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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/JarJarBrinksSecurity on 2024-02-04 22:53:58.

WWE is no stranger to controversy. Currently, Vince McMahon is being investigated by the Federal Government under sex trafficking charges (and civilly sued for many years of SA, among other things), the steroid trials in the early 90s, and negligence leading to the death of wrestler Owen Hart. There’s also less serious things like their decade long mission to push Roman Reigns as the face of the company despite fan backlash, the current story of The Rock returning to fight Roman Reigns and nixing a year long story build for Cody Rhodes, and many other examples that deserve their own things. But this ongoing drama reminded me of a couple years ago when WWE created a new match for women and named it after The Fabulous Moolah.

The Match

In 2014, WWE created a match to take place at WrestleMania called the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal. In this match, 30 men start in the ring and try to throw each other out of the ring over the top rope. If you are thrown out over the top rope and your feet touch the floor, you are eliminated from the match. It has the same rules as another one of WWE’s big matches, the Royal Rumble. But unlike the Royal Rumble where the winner receives a title shot at WrestleMania, the only thing you get for winning this one is the honor to hold the trophy. It was mostly designed to get talent, who didn’t have a match at WrestleMania , onto the show. It was never really seen as a big match by fans and was just a nice thing on the Pre-Show.

4 years later in 2018, WWE announced that they were creating another Battle Royal, this time for the Women’s Wrestlers. A Women’s Battle Royal had taken place before at WrestleMania in 2009, but that one was won by Santino Marella, a comedy wrestler that was dressed as his “twin sister” Santina Marella. That’s a whole thing for another day. But just like the Men’s BR honoring the legend Andre the Giant, WWE announced the Women’s BR would be honoring Wrestling legend The Fabulous Moolah. And fans were pissed.

Who is The Fabulous Moolah?

Mary Lillian Ellison was a wrestler famously known as The Fabulous Moolah. She started wrestling in 1949 after her divorce and in just 7 years, she became a recognizable name in wrestling. She won the NWA championship in 1956 and although there was some internal trouble with higher ups who wouldn’t recognize her reign, she held onto the title for 10 years and would hold it for another 10 years starting in 1968. Other accolades include a 4 time WWE Women’s champ, 2 time NWA Women’s Tag Champ, and would even have 2 more championship reigns in NWA, one of which she held for 5 years. She was also the first woman allowed to wrestle at Madison Square Garden and helped overturn the ban on Women’s Wrestling in New York. In 1995, she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, the first woman to do so, and even came back in 1999 to wrestle until her death in 2007 at 84. A very legendary career that many are jealous of.

Enough of the praising, let’s get to why people hate her.

On March 12, 2018 during Monday Night Raw, the Fabulous Moolah Women’s Battle Royal was announced and fans immediately voiced their outrage online. There are many threads on /r/SquaredCircle, but I think this thread explains it well. I’m going to summarize it but I encourage you to read the original post as it goes into more detail.

  • Moolah started a wrestling school where she trained women. Except she didn’t. She accepted their money and offloaded them to other wrestlers who she didn’t pay for the training.
  • While you trained at her school, she required you to sign a contract that gave her the position of your booker and she took 25% of your pay. Some wrestlers stated that she took 30% of their fee and she would deduct travel expenses, food, rent, and utilities before paying them. This resulted in one woman, Debbie Johnson, not being paid a cent for two years.
  • You were required to rent apartments that she owned on her property and you would pay her for rent and utilities.
  • The wrestling training took place in a barn that lacked heating and air conditioning and would be 5 hours a day for 6 months.
  • If you angered her during training, she would refuse to book them.
  • Some women were monitored and barred from leaving the training camp unless accompanied.
  • Many wrestlers accused her of using her influence to control the women’s wrestling scene to make sure they didn’t gain as much recognition as her.

And here’s where shit gets really bad. Trigger warning for sexual assault of all kinds.

Since her death, many women have come forward and told their stories of Moolah being their pimp. She would often give her trainees to promoters without their prior knowledge. One woman, Sweet Georgia Brown, told her daughter that she was “often raped, given drugs, and made an addict in an intentional attempt” by The Fabulous Moolah and her husband Buddy Lee who wanted to control her.

Legendary Women’s Wrestler Luna Vachon claimed that Moolah forced her to be photographed by an older man while she was 16. She had also claimed that her aunt had seen Moolah having sex with her trainees. Sandy Parker, who is gay, claimed Moolah pressured her to date men and forbade her from going to gay bars.

Here is another thread where /u/PurpleGato42 typed up a very long post on her demonic behavior with videos, interviews, and many sources.

So yeah, fans were right to be upset at this move.

The Reaction

The announcement thread is a mix of jokes and well deserved outrage. My personal favorites are the top 2 comments which read “Can’t wait for the Chris Benoit memorial ladder match” and “The Ultimate Warrior humanitarian award” (which is unfortunately very real). Some wrestling news outlets posted articles containing reactions on twitter such as Fightful. But if there was one thing WWE was good at, it was ignoring their fanbase and waiting for them to run out of steam. And unfortunately for them, fans were more passionate about this issue than they assumed.

Almost immediately, Deadspin and Newsweek picked up the controversy bringing the story out of the wrestling sphere and to a wider audience, which I’m sure WWE didn’t want.

And /u/daflash00 made a post that discussed a different plan of action. Contact the sponsors. Wrestlemania that year was sponsored by Snickers and KFC. Many examples of templates were put throughout the thread to help others and to dissuade harassment of the sponsor’s employees. /u/NeoGeoMeow commented about their experience calling Mars customer support and they were told that Snickers was aware and they were waiting for an official response and that they were taking it seriously.

And 3 days later, WrestlingInc posted an article with an official response from Mars Wrigley. They told them

We were recently made aware of the World Wrestling Entertainment Inc’s (WWE) decision to honor a former wrestler during the upcoming WrestleMania 34 event. As a principle-based business that has long championed creating inclusive environments that encourage and empower everyone to reach their full potential, this is unacceptable. We are engaging with the WWE to express our disappointment.

WWE were pros at many things, ignoring fan response being one of them. But ignoring sponsors was another thing.

The Aftermath

2 days later, a statement was released where WWE caved to sponsor pressure and removed Moolah’s name from the match now just being called “WrestleMania Women’s Battle Royal”. Stephanie McMahon, daughter of Vince McMahon and now-former CBO of WWE, sent out a tweet where she acknowledged the controversy and announced the name change.

What now?

As we all know, in 2020, COVID hit. WrestleMania was moved from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa to the WWE Performance Center in Orlando and both the Men’s and Women’s Battle Royals were cancelled so they could limit the number of wrestlers in the ring at one time. After WWE resumed normal operations, the men’s BR came back and moved to the Smackdown before WrestleMania, but the women’s has been quietly shelved after only 2 matches.

Moolah has become sort of persona non grata in WWE since the whole thing and rarely gets mentioned, if at all, anymore. There w…

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