John Bradshaw Layfield is not one of those talents who is indispensable to the company. He’s a mediocre announcer at best, and even when he was an in-ring performer, he was B-list.
A list talent like Steve Austin get a pass for a lot, but that shouldn’t even factor into it when we’re talking about the guy who soaped up Edge’s ass in the shower without consent.
I knew JBL had a long history of “bullying” as it’s being called, but we’re really talking about harassment, intimidation, theft, assault and battery and even sexual assault.
Allegedly. But these allegations come from too many places for JBL to keep his job.
It’s well known that the WWE has a culture of wrestlers “ribbing” each other. Examples of that would be William Regal and Steve Austin not telling Mick Foley he was going to a gay beach, or more extreme, or even exposing Al Snow’s dick in the ring during a house show. Wrestlers sometimes went pretty far, but most of them mean it in good fun and Foley even called the ribbing war off with Snow after he went too far.
JBL, on the other hand, has harassed wrestlers for years until they quit. He’s hit them for real in the ring and tried to intimidate them into helping him harass others.
The WWE has been far too soft with issues like this. Batista once got a woman fired after she refused to have sex with him and they let him come back. Then there’s the infamous Steve Austin incident, arrested for domestic violence and still allowed to come back.
It’s time to get draconian with enforcing rules on back stage behavior. For one thing, it might be time to ban pranks all together. Most wrestlers probably don’t take it too far, but it’s the ones who do that ruin it for everyone.
And JBL needs to be fired immediately and made an example of.
The Southern Nerd 