5 Most Insane Things Happening In Wrestling Right Now (Feb 16)
3. Dirty Old Men, Part 2
In 1993, Jerry Lawler was indicted on rape and sodomy allegations.
The charges were later dropped after, as has become the accepted version of events, one of the minors in question "fabricated elements of her story". Not so according to Deadspin's David Bixenspan, whose sensational and important revisit of the case yielded an interesting - and uncomfortable - implication. According to the case detective, Mike Redmond, neither girl recanted the story. They simply refused to testify. Redmond inferred that neither wanted to "get [Lawler] in trouble". Few doubted the mendacity of the entire saga - and Lawler hardly helped his known reputation, by reacting to the sight of cleavage like a toddler at Christmas throughout the ensuing Attitude Era - but this is conjecture.
What isn't is Lawler's begging letter to the prosecution, which Bixenspan exhumed alongside "the entire case file or close to it". In it, Lawler, with remarkable penmanship, assassinated the character of the girls in question. It was standard stuff, mostly, in that Lawler questioned their morality as a means of discrediting them. One of them was engaged in a sexual relationship. One of them even smoked! But Lawler then, in 1993 - a good 30 years after a certain real King's speech - chastised one of the girls for having been "caught having sex with a black man". Tell me he did not just write that.
The extent to which Jerry Lawler is a piece of sh*t is unclear. What we do know, now, if we didn't already, is that he definitely is.