTE
***
October 14, 2010
DEATHS IN LINDA McMAHON’S PRO WRESTLING INDUSTRY DO NOT = STEROIDS. THE DEATH PANDEMIC IS “STEROIDS-PLUS”
***
October 14, 2010
WRESTLING JOURNALIST MELTZER: WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR’S QUOTE IS “MIND-BOGGLING”
***
October 16, 2010
WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR “DISHONEST,” SAY 76% IN WRESTLING OBSERVER READER POLL
***
November 8, 2010
ROAD MAP TO NEW GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS OF PRO WRESTLING
***
November 20, 2010
CONCUSSION ISSUE REACHES CRITICAL MASS IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND POLITICS
The cover story in the current Pittsburgh City Paper on the World Wrestling Entertainment wellness policy is very poor, possibly the least informative and coherent article of that length yet published on this subject. Writer Charlie Deitch lays out the company line while omitting huge swaths of pertinent history – such as the elimination of steroid testing for ten years, the non-suspension of star Randy Orton after he appeared on the Signature Pharmacy customer list, the hole-riddled testimony of the McMahon family to the staff of the Waxman Committee, and the full background stories of very recent dead wrestlers Umaga and Lance Cade.
Really, a line-by-line critique would give City Paper’s effort here more attention than it deserves. Those of you who would like to read it for yourselves can go to http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A88609.
Those of you interested in hard reporting on the Pittsburgh doctors who administer for profit, while arguably somewhat ameliorating, the WWE death mill, see the links below from this blog over the last year.
Irv Muchnick
December 14, 2009
EXCLUSIVE: LINDA McMAHON’S WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR MET WITH CHRIS BENOIT BRAIN EXPERTS IN 2008
***
December 30, 2009
PAGING DR. JOSEPH MAROON, MEDICAL DIRECTOR FOR SENATE CANDIDATE LINDA McMAHON’S WWE
***
March 18, 2010
WHERE DOES WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR FIT IN SHAKEUP OF NFL’S CONCUSSION COMMITTEE?
***
March 18, 2010
EDDIE “UMAGA” FATU AUTOPSY: 406 POUNDS, ENLARGED HEART
***
March 19, 2010
WATCH THE CARDIOVASCULAR CONSULTANT FOR LINDA McMAHON’S WWE PIMP AN UNREGULATED SUPPLEMENT ON YOUTUBE
***
March 19, 2010
HOW NOT TO GET A GIG WITH WWE’S CRACK MEDICAL TEAM
***
March 30, 2010
UMAGA AUTOPSY TURNS FOCUS TO LINDA McMAHON’S WWE CARDIO PROGRAM AND DOCS
***
March 31, 2010
WWE DOCS GOVERNED BY “PRIVATE” PITT MED CENTER ETHICS POLICY
***
March 31, 2010
WWE MEDICAL TEAM BIOS – 5 OUT OF 8 ARE FROM PITT MED CENTER
***
April 6, 2010
WWE CARDIOLOGIST BRYAN DONOHUE’S SUPPLEMENT COMPANY HAS PR FIRM THAT DOESN’T DISCLOSE HIS EQUITY INTEREST
***
June 20, 2010
DR. JOSEPH MAROON SIGHTING IN EXCELLENT NEW HAVEN REGISTER ARTICLE ON WWE AND STEROIDS
***
June 28, 2010
BRAIN INJURIES IN LINDA McMAHON’S WWE AND THE NFL – WHERE SPORTS AND “SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT” OVERLAP
***
July 7, 2010
NFL EXPLAINS: MAROON STILL ON COMMITTEE, ONLY CONCUSSION “LEADERSHIP” HAS CHANGED
***
August 18, 2010
TREATMENT OF WWE PERFORMER CHARLIE HAAS IS A STUDY OF LINDA McMAHON’S CHARACTER
***
September 9, 2010
MORE ON THE 2008 MEETING OF LINDA McMAHON’S WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT THE WEST VIRGINIA BRAIN INSTITUTE
***
October 14, 2010
DEATHS IN LINDA McMAHON’S PRO WRESTLING INDUSTRY DO NOT = STEROIDS. THE DEATH PANDEMIC IS “STEROIDS-PLUS”
***
October 14, 2010
WRESTLING JOURNALIST MELTZER: WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR’S QUOTE IS “MIND-BOGGLING”
***
October 16, 2010
WWE MEDICAL DIRECTOR “DISHONEST,” SAY 76% IN WRESTLING OBSERVER READER POLL
***
November 8, 2010
ROAD MAP TO NEW GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS OF PRO WRESTLING
***
November 20, 2010
CONCUSSION ISSUE REACHES CRITICAL MASS IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND POLITICS
Saturday, December 4, 2010
How Vince and Linda McMahon’s WWE Beat the 1990s Steroid Charges: A Resource Guide
[posted 11/30/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
“Tampering Cloud Over Wrestling Big’s Trial,” by Jack Newfield and Phil Mushnick, New York Post, November 22, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/nyposttext.pdf
“The Fixer: Journalist. Private Eye. Mole. Snitch. It’s All in a Day’s Work for Marty Bergman, the Zelig of New York’s Information Highway,” by William Bastone, Village Voice, December 19, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf
“Steroid issue not going away,” editorial, Connecticut Post, July 27, 2010, http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Steroid-issue-not-going-away-592567.php
12/22/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 – 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-2-%E2%80%94-1992-drug-and-sex-scandals/
