Part 2 of Profiles in Caution With the Wrestling Media and Dawn Marie’s ‘Wrestlers Rescue’

On July 18 this blog reported that British wrestling writer Mike Aldren was raising serious and important questions about whether Dawn Marie’s charity Wrestlers Rescue was on the up-and-up. I did so not because the news was central to my own journalistic mission, but because it was related to it, because the obvious outlets were being exceptionally silent on the subject, and because nature abhors a vacuum.

Dawn Marie, or her lawyer, sent me a threatening-sounding legal-sounding letter. I responded with an invitation to publish the facts clarifying the Transparency For Dummies questions that Aldren had asked and I had reinforced. I never heard back.

Before Dawn Marie’s threats were transmitted, I asked Dave Meltzer (Wrestling Observer Newsletter), Bryan Alvarez (Figure Four Weekly), Wade Keller (Pro Wrestling Torch), and Jason Powell (ProWrestling.net) if they had clued in their readers or intended to do so. Alvarez responded that his newsletter would have an item, and it did, about all those nasty stories “on the Internet.”

Later one of the other three sent me a private message complaining that my criticism of the wrestling media (criticism branching out from Dawn Marie to World Wrestling Entertainment, the industry’s 900-pound gorilla) was unfair at least with respect to his own publication. I asked if I could publish the email. The answer is either no or he’s still thinking about it.

Yesterday I followed up with all four to see if there was any further coverage — of the deepening anecdotal evidence that Wrestlers Rescue has big-time accountability problems, of the legal threats to Aldren and me and our responses … of anything at all discounting the notion that they are engaging in self-censorship.

No responses.

Irv Muchnick