6 WWE Stars Who Got In SERIOUS Trouble With The Law

2. Vader

A uniquely unsettling act of kayfabe protection from a man who's mask had literally slipped years earlier anyway, Vader's decision to live the gimmick when that side of the business was dying made for quite the shocking scene on Kuwait television in 1997.

It started, as many of these over-familiar exchanges do, in the faux-comfy surrounds of the breakfast table.

'The Mastadon' and then-WWE Champion The Undertaker were guests on Good Morning Kuwait, doing some promotion and PR for the second consecutive tour there paid in full by the local government. It reached the annoyingly typical bit of the chat where the pair were queried about wrestling's legitimacy (with host Bassam Al Othman even uttering "fake" in his line of questioning ), but rather than doing what he'd probably done a million times before when others had come at him with the boring aside, Vader lunged for the interviewer as if he'd just walked into his White Castle of Fear. "Does that f*cking feel fake?" yelled the former WCW champion, sending the prop coffee table flying and leaving Othman's trousers presumably smelling something like his assailant's mask. He continued, "...why don't you come down tonight and, before I kick his *ss, I'll kick your *ss". The host politely declined. 

Of note, 'The Deadman' had pied the question once already, and had evidently managed it without bordering on causing an international incident. Vader's different approach proved costly, though perhaps not quite as costly as WWE might have made it appear. The scene resulted in him being very briefly jailed in the country before being released and forced to stump up a comically reasonable $164 fine. To their credit (?), back in America, WWE super-imposed bars over images of the whole thing, making Vader out to be a sick, caged animal that required a babyface - in this case the debuting Ken Shamrock - to do something about it. The reality bled through the fiction though, with Vince McMahon's audible disinterest in the whole mess trumping any attempt at genuine heat. 

The timing couldn't have been worse for Vader. Having fallen below enormous expectations following his 1996 debut, his run had been an uneven blend of middling matches, injuries, lost political conflicts and rapidly-shifting creative priorities. He'd just about found his place as an uppercard hard nut by this time, but getting rumbled for his "crimes" did more to diminish the aura than any benefit he might have gotten from committing them in the first place. Cast as a "bully" in the aftermath, his last acts as a heel were to rough up Jim Ross then lose to Shamrock and Undertaker at consecutive In Your House pay-per-views. He eventually slotted in as the babyface mate of The Patriot in a dull and doomed war with The Hart Foundation after Steve Austin had mostly left them behind and D-Generation X had scooped all their heat. That it all occurred in 1997 was even worse luck - long before the events of Montreal in November, this stood no chance of being the story of the year when the storylines were hot enough.