12/23/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 3 – 1994 Drug Trial),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-3-%E2%80%94-1994-drug-trial/
12/24/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 4 – The Defense Lawyer, the ‘Fixer,’ and the Playboy Model),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-4-%E2%80%93-the-defense-lawyer-the-%E2%80%98fixer%E2%80%99-and-the-playboy-model/
4/11/10, “Did Linda McMahon Obstruct Justice? Open Questions From the New London Day Investigation,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/did-linda-mcmahon-obstruct-justice-5th-in-a-series-%E2%80%93-open-questions-from-the-new-london-day-investigation/
4/20/10, “Steroid Doc Prosecutor Accused of Tipping McMahons Says, ‘No Comment,’” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/steroid-doc-prosecutor-accused-of-tipping-mcmahons-says-%E2%80%98no-comment%E2%80%99/
4/21/10, “Linda McMahon Memo Story Leaves Just a Few Open Questions – The Five W’s,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/linda-mcmahon-memo-story-leaves-just-a-few-open-questions-%E2%80%93-the-five-w%E2%80%99s/
4/27/10, “Linda McMahon and the Annals of Jurisprudence,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/linda-mcmahon-and-the-annals-of-jurisprudence/
“Tampering Cloud Over Wrestling Big’s Trial,” by Jack Newfield and Phil Mushnick, New York Post, November 22, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/nyposttext.pdf
“The Fixer: Journalist. Private Eye. Mole. Snitch. It’s All in a Day’s Work for Marty Bergman, the Zelig of New York’s Information Highway,” by William Bastone, Village Voice, December 19, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf
“Steroid issue not going away,” editorial, Connecticut Post, July 27, 2010, http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Steroid-issue-not-going-away-592567.php
12/22/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 – 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-2-%E2%80%94-1992-drug-and-sex-scandals/
12/23/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 3 – 1994 Drug Trial),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-3-%E2%80%94-1994-drug-trial/
12/24/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 4 – The Defense Lawyer, the ‘Fixer,’ and the Playboy Model),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-4-%E2%80%93-the-defense-lawyer-the-%E2%80%98fixer%E2%80%99-and-the-playboy-model/
4/11/10, “Did Linda McMahon Obstruct Justice? Open Questions From the New London Day Investigation,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/did-linda-mcmahon-obstruct-justice-5th-in-a-series-%E2%80%93-open-questions-from-the-new-london-day-investigation/
4/20/10, “Steroid Doc Prosecutor Accused of Tipping McMahons Says, ‘No Comment,’” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/steroid-doc-prosecutor-accused-of-tipping-mcmahons-says-%E2%80%98no-comment%E2%80%99/
4/21/10, “Linda McMahon Memo Story Leaves Just a Few Open Questions – The Five W’s,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/linda-mcmahon-memo-story-leaves-just-a-few-open-questions-%E2%80%93-the-five-w%E2%80%99s/
4/27/10, “Linda McMahon and the Annals of Jurisprudence,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/linda-mcmahon-and-the-annals-of-jurisprudence/
How the McMahons’ WWE Beat the Rap in the 1990s (Part 2, the Steroid Charges)
[posted 11/30/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
(YESTERDAY: Part 1, the Sex Charges, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/how-the-mcmahons%E2%80%99-wwe-beat-the-rap-in-the-1990s-part-1-the-sex-charges/)
Before circling back to the conclusion of yesterday’s post, we should reemphasize the single biggest factor in the 1994 acquittal of Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute steroids. That was the 1989 tip to Vince and Linda McMahon of the investigation of their Pennsylvania ring doctor, George Zahorian, who would be convicted and go to federal prison in 1991.
Even without the later machinations of defense counsel Laura Brevetti’s “fixer” husband, Martin Bergman – which started with planted smears of prosecutors in the New York media and continued all the way through to witness-tampering – the McMahons would have been nailed if not for the early warning to them that Dr. Zahorian was “hot” and needed to be removed as a WWF-appointed attending physician under Pennsylvania’s newly deregulated state athletic commission procedures.
Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, who has covered the industry and the trials longer and harder than anyone, says, “The key to the acquittal is Linda being tipped off and Zahorian never being hired. Zahorian actually hired and working for the company, and they’d have lost the case.”
