Cash Wheeler almost retired after being arrested last year.
The former AEW Tag Team Champion was charged with aggravated assault with a firearm last year. This came just before AEW All In 2023, and put FTR’s match with the Young Bucks in jeopardy.
After nearly a year of waiting, the charges were finally dropped in May of this year. Cash Wheeler and Dax Harwood spoke about what happened during that time on Close up with Renee Young.
Cash Wheeler revealed that the potential guilty verdict hung over his head for months. However, he refused to sign any plea deal or admit guilt, being adamant that the charges were completely untrue.
“That was a very rough patch, from August when I found out about it to May when everything finally got dismissed as it should have been the whole time. Yeah, um, yeah, it was… that was a long stretch, and there was a point in time where I couldn’t think about life after May. Because I knew everything hinged on that. That means I face the full repercussions if they do find me guilty. That was the be-all and end-all.”
I” mean, I don’t want to go into it too much because I don’t want to take up everybody’s time for too long, but like I told my lawyers when it happened, I would not take any sort of plea deal. I would not plead guilty to any charge whatsoever because I was not guilty, and I was not going to take any sort of plea. But on the flip side of that, it meant I would face the full repercussions if they did find me guilty.”
Cash Wheeler: They Had No Evidence, Just One Guy’s Statement
Cash Wheeler faced a potential five-year stint in prison, had he been found guilty of the charges.
However, he was shocked that the case went as long as it did. He revealed that there was zero evidence of a crime being committed, it went simply off of one man’s statement.
“I don’t know for sure. Because it’s based on, you know, priors and history and stuff like that. Which I don’t have, but the maximum for that, if the judge sees fit, is five years in prison. I knew that, but I also knew I didn’t do it, and I wasn’t going to sit here and say, ‘I’ll take any charge whatsoever to not go to jail.’ Because if I do that, then this goes away — AEW has to get rid of me. I can never leave the country again. So it’s like everything I’ve ever worked for, over something that never happened.”
“And just the way it all went about, I don’t see how it ever got that far. I didn’t even find out about it until a week after the fact. Like, they never pulled me over and found anything, they never came to my house and searched, they never had a witness, a picture, a video. All they had was one guy’s statement, and that was it. I found out a week later that there was already an arrest warrant for me.”
He Considered Retiring From Wrestling Due To The Arrest
Dax Harwood jumped in and spoke about how Cash Wheeler felt during this time.
The other half of FTR revealed that his partner told him he was considering retiring due to the potential backlash from his arrest.
Wheeler planned to retire and live in a small cabin back home, to save Dax Harwood from the scrutiny. Luckily, he managed to talk him out of it, and FTR remains a top team in AEW.
“I don’t want to speak for him, but really quick from my perspective, he told me, he was like, ‘Hey, I just want to—’ you know, when he told me everything that happened, um, I guess maybe a week after he told me when it happened, he said, ‘I think, because we have two separate contracts, I’m going to retire because I don’t want to subject you to any of this stuff that I’m going through.'”
“He knew the backlash on Twitter, because Twitter’s the cesspool of all social media. And he was like, ‘I’m just going to retire, and you don’t have to worry, because your contract’s with you. I’m just going to leave wrestling and go live in’—he has a little cabin back home—’I’m just going to live there and not worry about it anymore.’ So I had to talk him into not retiring.”
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