Major League Wrestling owner and CEO Court Bauer details some of the difficulties the company has faced, allegedly due to WWE‘s actions.
MLW filed an antirust lawsuit against WWE in January 2022 and alleged that the company tried to undermine the competition and monopolize the market. After the initial compliant was dismissed in February, MLW filed an amended complaint on March 6.
Bauer appeared on a recent episode of Talk Is Jericho and discussed MLW’s new deal with REELZ with Chris Jericho. He stated that their previous agreement with another platform for a streaming deal fell through at the last minute, and that triggered the lawsuit against WWE.
“Rewinding to 2021, I was talking up like, ‘We got this big deal, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming,” Bauer said. “Then we have the media embargo, they knew it was going down, the night before the press release was going out, the papers were signed, and then we’re told, ‘Deal off.’ That, long story short, triggered an antitrust lawsuit with WWE. I’d reached the summit, right, it’s so hard to get a TV deal. It’s not easy. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how good your product is or not. It’s just a hard thing to do. Especially now, when the content is king era has kind of toppled and the gig is dead and now it’s just a rush to pick up the best deal you can. We got in there right before that shit hit the fan. After that streaming deal went south, I basically had to go back out there and start over, like Groundhog Day, and start shopping and pitching and doing it all over again. It’s like getting knocked down from the top of the mountain and going through it all over again and just trying to keep the business afloat while you go through that. Two years later, and we had to go through the pandemic and we had to go through all this stuff. By the way too, billionaires just doing what they do in the midst of this, it wasn’t easy, and so meeting after meeting, and we got there with REELZ and we signed the contract in December and announced it in January, and we’re just so elated to be there.”
After Bauer highlighted the ratings success of REELZ and described how it was a bigger platform for MLW, he was asked about the company’s lawsuit against WWE. He pointed to other examples of WWE’s conduct damaging other companies and stated that, when MLW was nearly “mortally wounded” by it, the promotion opted to hold WWE accountable.
“Look at Ring of Honor and New Japan when they ran the Garden,” Bauer said. “I know AEW’s had issues, whether it’s contract tampering, whether it’s arena issues. This shit’s been going on for 40 years. Just ask the promoters through the decades, and how were they wounded? How were they damaged? For us, we were almost mortally wounded, and it was time to hold them accountable, so that’s what I did. I think Vince is the kind of guy that just, the WWE as a whole, they want to control, they want to have maximum market share. They want to suffocate the competitors by virtue of, look at how it’s happened. Exhibit A through Z, it speaks for itself,” (H/t Fightful for the transcription.)
WrestleZone will provide more information about MLW’s lawsuit against WWE as it becomes available.
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