Linda McMahon’s December 1989 memo instructing executive Pat Patterson to fire Zahorian surfaced during the recent Senate campaign through the reporting of Ted Mann of the New London Day. But with investigations of what is now World Wrestling Entertainment reviving at both the state and federal levels, more needs to be known about how the government sabotaged the 1990s case. Linda has said that James West, then the U.S. Attorney in central Pennsylvania who was coordinating the Zahorian prosecution, told one of the McMahons’ lawyers, Jack Krill, at “a fundraising event.” West vaguely denied that to Mann and then told me that he didn’t want to talk about the past. Sorry, Mr. West; the past has become prologue.
Incoming senator Richard Blumenthal, coming from the state attorney general’s office, should understand as well as anyone that the integrity of new attempts to reform pro wrestling requires setting the record straight on past efforts. The McMahons habitually and erroneously cite their acquittal as vindication, and one of the things allowing them to continue to run an entertainment death mill is the public absence of an institutional memory. The historical questions “how?” and “why?” still matter.
*****
To resume the narrative started here yesterday, WWF lawyer Jerry McDevitt and his team scored an important victory in their fight for survival when the government decided to abandon the allegations of sexual abuse inside the company and to focus on the steroid charges. But, of course, the McMahons still wanted acquittal at trial and they couldn’t rest on the assurance that their better-late-than-never separation from Zahorian would be enough for a not-guilty verdict.
Fixer deluxe Bergman went so far as to meet with star prosecution witness Emily Feinberg, Vince’s ex-secretary, and bait her with suggestions of six-figure payments for tabloid TV interviews. Incredibly, this story, which was exhaustively documented in 1995 by both the New York Post and the Village Voice, got censored in the 2010 Senate campaign coverage everywhere except on this blog.
A final and decisive factor in the 1994 acquittal was simply the bungling of the prosecutors: on at least one of the counts, they hadn’t even established proper jurisdiction for the trial in the Eastern District of New York. You have to wonder if Bergman’s smears in The New York Observer of Sean O’Shea, chief of the Business/Securities Fraud Unit for the U.S. attorney there, had rattled him. Another possibility: The Justice Department bureaucracy as a whole was conflicted or half-hearted about the McMahon prosecution once the decision was made to confine it to steroid charges, and the result was the undermining of its own case, consciously or otherwise.
Marty Bergman was investigated for witness tampering in the Emily Feinberg matter, but he was never charged. By leaking the story to the Post and the Voice, prosecutors may have been taking their payback against him and the McMahons as far as they wanted it to go: exposing these out-of-bounds defense tactics without further exposing the humiliation of their failed prosecution.
Irv Muchnick
NEXT: Additional related reading from this blog’s archive.
(YESTERDAY: Part 1, the Sex Charges, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/how-the-mcmahons%E2%80%99-wwe-beat-the-rap-in-the-1990s-part-1-the-sex-charges/)
Before circling back to the conclusion of yesterday’s post, we should reemphasize the single biggest factor in the 1994 acquittal of Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute steroids. That was the 1989 tip to Vince and Linda McMahon of the investigation of their Pennsylvania ring doctor, George Zahorian, who would be convicted and go to federal prison in 1991.
Even without the later machinations of defense counsel Laura Brevetti’s “fixer” husband, Martin Bergman – which started with planted smears of prosecutors in the New York media and continued all the way through to witness-tampering – the McMahons would have been nailed if not for the early warning to them that Dr. Zahorian was “hot” and needed to be removed as a WWF-appointed attending physician under Pennsylvania’s newly deregulated state athletic commission procedures.
Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, who has covered the industry and the trials longer and harder than anyone, says, “The key to the acquittal is Linda being tipped off and Zahorian never being hired. Zahorian actually hired and working for the company, and they’d have lost the case.”
Linda McMahon’s December 1989 memo instructing executive Pat Patterson to fire Zahorian surfaced during the recent Senate campaign through the reporting of Ted Mann of the New London Day. But with investigations of what is now World Wrestling Entertainment reviving at both the state and federal levels, more needs to be known about how the government sabotaged the 1990s case. Linda has said that James West, then the U.S. Attorney in central Pennsylvania who was coordinating the Zahorian prosecution, told one of the McMahons’ lawyers, Jack Krill, at “a fundraising event.” West vaguely denied that to Mann and then told me that he didn’t want to talk about the past. Sorry, Mr. West; the past has become prologue.
Incoming senator Richard Blumenthal, coming from the state attorney general’s office, should understand as well as anyone that the integrity of new attempts to reform pro wrestling requires setting the record straight on past efforts. The McMahons habitually and erroneously cite their acquittal as vindication, and one of the things allowing them to continue to run an entertainment death mill is the public absence of an institutional memory. The historical questions “how?” and “why?” still matter.
