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Ecw Press - Irvin Muchnick

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173 pages

English

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This is the first thorough and authoritative report of events surrounding the Benoit murder-suicide in 2007, in which WWE superstar Chris Benoit murdered his wife and their seven-year-old son before killing himself. One of the most shocking stories of the year, it was also a seminal event in the history of wrestling which laid bare the devastating prevalence of steroids and its effects on users. Irvin Muchnick - author of Wrestling Babylon (ECW, 2007) and co-author of Benoit (ECW, 2007) - has parsed public records and interviewed dozens of witnesses, inside and outside wrestling, to give the story the full true-crime treatment. Chris and Nancy also goes beyond the crime itself, showing how the tragedy was a microcosm of the drugs culture in wrestling. Muchnik probes the story of the massive supplies of steroids and human growth hormone found in Benoit's home and the WWE 'wellness policy' that promoted everything except the talents' wellness. The Ultimate Historical Edition extends the

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	08 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773057668
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Chris & Nancy The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, The Ultimate Historical Edition
Irvin Muchnick

Contents Epigraph Introduction to the Historical Edition Introduction to the 2013 Edition Introduction to the 2009 Edition Chapter 1: “They’ve Killed the Family!” Chapter 2: Chris & Nancy Chapter 3: Living with Death Chapter 4: Last Days in Fayette County Chapter 5: The Lost Weekend Chapter 6: Tribute to a Murderer Chapter 7: Chavo Guerrero, Scott Armstrong, the Text Messages, and the Two Timelines Chapter 8: The District Attorney, the Sheriff, and What’s Missing Chapter 9: The Wikipedia Hacker Chapter 10: Squire David Taylor Drops by Green Meadow Lane Chapter 11: How the Media Massaged It (Tabloid, Mainstream, and Fan Flavors) Chapter 12: Dr. Astin and the War on Drugs Chapter 13: Congress Cuts a Promo Chapter 14: All the World’s a Stooge Photos Notes on Sources Fayette County Authorities Michael Benoit Holly Schrepfer Sandra Toffoloni Jerry Mcdevitt and the Blog Retraction Acknowledgments About the Photos Order the DVD List of Files About the Author Copyright

Epigraph
Grow up your forty [years old] for mighty sakes get off the stuff it’s obvious im probably not the only one who can see and we both know the [World Wrestling Entertainment] wellness program is a joke.
— Nancy Benoit to Chris Benoit text message, May 10, 2007
The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. It’s what’s legal.
— Michael Kinsley

