10 Controversial WWE Releases
2. Matt Hardy, 2005
“My only gripe is how the situation went down in the end. It was just poor decision making and I think things should have been handled differently.”
That was Matt Hardy’s rather reserved verdict after his 2005 release from WWE, shared during an appearance on the Between the Ropes radio program on 20 April—just nine days after leaving the company.
The situation in question was, of course, that which involved Hardy’s real-life girlfriend Amy Dumas, known on-screen as Lita, and her affair with Adam Copeland, better known as Edge. News broke of the pair’s infidelity sometime in March and just one month later, Hardy was released from his WWE contract.
Having been nursing a knee injury since August of 2004, here was Hardy coming out of a lengthy rehab having lost months of his career, his long-term girlfriend, and now his job with WWE.
A fan backlash saw him re-signed a few months later, but that was arguably only out of WWE’s hopes of turning a real-life story into an on-screen angle as opposed to any sense of remorse regarding its treatment of Hardy.