10 Wrestlers Who Should Be In Jail
Serious actions deserve serious consequences.
Crime.
It’s everywhere.
It’s an unfair world rife with grotesque wealth distribution. If you want some of it yourself, you’ve either gotta make a fair living, if AI hasn’t taken your job yet, daddy, or get in on the flim-flam and make yards as a fakeloo artist.
…or so they want you to think.
The reality, per data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2024, is that crime rates are falling - at least in the United States of America.
Murder dropped by 12%, the most significant fall in two decades. Robbery dropped by 0.3%, aggravated assault by 3% from 2023 figures.
The thing is, these records are incomplete. Not every law enforcement agency submits statistics to the Feds, and these cities include some of the more notorious hotspots for trouble. It’s murky out there - and these figures obviously don’t include the crimes that people are getting away with.
What’s worse, the real numbers are probably more horrifying than those “the man” wants you to know about. There’s a crime wave unfolding in plain sight.
If the FBI ever assigned a gumshoe to the crime-infested world of professional wrestling, those numbers would jump up like crazy…
10. Hangman Page
Hangman Page was an innocent guy, once upon a time. A regular joe. Hell, before he entered the world of professional wrestling, the man was a schoolteacher.
He was corrupted by the industry. He was on top for a while, but then a man he perceived to be rotten took his spot. Never the same after that, Swerve Strickland sensed it - and vowed, in his words, to take the spot Page didn’t even want. While unmotivated, Page was still formidable - which might explain why Swerve, trying to peck at Hangman’s psyche, invaded his home and cut a promo on his infant child.
Swerve didn’t just peck at Hanger’s psyche; he broke it. In a delayed retaliation, Hangman burned Swerve’s childhood home to the ground a year later.
According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, arson is punishable by a maximum of 20 years imprisonment and a minimum of five. Hangman Adam Page should be in da clink right now.
The overcrowded system would come as something of a shock to him, looking at those Collision houses.
9. Swerve Strickland
As mentioned, Swerve in 2023 invaded the home of Hangman Page. He did not steal any goods or commit an assault, so the offence was merely a misdemeanour.
However.
Swerve also broke into the Buddy Wayne Academy that same year, leaving his bereaved son Nick a bloody mess. The angle was good, if you can tolerate a more heightened quality in your wrestling.
Wrestling is a strange, lawless zone. Beyond the confines of the ring, where contests are sanctioned and a level of physical violence is permitted, common assaults, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, occur on a weekly basis.
Entering a civilian territory and committing battery could earn the offender up to 10 years in prison. Swerve also threatened to cut Billy Gunn’s fingers off with actual scissors (do you get it?).
What’s annoying about Swerve’s crime spree - and the following applies to wrestling full stop - is that he scans as bad news without these cinematic detours.
He isn’t cutting monologues in the middle of matches, at least - which quite frankly is far more offensive than maiming an Attitude Era midcarder.
8. As Yet Unidentified Perp
Back in November, Jade Cargill was attacked on SmackDown.
This was no ordinary Wrestler X beats up Wrestler Y scenario, the sort of thing you see but barely even register on a near-daily basis. This was a brutal attack.
Jade Cargill was found splayed against a shattered windshield with blood pouring out of her face. The scene was so disturbing…in theory, that Bianca Belair became utterly hysterical. Jade was unconscious and unresponsive and was immediately rushed in an ambulance to the nearest local medical facility. She was not seen for months afterwards. This was the worst thing to ever happen to her since AEW basically stopped trying.
So who is the perp?
Who belongs in a jail cell?
At time of writing, the suspect has yet to be revealed.
Is Naomi - who eventually deputised as Women’s World champion - too obvious? Bayley is too nice.
What about Belair herself? Her acting job was so poor that there must be some explanation behind it. What if she was only pretending to be upset?
That, or WWE isn’t actually cinema. One of the two.
7. Christian Cage
Christian Cage is a stand-up guy, or at least he was.
It takes a person of real character, selflessness and pure love to undertake the challenging process of adoption. Cage has taken poor, bereaved Nick Wayne and Kip Sabian under his wing, much like he did with Jack Perry. All he asks for in return is constant success. Don’t good guardians only want the best for their children?
His love, while tough, is enduring. While Taz is not technically “dead”, Christian, who only wants to see HOOK fulfil his rapidly diminishing promise, tried to manoeuvre hook away from him. Cage sought to accomplish this by breaking both of Taz’s knees.
That’s violent assault, that is.
It’s no worse than Pillmanizing somebody’s ankle - except, of course, that the wrestlers who get Pillmanized return within a week half the time. Poor Taz was out for months, and what’s worse, he’s been non-active for a quarter of a century. He’s not in “the game”. He’s a Non-Wrestler Jones who lives in Commentary Booth City. He’s been calling a plethora of matches for longer than he was ever in the ring.
Cage is a violent offender. Throw away the key.
Throw away his Money In The Bank thing as well, that’s a WWE thing AEW doesn’t need.
6. Chris Jericho
Fraud is an imprisonable offence, which could spell bad news for one Chris Jericho.
Jericho maintains that his purpose in AEW is to elevate new, young talent. This is his explicit character arc, too, which makes no sense, but whatever.
He selected HOOK as his big, benevolent favour to wrestling in 2024. On March 13, the ‘Lion HOOK’ team defeated the Gates of Agony before HOOK rejected Jericho as a mentor and elected to do his own thing.
With Jericho furious about this election, a long feud unfolded, spanning six months, in which they traded wins on pay-per-view before HOOK won in the end. The matches ranged from “barely passable” to “so overlong and boring that the crowd vocally urged Jericho to retire”.
