Wrestling #MeToo #SpeakingOut

[Merzbow]

11 hours ago, TheBurningRed said:

I believe he was producing it. 

Emily and Dan Read like to pretend their progressive. But they banned a trans woman (a former poster on here) from training with their company because Emily didn’t feel comfortable with her training with and wrestling women. 

I know of unchecked transphobic bullying that forced one trainee out of the company, too. 

Then there was Emily on Twitter a few years back that led to her supposedly leaving the company because this time it was too public to hide from, too many incidents for it not to be seen as deeply imbedded.

[TheScarlettChad]

What is it with Brit wres and nonces? There's very very few that aren't absolute wronguns. I know people like to think WWE killed Brit wrestling. That and the pandemic. But the boom was also killed by most of the guys who started it being peadophiles. 

[TimmyB]

1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

I know of unchecked transphobic bullying that forced one trainee out of the company, too. 

Then there was Emily on Twitter a few years back that led to her supposedly leaving the company because this time it was too public to hide from, too many incidents for it not to be seen as deeply imbedded.

Didn't EVE try and do a show where only females were allowed to attend? Then someone who identified as a female contacted EVE about coming along and Emily replied with something like, "Do you think someone who has been raped would feel comfortable if you were there?"

Edited March 11 by TimmyB

[DavidB6937]

1 hour ago, TheScarlettChad said:

What is it with Brit wres and nonces? There's very very few that aren't absolute wronguns. I know people like to think WWE killed Brit wrestling. That and the pandemic. But the boom was also killed by most of the guys who started it being peadophiles. 

You'd like to think so, but I'd bet that's pretty far down the list of reasons why things have failed.

[Tim Healys Chutney Spoon]

2 hours ago, Supremo said:

Close.

You'd have thought that seeing the fallout from the Hangman post recently, Ospreay would have used his head a bit more. Clearly they don't use their intelligence at times...

[tiger_rick]

1 hour ago, TheScarlettChad said:

What is it with Brit wres and nonces? There's very very few that aren't absolute wronguns. 

It's been an accident waiting to happen for years. I remember posting on here what must have been more than 15 years ago about the safeguarding in coaching football and how there's absolutely nothing to stop anyone starting a wrestling school without proper checks in place for insurance, DBS, etc. 

Football has got even more stringent in the last 5 years since the scandal of the historic sex abuse cases with Safeguarding courses needing to be done more often and being expanded to learn from history. Similar to how the First Aid refresher courses contain much more detail on heart issues, CPR and concussions than they used to. A properly goverened sport constantly evolves it's practices to protect coaches and players.

Wrestling, as far as I know, is still the wild west.

[tiger_rick]

Sorry for the DP but unrelated to above, I've been looking at ways to take my daughter to see EVE. That can get to fuck. I'm done with pretty much all of it. It's so disgusting that its tiresome. 

Edited March 11 by tiger_rick

[WyattSheepMask]

Wasn’t there meant to be a government department (or a deporting an existing department) set up to regulate British Professional Wrestling in the wake of Speaking Out? Or did that not actually come to fruition 

[JNLister]

5 minutes ago, WyattSheepMask said:

Wasn’t there meant to be a government department (or a deporting an existing department) set up to regulate British Professional Wrestling in the wake of Speaking Out? Or did that not actually come to fruition 

No, there was an All-Party Parliamentary Group, which is basically just a fancy talking shop. It's a bit like the House of Commons equivalent of a student union society. They issued a report but they had/have no power to enforce anything.

[BomberPat]

Just now, tiger_rick said:

It's been an accident waiting to happen for years. I remember posting on here what must have been more than 15 years ago about the safeguarding in coaching football and how there's absolutely nothing to stop anyone starting a wrestling school without proper checks in place for insurance, DBS, etc. 

In this instance, I think Robbo works with young people in his shoot job, and he apparently has a completely clean enhanced DBS check. So it then becomes a question of how viable it is to keep people from working in the business based on allegations, and asking indie wrestling companies with no HR infrastructure to actually hold workers to a higher standard than proper companies performing enhanced background checks.

That's not to downplay your point in general, too much of wrestling is an unregulated mess, but part of that mess is that the kind of safeguarding you're talking about here wouldn't have changed anything in this situation, and then the question becomes whether it should have done. 

