5 Times Wrestling And Social Media Got Awkward
2. Bill DeMott: Bully
Bill DeMott was so railroaded on Twitter for his coaching style, in 2013, that he was forced to tender his WWE resignation. Social media at times feels like a platform for pure hatred, enabling the awful side of uneducated people to type things they'd never speak aloud - but, on the evidence of the social action directed towards DeMott, at least, it can also be a force for good.
Some backstory: DeMott was assigned as Head Trainer in Deep South Wrestling in the mid-2000s, the very worst period of WWE's pre-NXT developmental model. He was released after a deluge of complaints and injuries piled up under his watch - but because the Georgia territory was an unregulated dumping ground, he still hung around. He physically left only when he was outright told - by WWE, not territory owner Jody Hamilton - that he wasn't allowed to hang out anymore. Yes, he was WWE's answer to Nelson Muntz.
He was rehired by Triple H as part of his developmental reboot, but he hadn't developed his own methods. Kevin Matthews, who first spoke out about DeMott on the similarly forgotten social media platform MySpace in 2007, levelled up in an epic Twitter tirade in late 2012, in which, holding new information from old contacts, he accused DeMott of purposefully injuring those in his charge out of pure, unadulterated sadism.
A memo leaked to Reddit, written by Austin Matelson in which he accused DeMott of, among other things, telling an African American student to go back to his motherland and expressed his hope that Enzo Amore "die" in the near future, precipitated a sh*t-storm of Twitter indictments from names such as EC3, Joey Ryan and MVP.