Introduction to the Historical Edition
Twenty-six days before the January 6, 2021, violent insurrection at the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, attempting to block certification of the election of his successor Joe Biden, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote about Trump’s successful efforts to plant in the minds of a substantial minority number of Americans the idea that the election, which he had lost by seven million votes, had been fraudulent.
“To tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh,” Bouie observed. The joke here, Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results, was “a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe .” Bouie went on to explain that kayfabe is “the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real.”
In March 2020, near the start of the final chaotic and pandemic-plagued year of the disastrous Trump experiment chapter of the democratic experience, the essay below was appended to this “Ultimate Historical Edition.” A year later, as this edition, previously published only in electronic form, goes additionally to its hard-copy print version, I try here to keep pace with the madcap evolution of the book’s relevance. I promise, this brief word is my last. I think.
There isn’t a lot more to add. I already postulated, at length, that Trumpism was, to a large extent, simply kayfabe writ large. I also ticked off other phenomena suggesting that the Chris Benoit story had foreshadowed the completion of the wrestlingization of America on an apocalyptic scale.
The only other footnote concerns Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who in the last year undertook an explicit henchman role in the authoritarian angling for a coup d’état . In 1994 the federal government unsuccessfully prosecuted WWE’s Vince McMahon for conspiracy to distribute steroids. McMahon was aided not only by the open advocacy of his lead defense attorney Laura Brevetti, but also by the secret intervention of her boyfriend at the time, a sleazy fixer named Marty Bergman, who posed as a television producer while suborning the testimony of McMahon’s former secretary and paramour Emily Feinberg. Not long after the trial, Brevetti and Bergman got married. The ceremony took place at City Hall in New York. Officiating? Mayor Rudy Guiliani.
March 2021
One of the goals of this third “ultimate historical edition” is to re-establish the known — not speculative — record of what happened to Chris Benoit and his family in June 2007. Another is to introduce this wicked story to a new generation of readers. My fellow author Greg Oliver, who runs the Slam! Wrestling news and feature site, told me that when he tables his books at places like wrestling fan conventions, there is palpable renewed interest in Benoit: Wrestling With the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport , the volume of instant essays Greg co-wrote with Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, and myself. Initially that book drew interest from people who were news consumers trying to make sense out of the event and its aftermath. Today, Greg said, he detects something different: curiosity, from scratch, on the part of those who have only heard about Benoit in passing and want to nail down the fundamentals. My hope is that this renewed footprint of Chris & Nancy will help.
As for what has gone down in the intervening dozen years, you can choose your own jumping-off point. Mine is related to Benoit only in one important sense: It is the most recent parallel wrestler’s suicide by hanging. On May 16, 2019, former WWE “diva” Ashley Massaro took her own life in this fashion. She was 39 and one of the two seemingly premature ex-WWE fatalities that year. The other, Rick Bognar, the one-time “fake Diesel,” died suddenly at 49 of unknown causes.
Obviously, this collective annual toll of two was a tiny fraction of the 20-plus in Benoit’s 2007, which occurred at the peak of major wrestling promotion early fatalities. Many of that generation’s untimely deaths could be traced, though not in any reliably direct, one-to-one correspondence, to some combination of drugs and what we now better understand is the insidious accumulation of traumatic brain injury. The drugs involved were at least as likely to be painkillers and antidepressants as either the steroid family or recreational “street” drugs. They now fit neatly into what we know as a society-wide opioid crisis.
Meanwhile, the detection of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by both dumb stunt impacts and lots of completely routine ones, is still foolproof only postmortem. More interested in elevating discussion of the overall problem than in constructing a perfect pie graph, I called both drug excess and brain trauma, twin occupational hazards in varying measures, the ingredients of wrestling’s “cocktail of death.”
This turn of phrase makes for a punchy subtitle but may be too anodyne for a fantasy industry that is almost, by definition, unequipped to deal with the realities of mental illness in general — something the world at large is just starting to come to grips with. You could say that some of the inherent self-medication in wrestling is the symptom of another cocktail ingredient.
Today, giving due credit for constructive changes, I must record that the industry’s bedrock health and safety record has improved from its unimaginably very worst. Performers in this spectacle-sports hybrid still die young at a low roar, but at rates consistent with a more expected rhythm as a consequence of the extreme risk-taking of what the Taylor Swift lyric calls “the young and the reckless.” The clear and present danger highlighted by Congressional investigations — half-hearted though those investigations were — has abated. In place is the somewhat normalized human sausage factory that is a byproduct of late-empire America’s inexhaustible entertainments.
But let’s not take too large a leap from this qualified good news. I, for one, am not about to declare the WWE Wellness Policy a success, except on its own narrow terms. I have some skin in this game, both in general and as a figure who, in caricature, was featured in the pages of The American Lawyer in 2011, juxtaposed against WWE mouthpiece Jerry McDevitt for a post-Benoit debate (see http://muchnick.net/americanlawyer.pdf).
Please do not try to sell me on the notion that today’s drug tests are administered, and their associated disciplines meted out, with scientific neutrality. WWE executive vice president Paul “Triple H” Levesque, husband of Vince McMahon’s daughter Stephanie, still performs occasionally at age 50, and he looks mahvelous . (One of Levesque’s early personal trainers and “nutritionists,” Dave Palumbo, who at one point was imprisoned for selling fake human growth hormone, was renowned for counseling his clients on how to beat drug tests.) I don’t know, maybe movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really was forced to pee into a cup before parachuting back into WWE rings for cameo appearances. John Cena lost time to a torn pectoral in the years just before he, too, was mostly detached to Hollywood. Pec and tricep ruptures are injuries not found in the sports medicine literature prior to steroids.
Aside from the smell test for specific eyebrow-raising performers, the basic point is that WWE contracts with a drug-testing lab but still runs the show. This is not a genuinely independent review system. In legit sports, the system is also less than perfect and transparent, but it’s inching closer — in part because the scrutiny is greater and in part because the standards for regulating performance enhancement are more objective and compelling.
Again: What WWE is doing today in the area of preventing future Benoits is considerably better than nothing, no matter what motivates the powers-that-be — a genuine concern for health and safety, or simply public relations — and no matter how large the remaining gap between the real and the ideal.
In addition, a couple of new factors on the contemporary wrestling industry landscape have done a lot to mitigate aga