It doesn't sound like the people who work there have a problem with Paul Robinson working there, and I don't think he's actively a danger to anyone, but the promotion could have been more transparent earlier with their audience to allow them to make an informed decision about it. But at the same time, I've seen the same people argue that they were trying to hide that Robbo worked the show, and then accusing Ospreay of being brazen about it by posting photos of them together - well, which is it? Are they hiding him, or being brazen about it, it can't really be both? The ring announcer shouted him out as one of the producers at the start of the show, so it's not like they were pretending he didn't work there.

But they could have been more upfront about it ahead of time - but then it becomes a question of, okay, how do you communicate that? Do you provide a list of every producer, every member of ring crew, everyone working the venue, the medics, and so on, so that anyone in a position to attend the show can make an informed decision based on who else is going to be in the room? Where do you put that information? These are genuine, valid questions, I'm not framing them to make it sound like an impossibility. Because what people seem to be suggesting is that they should have just come out and said, "by the way, Paul Robinson is working backstage at this show", and I think that misses the point, and is one of the biggest failed lessons of Speaking Out - too many people took it to mean, "Speaking Out gave us a list of bad people, and nobody should ever work with those people again", but what if there's someone working this show who hasn't been publicly accused of something, but who did do something horrible? I'm not suggesting there was, but if we're talking informed consent about knowing who's going to be present at a show, then that can't begin and end at people already named in Speaking Out, it needs to be a broader culture of transparency. And it's not impossible - you go to a theatre production, and generally the programme will tell you the name of everyone involved right down to the runners.

 

What's hurting a lot of this stuff now is that a lot of the initial allegations just aren't out there any more. I'm not suggesting that's what happened with Paul Robinson here, but hundreds of people have deleted their Twitter accounts, and with that the Tweets calling out a lot of people, or providing more context on what people were accused of, are lost. So we're relying on a kind of institutional memory of who did what, who's a wrong'un and why, and even in this case, I've seen Reddit posts calling Paul Robinson "an admitted paedophile", and people confidently saying how he admitted to everything he was accused of (and being vague about what that was), when he didn't, he refuted it. It's on the individual to decide whether they choose to accept that refutation or not, of course, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't - to be honest, he's such a non-entity to me that I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. 

 

Ultimately, I don't really have a dog in this fight, largely because I'm exhausted by this whole mess coming up time and time again. It becomes about optics more than about whether anyone is put at risk sometimes, and the one obvious fact here is that this was a really stupid avoidable mistake, and anyone could have seen this mess coming out of it. 

[BomberPat]

3 minutes ago, JNLister said:

No, there was an All-Party Parliamentary Group, which is basically just a fancy talking shop. It's a bit like the House of Commons equivalent of a student union society. They issued a report but they had/have no power to enforce anything.

To add to this, the APPG's stated aim was never to address Speaking Out anyway, they were about representing wrestling as part of the economy - they just happened to come about around the same time as Speaking Out, and fans assumed that was what they were formed in response to, but it had been in the works for a while before Speaking Out happened. Ultimately, their role ended up being little more than blagging free tickets to WWE shows, and nobody should have ever expected more from them.

[mim731]

10 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

nobody should have ever expected more from them.

As per any group composed of MPs if we're being honest, depressing as that may be. 

[tiger_rick]

17 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

In this instance, I think Robbo works with young people in his shoot job, and he apparently has a completely clean enhanced DBS check. So it then becomes a question of how viable it is to keep people from working in the business based on allegations, and asking indie wrestling companies with no HR infrastructure to actually hold workers to a higher standard than proper companies performing enhanced background checks.

That's not to downplay your point in general, too much of wrestling is an unregulated mess, but part of that mess is that the kind of safeguarding you're talking about here wouldn't have changed anything in this situation, and then the question becomes whether it should have done. 

True, a DBS does just mean you haven't been caught yet but it's part of a wider Safeguarding culture that just doesn't exist because no-one is remotely bothered. 

I have turned down a couple of people wanting to volunteer because of things I've heard and being unwilling to take the risk. Even though getting volunteers is one of the hardest parts of running a sports club. That isn't even a consideration in wrestling. People come with serious public allegations and there's little thought to not only hiring them but paying them too. 

Edited March 11 by tiger_rick

[SuperBacon]

18 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

It becomes about optics more than about whether anyone is put at risk sometimes,

I'll be honest, that wasn't my intention. I was just surprised that a company as seemingly as progressive as EVE would choose to employ someone with such allegations against them. I suppose rightly or wrongly, I expected that from someone like Progress, but, again rightly or wrongly, I'd expect a bit more from a company like EVE.

