10 Wrestling Legal Battles That Turned Ugly
2. The Hardy Boyz Vs. TNA
An ongoing dispute that only looks to be getting worse, the rights to the 'Broken' Hardyz gimmick remain up in the air, and have resulted in precision references to the personas by both Matt and Jeff since their surprising return to WWE at WrestleMania 33.
The case, in a nutshell, boils down to if TNA own the characterisations or if the wrestlers can freely portray them elsewhere. Their arc was created under the careful gaze of Jeremy Borash and produced to air weekly on Impact Wrestling, feeding the company's belief that the entire thing is their intellectual property.
WWE won't argue that, but Matt and Jeff certainly will, and it appears more and more as though they'll be willing to expose the wafer-thin veneer of professionalism in the now-rebranded Global Force Wrestling to do so.
A court battle went public following Matt and Jeff's appearances on Monday Night Raw after Anthem Media CEO Ed Nordholm had a laissez faire attitude to the entire thing in an interview designed to curb attention to the story. Matt's wife Reby profoundly disputed the comments, fuelling a simmering social media war with a 'F**k That Owl' (Anthem's divisive symbol had undue prominence on TNA's TV product) hashtag, with Matt pledging at various points to air much of their dirty laundry with the group if things continued to spiral.
The case labours on, allegedly at the behest of GFW kingpin Jeff Jarrett in hope that the Hardy camp will eventually just walk away, but it stands to get a lot worse before it gets better.