The match quality didn’t matter; a star was born!
A star who failed to make a single appearance on pay-per-view for the remainder of the year.
Jericho opting to give young guys the “rub” doesn’t even work within AEW’s fiction. Literally, there is no elevation up the card. HOOK wasn’t even on cards after All In: London.
Does Jericho really want to get these guys over as stars? Or is he acutely aware that his days as a star himself are over?
Jericho, who benefits from the TV time, has involved himself in deception intended to result in his own personal gain.
You could imprison the guy, and he’d somehow find a way to escape for two hours on a Wednesday night.
5. Tony D’Angelo
This is an open-and-shut case.
Tony D’Angelo is, outwardly, a mafia crime boss whose unseen family members share names with the cast of ‘The Sopranos’. He might bring up the usual cover story from time to time - Tony Soprano’s cover story - and insist that he’s in the waste management business to deflect his crimes. The problem is that his crimes are broadcast internationally on either network television in the United States, or on the world’s most popular streaming service internationally.
Tony menaced and then roughed up a production assistant on Lash Legend’s ill-fated chat show. This was small fry stuff, a bit of intimidation. Tony then went on to whack Tony ‘Two Dimes’ Donovan for his apparent treachery. You didn’t see the body, but the heavy implication is that he was a rat who slept with the fishes. (That still wouldn’t be the worst romance story in NXT.)
Some people rave about the booking prowess of Shawn Michaels - but think about it. His sub-Tony Soprano character, in his programme with Oba Femi, turned into Rocky when he got “afraid” in the third film.
A guy writing nonsensical plots ripped entirely from the TV and movies he was obsessed with: doesn’t that sound a lot like Vince Russo?
4. Daniel Garcia
Daniel Garcia committed two crimes in 2024.
Firstly, it was revealed that he stole MJF’s Dynamite Diamond Ring. Garcia claimed that he pawned it in Buffalo. What he purchased with the proceeds is unclear. He can’t have bought any new clothes, since he’s taken to wearing AEW t-shirts in his new “blue tick AEW positivity X account” gimmick.
Of far more seriousness was his vicious and terrifying treatment of Scapegoat Jack Perry on Collision back in November. Together with his accomplice Daddy Magic, the two babyfaces kidnapped the one heel. After an interrogation of sorts, Garcia chained Perry to the hood of his own gimmick bus.
Garcia then took Perry for a joyride. Presumably, the idea was to just give him a little fright. He’d had it with Perry, and his inability to play an undersized heel despite working with Christian for what felt like nine years.
What if the chain came loose? What if Perry slipped off the hood and was trampled under the barreling wheels below?
Garcia could be facing serious time. It was on Collision, though, so it’s easy to see how he got away with it.
3. Jon Moxley
Somebody needs to drop the arm on that rooster Jon Moxley and his moll Marina Shafir. The guy has a rap sheet longer than Lanny Poffo’s cock, see?
Mox is a shoot criminal.
Leading the Death Riders, he seems less concerned with getting the AEW roster to live up to its potential and more invested in going to jail. What an irony; the man who framed his exit from WWE as a prison escape seems hell-bent on going back there. Does he truly hate AEW that much?
In addition to smashing Zay’s hand with a hammer, a violent assault - the comeback from which incidentally never informed the since-abandoned wider storyline - Mox and his accomplices also attempted to murder Orange Cassidy by pouring bleach down his throat. The Death Riders, a worse stable than the Corre at this point, have also injured Darby Allin so frequently and so severely that his resulting absence is indefinite.
The Death Riders also kidnapped FTR and left them for dead after a Collision taping (Dax Harwood hated that, if only because he probably sold it really well and nobody was around to validate his performance).
2. Mercedes Moné
Mercedes Moné, what happened to you?
She was an incredible villain years and years ago, making young children cry and laughing hysterically about it, but one could argue that Mercedes only did those outlandish things to make an imprint on the women’s wrestling scene in the U.S. - to build something and become instrumental in its legacy. She’s obsessed with making history. One must be bold to shape the future.
Attempting to murder Kris Statlander, however, was simply not on.
She was directing Kamille to do it, yes, but it was her idea. And it would have worked, if Kamille could bloody drive.
Kamille, under instruction from Mercedes, attempted to kill Kris Statlander via vehicular homicide, video footage of which exists. She should be jailed. There’s more bad news: judges shape sentences based on the degree of remorse, and Moné wasn’t shocked nor regretful; if anything, she berated Kamille for not getting the job done.
And for that matter, they should throw the book at Tony Khan for hiring the creatives who have turned AEW into every bad U.S. cable wrestling show ever.
1. The Wyatt Sicks
The Wyatt Sicks actually got over for a little while there.
The presentation felt major league; in-ring, the act had a certain action-heavy bombast; Bo Dallas fused meta with real sentiment to add emotional weight to the visual schlock; there was an all-important sense that the Sicks weren’t supernatural entities, rather disenchanted human beings using masks to escape into and embody a more powerful avatar.
They shouldn’t have got over. They should be in prison.
When they debuted as a unit, they executed the promised massacre. They walked over the prone bodies - corpses?! - of several production staffers through eerie fog. One guy was draped against a wall with what looked like blood from an exit wound splattered all over it.
So what’s the deal?
Did they…did they actually kill a guy?
Or did the auteurs over at WWE, with their impeccable storytelling, film a dumb scene that you weren’t actually meant to take seriously?
Since it would be biased to say WWE is nonsensical, the answer must be that the Wyatt Sicks deserve life imprisonment.