MJF Has Worked Hard To Improve "Not Great" Backstage Reputation (AEW News)
Well, one of his signatures IS the Heatseeker piledriver...
Maxwell Jacob Friedman - top AEW star, former AEW World champion, and new member of the Hurt Syndicate stable - was no stranger to locker room heat until very recently.
This is according to Fightful Select's Sean Ross Sapp, when answering a question pertaining to MJF's reputation. When it was suggested that MJF "doesn't come off as one of the boys", a Patreon subscriber enquired as to how he is perceived backstage.
"It's improved a lot over the last nine or ten months, and he's worked hard at that," Sapp responded, before indicating that any issues with various members of the AEW roster were not necessarily the result of his conduct, but rather "being the top singles act, top tag act, and the main guy getting promo time all at once".
Stories of various disputes have followed MJF throughout his run in AEW since 2019.
Opinion - We Have Been Here Before
Scorpio Sky, on Twitter, said that MJF displayed "the smallest d*ck energy imaginable" when throwing a drink over a child at the 2023 Revolution pay-per-view in one of the best AEW matches ever. Around the same time, in February 2023, Eddie Kingston rhetotrically asked, in a tweet, why MJF occupied so much TV time at the expense of Ortiz and the House of Black. (Then again, this is Eddie Kingston: an old school man who will go to extreme lengths and commit much time towards selling people on the idea of his various "grudges").
Dax Harwood, on his short-lived podcast, seemed to intimate that MJF was very, very keen to be at the forefront of the Pinnacle stable. Dax wondered aloud why Tully Blanchard wasn't afforded much time to speak. Most infamously, perhaps, in the summer of 2024, MJF was involved in a backstage fracas with Britt Baker, after Baker - who was subsequently suspended - had loudly criticised MJF in the women's locker room.
These reports have dried up over the last several months - publicly, at least, MJF has enjoyed an incident-free 2025, a year throughout which he has set about rediscovering his form in the classic heel role that best suits him.