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Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

That’s Jerry “The King” Lawler. A professional wrestler from the 1970s, best remembered for two things. The first is the time he went on Dave Letterman in the 80s, and slapped Andy Kaufman. And the second thing he’s known for is doing color commentary for the WWF as other people wrestle.

In 1993 he was still a wrestler, and WWF had advertised him for something called “Survivor Series”. Which was an event you pay money to see where a team of 4 wrestlers fights the other 4 wrestlers. Well he had to be replaced on show, as he was dealing with legal issues in his hometown of Memphis.

The legal issues came about because he began having back and forth discussions with two 14 year old white girls. (Their race will be of note later). He asked them to meet at a local hotel. Stories differ if they had sex, or if he wanted sex but they refused, but the common thing all accounts (except for Lawler himself who denies everything) is that regardless of how things turned out, Lawler showed up expecting sex.

When the girls went to the police, and said he raped them, he wrote a letter to the police and to local media stations. It’s important to note that in Memphis he was (and still is) considered to be a huge home grown celebrity. Only surpassed by Elvis.

In the letter he wrote to local media and police, he begged them not to dirty his name on a national level. He said he was too important to deal with these legal issues, and that they weren’t even true.

I won’t use the language he used, you can use your imagination which word he used, but he essentially said that these two girls were sluts and that they were “lovers of black people”. Again, not his actual quote. Use your imagination.

Essentially he was saying that he would never have sex with these two girls, because they had black boyfriends, and THAT was beneith him. At no point did he say having sex with 14 year old girls was something that he was above. Just that it would ruin his reputation and that he was too big of a celebrity for that information to get out.

To this day, I will never understand why pro-wrestling fans never shunned Lawler. I will never understand why they never shunned Stone Cold Steve Austin. It took them 60 years, but they eventually shunned The Great Moolah.

Funnily enough, they shun David Arquette. A 90s actor, who as far as I can tell did nothing wrong. I’ll admit he shouldn’t have won the title, but he did nothing wrong.

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