[Hannibal Scorch]

14 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

In this instance, I think Robbo works with young people in his shoot job, and he apparently has a completely clean enhanced DBS check. So it then becomes a question of how viable it is to keep people from working in the business based on allegations, and asking indie wrestling companies with no HR infrastructure to actually hold workers to a higher standard than proper companies performing enhanced background checks.

That's not to downplay your point in general, too much of wrestling is an unregulated mess, but part of that mess is that the kind of safeguarding you're talking about here wouldn't have changed anything in this situation, and then the question becomes whether it should have done. 

It doesn't sound like the people who work there have a problem with Paul Robinson working there, and I don't think he's actively a danger to anyone, but the promotion could have been more transparent earlier with their audience to allow them to make an informed decision about it. But at the same time, I've seen the same people argue that they were trying to hide that Robbo worked the show, and then accusing Ospreay of being brazen about it by posting photos of them together - well, which is it? Are they hiding him, or being brazen about it, it can't really be both? The ring announcer shouted him out as one of the producers at the start of the show, so it's not like they were pretending he didn't work there.

But they could have been more upfront about it ahead of time - but then it becomes a question of, okay, how do you communicate that? Do you provide a list of every producer, every member of ring crew, everyone working the venue, the medics, and so on, so that anyone in a position to attend the show can make an informed decision based on who else is going to be in the room? Where do you put that information? These are genuine, valid questions, I'm not framing them to make it sound like an impossibility. Because what people seem to be suggesting is that they should have just come out and said, "by the way, Paul Robinson is working backstage at this show", and I think that misses the point, and is one of the biggest failed lessons of Speaking Out - too many people took it to mean, "Speaking Out gave us a list of bad people, and nobody should ever work with those people again", but what if there's someone working this show who hasn't been publicly accused of something, but who did do something horrible? I'm not suggesting there was, but if we're talking informed consent about knowing who's going to be present at a show, then that can't begin and end at people already named in Speaking Out, it needs to be a broader culture of transparency. And it's not impossible - you go to a theatre production, and generally the programme will tell you the name of everyone involved right down to the runners.

 

What's hurting a lot of this stuff now is that a lot of the initial allegations just aren't out there any more. I'm not suggesting that's what happened with Paul Robinson here, but hundreds of people have deleted their Twitter accounts, and with that the Tweets calling out a lot of people, or providing more context on what people were accused of, are lost. So we're relying on a kind of institutional memory of who did what, who's a wrong'un and why, and even in this case, I've seen Reddit posts calling Paul Robinson "an admitted paedophile", and people confidently saying how he admitted to everything he was accused of (and being vague about what that was), when he didn't, he refuted it. It's on the individual to decide whether they choose to accept that refutation or not, of course, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't - to be honest, he's such a non-entity to me that I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. 

 

Ultimately, I don't really have a dog in this fight, largely because I'm exhausted by this whole mess coming up time and time again. It becomes about optics more than about whether anyone is put at risk sometimes, and the one obvious fact here is that this was a really stupid avoidable mistake, and anyone could have seen this mess coming out of it. 

The best, most thorough statement on this I’ve seen anywhere.

The link I shared has the tweet written in the article as was (like you said, the victim eventually deleted her account because of  people being dicks).

As I said earlier, he’s also trained a lot of the women on these shows. They are obviously content with his involvement and surely their opinions are worth more than anyone else’s, especially fans. 
 

From people who know more about the production side of things, Robinson has been working EVE shows before Ospreay got involved as well as Progress. Not sure about Rev Pro, but wouldn’t surprise me. So the narrative of he’s an admitted nonce are completely untrue and refuted. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be working these shows, especially considering his DBS and this is a bad look is mostly tribalistic point scoring, some of these takes from people who have called Janel Grant a gold digger and worst. 
 

Is it a bad look? If you believe he did something wrong, sure. But again, he was the only person I remember who denied it and had people who were there vouch. He also told the victims parents about what he’d heard happen with Edler. And I also have no dog in the fight. Never been a fan of him. But I’m not going to grab a pitchfork when I believe in this case it wasn’t warranted.

They just put on an amazing show. 3 EVE first timers went to that show and we’re all making plans to see more shows. The fact that this is now tarnishing that is a damn shame to those involved.