*****
To resume the narrative started here yesterday, WWF lawyer Jerry McDevitt and his team scored an important victory in their fight for survival when the government decided to abandon the allegations of sexual abuse inside the company and to focus on the steroid charges. But, of course, the McMahons still wanted acquittal at trial and they couldn’t rest on the assurance that their better-late-than-never separation from Zahorian would be enough for a not-guilty verdict.
Fixer deluxe Bergman went so far as to meet with star prosecution witness Emily Feinberg, Vince’s ex-secretary, and bait her with suggestions of six-figure payments for tabloid TV interviews. Incredibly, this story, which was exhaustively documented in 1995 by both the New York Post and the Village Voice, got censored in the 2010 Senate campaign coverage everywhere except on this blog.
A final and decisive factor in the 1994 acquittal was simply the bungling of the prosecutors: on at least one of the counts, they hadn’t even established proper jurisdiction for the trial in the Eastern District of New York. You have to wonder if Bergman’s smears in The New York Observer of Sean O’Shea, chief of the Business/Securities Fraud Unit for the U.S. attorney there, had rattled him. Another possibility: The Justice Department bureaucracy as a whole was conflicted or half-hearted about the McMahon prosecution once the decision was made to confine it to steroid charges, and the result was the undermining of its own case, consciously or otherwise.
Marty Bergman was investigated for witness tampering in the Emily Feinberg matter, but he was never charged. By leaking the story to the Post and the Voice, prosecutors may have been taking their payback against him and the McMahons as far as they wanted it to go: exposing these out-of-bounds defense tactics without further exposing the humiliation of their failed prosecution.
Irv Muchnick
NEXT: Additional related reading from this blog’s archive.
Monday, November 29, 2010
How Vince and Linda McMahon’s WWE Beat the 1990s Sex Charges: A Resource Guide
“Tampering Cloud Over Wrestling Big’s Trial,” by Jack Newfield and Phil Mushnick, New York Post, November 22, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/nyposttext.pdf
“The Fixer: Journalist. Private Eye. Mole. Snitch. It’s All in a Day’s Work for Marty Bergman, the Zelig of New York’s Information Highway,” by William Bastone, Village Voice, December 19, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf
12/22/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 – 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-2-%E2%80%94-1992-drug-and-sex-scandals/
4/19/2000, “How Linda McMahon Managed the WWE Pedophile Scandal’s Damage Control,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/how-linda-mcmahon-managed-the-wwe-pedophile-scandal%E2%80%99s-damage-control/
5/15/10, “In Bed With the WWF: Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/muchnick-book-bonus-%E2%80%98in-bed-with-the-wwf-%E2%80%93-sex-and-scandal-in-pro-wrestling%E2%80%99/
8/1/10, “Politico Is Latest Media Outlet to Bury the Lead of Its Own Linda McMahon Scandal Story,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/politico-is-latest-media-outlet-to-bury-the-lead-of-its-own-linda-mcmahon-scandal-story/
8/3/10, “Politico’s Story on Linda McMahon’s Management of the Wrestling Pedophile Ring Story Closes the Subject ... For Now,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/politico%E2%80%99s-story-on-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-management-of-the-wrestling-pedophile-ring-story-closes-the-subject-%E2%80%A6-for-now/
8/3/10, “Pedophile Accuser’s 1993 Complaint Against Linda McMahon’s Wrestling Company,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/pedophile-accuser%E2%80%99s-1993-complaint-against-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wrestling-company/
10/12/10, “Linda McMahon’s Lawyer Threatens Lawsuit Against Talking Points Memo,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/linda-mcmahons-lawyer-threatens-libel-suit-against-talking-points-memo/
10/13/10, “EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Kept Vince’s Rape Accuser Employed Longer Than Geraldo Lawsuit Suggests,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/exclusive-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-kept-vince%E2%80%99s-rape-accuser-employed-longer-than-geraldo-lawsuit-suggests/
“The Fixer: Journalist. Private Eye. Mole. Snitch. It’s All in a Day’s Work for Marty Bergman, the Zelig of New York’s Information Highway,” by William Bastone, Village Voice, December 19, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf
12/22/09, “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 – 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-2-%E2%80%94-1992-drug-and-sex-scandals/
4/19/2000, “How Linda McMahon Managed the WWE Pedophile Scandal’s Damage Control,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/how-linda-mcmahon-managed-the-wwe-pedophile-scandal%E2%80%99s-damage-control/
5/15/10, “In Bed With the WWF: Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/muchnick-book-bonus-%E2%80%98in-bed-with-the-wwf-%E2%80%93-sex-and-scandal-in-pro-wrestling%E2%80%99/
8/1/10, “Politico Is Latest Media Outlet to Bury the Lead of Its Own Linda McMahon Scandal Story,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/politico-is-latest-media-outlet-to-bury-the-lead-of-its-own-linda-mcmahon-scandal-story/
8/3/10, “Politico’s Story on Linda McMahon’s Management of the Wrestling Pedophile Ring Story Closes the Subject ... For Now,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/politico%E2%80%99s-story-on-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-management-of-the-wrestling-pedophile-ring-story-closes-the-subject-%E2%80%A6-for-now/
8/3/10, “Pedophile Accuser’s 1993 Complaint Against Linda McMahon’s Wrestling Company,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/pedophile-accuser%E2%80%99s-1993-complaint-against-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wrestling-company/
10/12/10, “Linda McMahon’s Lawyer Threatens Lawsuit Against Talking Points Memo,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/linda-mcmahons-lawyer-threatens-libel-suit-against-talking-points-memo/
10/13/10, “EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Kept Vince’s Rape Accuser Employed Longer Than Geraldo Lawsuit Suggests,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/exclusive-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-kept-vince%E2%80%99s-rape-accuser-employed-longer-than-geraldo-lawsuit-suggests/
How the McMahons’ WWE Beat the Rap in the 1990s (Part 1, the Sex Charges)
While a much more important story plays out behind the scenes, the Connecticut media remain mesmerized by the nonexistent political future of Linda McMahon, who just blew through $50 million of her World Wrestling Entertainment-generated wealth to lose the U.S. Senate race there by double digits and help drag the state Republican Party down to a shutout defeat in every Congressional and statewide election race.
