Effy On Possibly Suing Joey Ryan, Winding Up In Court With Mike Quackenbush

Oct 9, 2020 - by Steve Gerweck

Filed to GERWECK.NET:

Conducted by Wrestling Inc. Managing Editor Nick Hausman

Audio Link: https://audioboom.com/posts/7700059-will-wwe-take-money-in-the-bank-away-from-otis-chris-jericho-snaps-at-fan-feat-effy

Post Link: https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/10/effy-discusses-why-he-will-probably-end-up-in-court-with-675624/

Post Link: https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/10/effy-im-thinking-about-suing-joey-ryan-675456/

On how the #SpeakingOut movement affected him:

I had to do a lot of introspection because, obviously, I’m around a lot of these people. You can go back through Cagematch or whoever has the matches listed up, and I’ve been in matches with these people. The original Big Gay Brunch had David Starr and Joey Ryan announced for the show.

People say, ‘didn’t you know, didn’t you know,’ and people would make jokes like, ‘oh Joey might try to flirt with you too much,’ or ‘he might come on too hard if he gets drunk,’ but no one was ever coming out and saying, ‘hey, this person sexually assaulted me.’ That wasn’t the conversation, and so now, I’m thinking, well, I was close to these people in a way because you’d spend three or four hours around them at a show.

You’d have a match with them. You’d be around after the show, but you start thinking, you go, of course, they want to keep me out of the loop because I’m a good person to say, ‘no, they’re a good person. I’ve hung out with them a bunch.’ It’s easy to cover your s–t up with that, and we respect this secret in wrestling.

On the pro wrestling business being built on secrets:

Wrestling’s built on the secret, the secret of wrestling and because of that, I kind of figured out that maybe that’s the only secret we need and maybe we need to stop having all this sort of mysterious stuff going on backstage because when people don’t know who’s in charge, when people don’t know who’s running things [and] when people don’t know who to go to, it becomes a problem for everyone. And seeing COVID cut everything off and give these people the voice to speak because they didn’t have to confront abusers anymore, they didn’t have to count on their abusers for bookings or for money or for flights.

There’s so many things that are terrible about COVID, but without that pause in professional wrestling, we probably wouldn’t have people actually speaking out and saying, ‘hey this stuff happened to me’ and us being able to actually make the changes going forward. Not only are we having to make changes to make sure people don’t get COVID at our shows, we’re having to make these changes to make sure people feel safe and comfortable and aren’t put in these situations at our shows.

On possibly suing Joey Ryan:

I’m thinking about suing Joey Ryan. I think he’s besmirched my image as a consensual pervert, which is what I fall into. I’ve never non-consensually touched a person. I will speak about sex publicly. I do not have taboo speaking about sexual things. I will not put you in an uncomfortable position. I think by being featured now, there’s a picture of me and Joey Ryan grabbing each other’s d–ks from a match. It was a funny end of the match thing.

I had no idea, and now that comes up every time he’s been [in a] scandal. I think Joey Ryan is costing me. I mean, it could be $20,000 a month. It could be less than that, but there’s no telling how much money I would be making if I wasn’t associated widely with him because I was tricked as a co-worker into believing he was someone he was not. We’re talking to the lawyer’s to see what we can really do with it, but if he’s gonna go attack women for telling the truth, then he should get a text back. Let the dirt sheet eat it up. I don’t care.

On Mike Quackenbush being accused during the #SpeakingOut movement and how it’s affected CHIKARA talent:

I was upset more, and I don’t want to dwell on this too long. I was upset more because finding out how creative was handled and finding out what Mike was kind of holding back from them being able to do and understanding that it was his flaws that were keeping them from going to the next level because if I was in charge of CHIKARA, day one, what am I doing?

I’m calling up every elementary and middle school and saying, ‘can we host a positive wrestling thing in your gym to teach kids about bullying, to teach kids about being kind [and] to teach kids about standing up for themselves. I would work into that because you have a children’s program, and now looking back on it, you go, maybe he was just trying to not get his handle any closer to families and children.

And maybe that’s what the deal was. But I look at the CHIKARA kids and technically, Quackenbush owns all their rights. I told every single one of them, and I’ll probably end up going to court for it, I go, ‘f–k him’. Use every bit of what you have, use all of it and make him fight you on it because he has no place here.

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