Commentators with way too much time on their hands are wasting the time of the rest of us speculating about a new run by McMahon in 2012 for Connecticut’s other Senate seat. One variation inexplicably floats her name for state party chair. I haven’t yet seen anyone nominate Linda for secretary-general of the United Nations, based on her sterling Senate campaign, but that’s probably coming.
The much more important story, playing out right under the noses of Nutmeg State journalists, is ongoing investigations of WWE’s business practices. The state of Connecticut is in the midst of auditing what many believe to be the clear misclassification of wrestlers as independent contractors. And when new Senator Richard Blumenthal, who defeated McMahon, takes office in January, he is expected to do something about reenergizing other probes of pro wrestling out of Washington.
As readers of this blog know, there is a long history of government investigations of Vince and Linda McMahon’s company. With the goal of improving general understanding of the challenge of bringing the publicly traded WWE to account for the last generation’s pandemic of industrial deaths, let’s review how its privately owned predecessor, TitanSports/World Wrestling Federation, wriggled off the hook of a two-pronged federal investigation in the 1990s. Back then a grand jury investigated the company both on allegations that it harbored a circle of employees and executives who abused underage boys, and on charges that it brokered illegal steroid transactions between its wrestlers and its already convicted Pennsylvania ringside physician, Dr. George Zahorian.
*****
The WWE legal team was and still is headed by partner Jerry McDevitt of the Pittsburgh law firm now named K&L Gates. McDevitt got a major assist from another current partner at the firm, Laura Brevetti, who defended Vince McMahon at the 1994 federal trial – along with undercover support from Brevetti’s “fixer” husband Martin Bergman, a crony of then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Team McMahon’s basic approach was that the best defense was a good offense. The year 1993 was one of carefully coordinated PR whose purpose was less to tell WWF’s side of the story than to chill the very telling of that story by others.
Tom Cole, the main pedophile accuser, got fired by the company for the second time early that year, perhaps because he refused to coordinate and share his grand jury testimony. (In May, Cole sued the McMahons a second time.)
In March, WWF sued Geraldo Rivera for libel for reporting the claim of ex-referee Rita Chatterton that Vince had raped her.
In September, I was subpoenaed for testimony in another WWF libel suit, against the New York Post and sports columnist Phil Mushnick. I decided to fight the subpoena with California’s journalist shield law, and the McDevittites dropped it. In due course they dropped both the Rivera and Mushnick lawsuits themselves.
Also in 1993, and continuing to the eve of the steroid trial the next year, the company filed spurious claims with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility against Anthony Valenti, chief investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, and prosecutor Sean O’Shea. Marty Bergman – posing as an independent freelance writer and not disclosing his relationship with Brevetti – co-authored articles in The New York Observer about these self-generated “investigations” of Valenti and O’Shea. Joe Conason, the executive editor of the Observer, later admitted he had been duped. Bergman’s co-author agreed that he and Conason had been taken for a ride, one designed to throw prosecutor O’Shea off his game.
I’ll get to that last point, among other things, in the second part of this series. For now, it’s important to reflect on how the WWF allegation against Valenti (along with the chilling, if baseless, libel suits against journalists) eliminated the sex charges from both the public conversation and the prosecutorial bill. Valenti was accused of colluding with an NBC investigative producer in leaking secret grand jury information. Ultimately, NBC did not air the story on which it had been working.
The dropping of sex charges was a significant victory for McDevitt and his operatives. The reality is that indictment on those allegations (whether or not they were fair) might well have sunk WWF even if Vince and company were later found not guilty at trial. The steroid charges, by contrast, were far more survivable, even in the unhappy event that they would be a conviction at trial.
Irv Muchnick
NEXT: Additional related reading from this blog’s archive.
TOMORROW: Part 2, How the McMahons beat the steroid charges.
Commentators with way too much time on their hands are wasting the time of the rest of us speculating about a new run by McMahon in 2012 for Connecticut’s other Senate seat. One variation inexplicably floats her name for state party chair. I haven’t yet seen anyone nominate Linda for secretary-general of the United Nations, based on her sterling Senate campaign, but that’s probably coming.
The much more important story, playing out right under the noses of Nutmeg State journalists, is ongoing investigations of WWE’s business practices. The state of Connecticut is in the midst of auditing what many believe to be the clear misclassification of wrestlers as independent contractors. And when new Senator Richard Blumenthal, who defeated McMahon, takes office in January, he is expected to do something about reenergizing other probes of pro wrestling out of Washington.
As readers of this blog know, there is a long history of government investigations of Vince and Linda McMahon’s company. With the goal of improving general understanding of the challenge of bringing the publicly traded WWE to account for the last generation’s pandemic of industrial deaths, let’s review how its privately owned predecessor, TitanSports/World Wrestling Federation, wriggled off the hook of a two-pronged federal investigation in the 1990s. Back then a grand jury investigated the company both on allegations that it harbored a circle of employees and executives who abused underage boys, and on charges that it brokered illegal steroid transactions between its wrestlers and its already convicted Pennsylvania ringside physician, Dr. George Zahorian.
*****
The WWE legal team was and still is headed by partner Jerry McDevitt of the Pittsburgh law firm now named K&L Gates. McDevitt got a major assist from another current partner at the firm, Laura Brevetti, who defended Vince McMahon at the 1994 federal trial – along with undercover support from Brevetti’s “fixer” husband Martin Bergman, a crony of then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Team McMahon’s basic approach was that the best defense was a good offense. The year 1993 was one of carefully coordinated PR whose purpose was less to tell WWF’s side of the story than to chill the very telling of that story by others.
Tom Cole, the main pedophile accuser, got fired by the company for the second time early that year, perhaps because he refused to coordinate and share his grand jury testimony. (In May, Cole sued the McMahons a second time.)
In March, WWF sued Geraldo Rivera for libel for reporting the claim of ex-referee Rita Chatterton that Vince had raped her.
In September, I was subpoenaed for testimony in another WWF libel suit, against the New York Post and sports columnist Phil Mushnick. I decided to fight the subpoena with California’s journalist shield law, and the McDevittites dropped it. In due course they dropped both the Rivera and Mushnick lawsuits themselves.
Also in 1993, and continuing to the eve of the steroid trial the next year, the company filed spurious claims with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility against Anthony Valenti, chief investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, and prosecutor Sean O’Shea. Marty Bergman – posing as an independent freelance writer and not disclosing his relationship with Brevetti – co-authored articles in The New York Observer about these self-generated “investigations” of Valenti and O’Shea. Joe Conason, the executive editor of the Observer, later admitted he had been duped. Bergman’s co-author agreed that he and Conason had been taken for a ride, one designed to throw prosecutor O’Shea off his game.
I’ll get to that last point, among other things, in the second part of this series. For now, it’s important to reflect on how the WWF allegation against Valenti (along with the chilling, if baseless, libel suits against journalists) eliminated the sex charges from both the public conversation and the prosecutorial bill. Valenti was accused of colluding with an NBC investigative producer in leaking secret grand jury information. Ultimately, NBC did not air the story on which it had been working.
The dropping of sex charges was a significant victory for McDevitt and his operatives. The reality is that indictment on those allegations (whether or not they were fair) might well have sunk WWF even if Vince and company were later found not guilty at trial. The steroid charges, by contrast, were far more survivable, even in the unhappy event that they would be a conviction at trial.
Irv Muchnick
NEXT: Additional related reading from this blog’s archive.
TOMORROW: Part 2, How the McMahons beat the steroid charges.
Connecticut Columnist Sketches How Linda McMahon Killed State Republican Party, But Ignores Next Step: Government Investigations of WWE
The always sharp Chris Powell of the Manchester Journal Inquirer talks some sense about the lunacy of a second Linda McMahon run for the Senate. See “Amid Republican ruins, McMahon plans encore,” http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles/2010/11/27/chris_powell/doc4cefcbf26d364482659680.txt.
Right on, brother Chris. Unfortunately, Powell – like everyone else at the media throttle in Connecticut – has not gone on to report that there is a government antidote to McMahonism even if there isn’t a political one. The state’s Labor Department is investigating World Wrestling Entertainment for independent contractor abuse, and Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal has at least hinted that he will work to restart investigations of pro wrestling’s occupational health and safety record at the federal level.
More media coverage of all this is on tap for next week. But as far as I know, none is slated in a Connecticut newspaper.
Irv Muchnick
Right on, brother Chris. Unfortunately, Powell – like everyone else at the media throttle in Connecticut – has not gone on to report that there is a government antidote to McMahonism even if there isn’t a political one. The state’s Labor Department is investigating World Wrestling Entertainment for independent contractor abuse, and Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal has at least hinted that he will work to restart investigations of pro wrestling’s occupational health and safety record at the federal level.
More media coverage of all this is on tap for next week. But as far as I know, none is slated in a Connecticut newspaper.
Irv Muchnick
Thursday, November 25, 2010
WWE Agent Dean Malenko’s Friendship With Late Eddie Guerrero Involved More Than I Realized
See “WWE road agent Dean Malenko has suffered a hushed up health scare,” Keith Harris, Cageside Seats, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/11/24/1835282/wwe-road-agent-dean-malenko-has-suffered-a-hushed-up-health-scare.
Irv Muchnick
Irv Muchnick
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Five Questions Linda McMahon Wasn’t Asked on ‘Face the State’
Linda McMahon’s loss-lap interview Sunday on Face the State, WFSB, Channel 3, is online at http://www.wfsb.com/facethestate/index.html.
Here are some of the topics that didn’t come up during the nine-minute segment:
1. Linda, the vanity thrill of running for political office and feeling important is understandable. But what, besides your wealth, makes you think another run is at all plausible? You just spent $50 million and lost by 12 points. You were the female candidate, yet garnered only two out of five women’s votes. You lost every single Congressional district in Connecticut – that is to say, your opponent, Richard Blumenthal, got majorities in every section of the state and the five Republican candidates for Congress all lost on an election day in which the party made significant gains across the country. For the first time in 24 years, a Democrat was elected governor in Connecticut, and Republican candidate Tom Foley came much closer to Dan Malloy than you did to Blumenthal – further suggesting that you had a deleterious “reverse coattails” effect. There is talk of replacing the state party chairman, Chris Healy, whose wife Suzan Bibisi was down for a fat paycheck on your campaign staff. What’s wrong with this picture?
2. What is the minimum wage?
3. How many of your wrestlers have died since your last appearance on Face the State?
4. One consequence of your entry into the political arena is an investigation by the State of Connecticut of World Wrestling Entertainment’s abuse of the independent contractor classification. Some critics think this audit was long overdue. How happy are your husband Vince and the WWE board of directors, including Lowell Weicker, about that?
5. Why in the world are we wasting precious broadcast time on your spin of a failed campaign while the state and the country face pressing policy issues?
Oh wait ... That last one is a question Dennis House, the host of Face the State, should have asked himself.
Sorry, Dennis.
Irv Muchnick
Here are some of the topics that didn’t come up during the nine-minute segment:
1. Linda, the vanity thrill of running for political office and feeling important is understandable. But what, besides your wealth, makes you think another run is at all plausible? You just spent $50 million and lost by 12 points. You were the female candidate, yet garnered only two out of five women’s votes. You lost every single Congressional district in Connecticut – that is to say, your opponent, Richard Blumenthal, got majorities in every section of the state and the five Republican candidates for Congress all lost on an election day in which the party made significant gains across the country. For the first time in 24 years, a Democrat was elected governor in Connecticut, and Republican candidate Tom Foley came much closer to Dan Malloy than you did to Blumenthal – further suggesting that you had a deleterious “reverse coattails” effect. There is talk of replacing the state party chairman, Chris Healy, whose wife Suzan Bibisi was down for a fat paycheck on your campaign staff. What’s wrong with this picture?
2. What is the minimum wage?
3. How many of your wrestlers have died since your last appearance on Face the State?
4. One consequence of your entry into the political arena is an investigation by the State of Connecticut of World Wrestling Entertainment’s abuse of the independent contractor classification. Some critics think this audit was long overdue. How happy are your husband Vince and the WWE board of directors, including Lowell Weicker, about that?
5. Why in the world are we wasting precious broadcast time on your spin of a failed campaign while the state and the country face pressing policy issues?
Oh wait ... That last one is a question Dennis House, the host of Face the State, should have asked himself.
Sorry, Dennis.
Irv Muchnick
Report: Ex-Wrestler Dean Malenko Recently Had Heart Attack
[posted 11/22/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
I have been told by a reliable source that in recent months ex-pro wrestler Dean Malenko, who now works for the World Wrestling Entertainment front office, suffered a heart attack.
Malenko (real name Dean Simon, age 50) was a very close friend of the two WWE wrestlers whose deaths most galvanized attention to the company’s occupational health and safety standards: Eddie Guerrero (who died of a heart attack in 2005 at age 38) and Chris Benoit (who committed double murder/suicide in 2007 at age 40).
Malenko was backstage at last night’s WWE Survivor Series pay-per-view in Miami. (He lives in Florida.) No mention was made to anyone of recent health problems.
WWE spokesman Robert Zimmerman has not responded as yet to my request for comment on this report.
Irv Muchnick
I have been told by a reliable source that in recent months ex-pro wrestler Dean Malenko, who now works for the World Wrestling Entertainment front office, suffered a heart attack.
Malenko (real name Dean Simon, age 50) was a very close friend of the two WWE wrestlers whose deaths most galvanized attention to the company’s occupational health and safety standards: Eddie Guerrero (who died of a heart attack in 2005 at age 38) and Chris Benoit (who committed double murder/suicide in 2007 at age 40).
Malenko was backstage at last night’s WWE Survivor Series pay-per-view in Miami. (He lives in Florida.) No mention was made to anyone of recent health problems.
WWE spokesman Robert Zimmerman has not responded as yet to my request for comment on this report.
Irv Muchnick
Connecticut Investigation of WWE Involves Unemployment Insurance Taxes
[posted 11/22/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Connecticut Department of Labor spokesman Paul Oates told me today that any audit of World Wrestling Entertainment would be coming out of the department’s Unemployment Insurance Division, not its Wage and Workplace Standards Division.
Oates emailed:
“[A]t this time, I am unable to confirm or deny that there is or was a WWE audit undertaken by the UI Tax Division within this Agency. Section 31-254 of the Connecticut General Statute provides the following: ‘The administrator may require from any employer, whether or not otherwise subject to this chapter, any sworn or unsworn reports with respect to persons employed by him which are necessary for the effective administration of this chapter. Information thus obtained shall not be published or be open to public inspection, other than to public employees in the performance of their public duties, in any manner revealing the employee’s or the employer’s identity.... [Emphasis added]‘”
There are two dimensions of independent contractor misclassification. One is the way it can deprive governments of tax revenues. The other is the way it can deprive workers of benefits. My interpretation of the statement issued by the Department of Labor is that its investigation of WWE originated, or is now oriented, on the tax payment issue.
Irv Muchnick
Connecticut Department of Labor spokesman Paul Oates told me today that any audit of World Wrestling Entertainment would be coming out of the department’s Unemployment Insurance Division, not its Wage and Workplace Standards Division.
Oates emailed:
“[A]t this time, I am unable to confirm or deny that there is or was a WWE audit undertaken by the UI Tax Division within this Agency. Section 31-254 of the Connecticut General Statute provides the following: ‘The administrator may require from any employer, whether or not otherwise subject to this chapter, any sworn or unsworn reports with respect to persons employed by him which are necessary for the effective administration of this chapter. Information thus obtained shall not be published or be open to public inspection, other than to public employees in the performance of their public duties, in any manner revealing the employee’s or the employer’s identity.... [Emphasis added]‘”
There are two dimensions of independent contractor misclassification. One is the way it can deprive governments of tax revenues. The other is the way it can deprive workers of benefits. My interpretation of the statement issued by the Department of Labor is that its investigation of WWE originated, or is now oriented, on the tax payment issue.
Irv Muchnick
Coverage in Britain’s Shortlist Magazine
This week’s issue of Shortlist, a widely circulated men’s magazine in Great Britain, has an important article by writer James McMahon (no relation to Vince and Linda, obviously), entitled “Is This the Most Dangerous Entertainment in the World?” The piece covers the Chris Benoit murder-suicide and the pandemic of deaths in the wrestling industry, and quotes both Michael Benoit (Chris’s father) and myself. You can view page images at http://magazine.shortlist.com/1Q4ce28f17225b2012.cde (go to pp. 54-56).
A photo on page 56 is miscaptioned. That is not Chris Benoit with Nancy. Someone thinks it may be Nancy’s first husband (before Chris and before wrestler Kevin Sullivan). Also, in criticism of the World Wrestling Entertainment wellness policy, I’m quoted as saying, in part, that “the men that make money for them don’t get tested.” What I believe I said is not that the top guys don’t get tested at all, but rather that enforcement of the results is erratic. The prime example is Randy Orton, who did not seem to have any consequences from landing on the Signature Pharmacy customer list, while every other WWE performer on the list got suspended.
All in all, Shortlist has made a valuable contribution to the journalism that will drive the next steps in pro wrestling regulation.
Irv Muchnick
A photo on page 56 is miscaptioned. That is not Chris Benoit with Nancy. Someone thinks it may be Nancy’s first husband (before Chris and before wrestler Kevin Sullivan). Also, in criticism of the World Wrestling Entertainment wellness policy, I’m quoted as saying, in part, that “the men that make money for them don’t get tested.” What I believe I said is not that the top guys don’t get tested at all, but rather that enforcement of the results is erratic. The prime example is Randy Orton, who did not seem to have any consequences from landing on the Signature Pharmacy customer list, while every other WWE performer on the list got suspended.
All in all, Shortlist has made a valuable contribution to the journalism that will drive the next steps in pro wrestling regulation.
Irv Muchnick
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
