In the middle years of the 2010s, British wrestling was in the midst of something of a golden era. UK companies such as PROGRESS Wrestling in London, Insane Championship Wrestling in Scotland, and Revolution Pro Wrestling were putting UK talent on the map in a way that was drawing in thousands of fans. In 2018, I was fortunate enough to see PROGRESS put on a show in front of 4,750 fans at Wembley Arena – one of the biggest homegrown independent wrestling events ever staged in Britain.
Around this time, the American behemoth WWE took notice and recruited a whole host of British stars to front its NXT UK brand – established in a two-part TV special at the beginning of 2017. The UK wrestling business and its stars were making a massive impact on the industry worldwide.
Then, as with so many other creative industries, the pandemic took a toll. Independent companies reliant on live revenue were forced to lay dormant, while the big American promotions taped unusual and oddly clinical shows without audiences in cavernous, empty buildings. But against this backdrop, something even bigger – and far more important – was about to happen.
In June 2020, an ex-girlfriend of American wrestler David Starr accused him of sexual assault – allegations which he denied. In the days to come, people from inside and outside the wrestling business came forward with their own allegations of sexual misconduct against wrestlers, promoters, referees, and trainers – many of which were based in the UK or came up through the British scene – using the hashtag #SpeakingOut. Organisations quickly investigated and multiple wrestlers accused of abuse found themselves blacklisted from the business, while promotions scrambled to work out how this had happened and, more importantly, how to stop it.
“I had conversations with people that I trust about whether I should walk away [from wrestling],” says Professor Claire Warden of Loughborough University. Warden has been researching wrestling as an art form for years and co-founded the Leicester-based promotion Wrestling Resurgence, which has funding from Arts Council England.
Professor Claire Warden of Loughborough University
“I knew that wrestling had a difficult history with all sorts of things. I’m not naive to that, but I think I had naively imagined that a lot of that was historical and that we had ‘come a long way’, which is what I would say to people when they asked me this question. Then 2020 hit and all the stories came out – stories about people that I knew a little and even had worked with a little – and I was quite shaken by my own naivety about the things that I thought had long gone. It clearly had not long gone.”
British wrestling clearly had to change and the issue had even made its way to the corridors of power. In 2020, a variety of MPs from all of the major parties established an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) with the stated aim to “promote the sport of wrestling and to hold meetings for parliamentarians and external bodies about issues around the sport”.
“The more that you looked into it, the more you saw what a gap there was in terms of how wrestling is talked about in parliament,” says Charlotte Nichols – Labour MP for Warrington North – who was a member of the APPG until all groups were dissolved in 2024 ahead of the general election. “Wrestling has always sat in a slightly odd space in that it isn't covered by any of the sporting bodies because there's a predetermined outcome, but it's not covered by any of the arts bodies either. So when you looked at how you grow wrestling in the UK, how you make sure that people are safeguarded in wrestling, and how you make sure that events are appropriately licensed at a local authority level, there just seemed to be this real gap. I think that was one of the things that made everyone quite keen to get their teeth in.”
The APPG issued a report in 2021, in which it recommended that wrestling should be classified as a sport when it came to training schools. This would impose restrictions on coaches and trainers similar to those for other sports, requiring background checks and safeguarding measures. Meanwhile, they suggested that actual wrestling shows should be categorised alongside theatre and other types of performance.
Charlotte Nichols was a member of the wrestling APPG until 2024
(Credit: House of Commons)
To borrow a phrase from a different combat sport, wrestling in Britain was on the ropes. Aside from the usual preconceptions about its fakery – which I’ve written about on Voice before – wrestling in Britain was now seen as a hotbed of predators. It was clear things had to change, and change fast, or the industry would collapse forever.
Warden says: “I know people who walked away, and I respect them for that, because that was the decision they felt they had to make at that juncture. But thinking particularly about the women that we've worked with at Resurgence, whose careers we tried to nurture and who I respected enormously, I think that helped – to know that they wanted to stay around and try to make it better as well. I think that helped to inspire me to do so.”
Nichols was also deeply affected by the news. “A lot of the allegations were absolutely horrifying and I think, when someone has been brave enough to come forward and share their testimony like that, it's important that some action is taken.”
Fortunately, things did change. Major companies cut ties with those accused of misconduct and several changed personnel behind the scenes as well, working with the APPG to change the face of an industry that had been exposed in a horrifying way. While all of those major promotions still exist in various forms, they operate very differently to how they did before #SpeakingOut.
London-based wrestling company Riot Cabaret was in its embryonic stages prior to 2020, but had already done extensive work with the acting union Equity – drawing on the creative industries backgrounds of its founders James Lawrence and Sean Thorne. Riot Cabaret agreed a code of conduct with Equity from its inception as a promotion and, after #SpeakingOut, committed to stand by the union’s five pledges for wrestling promotions.
“When we were putting together the policies and procedures for Riot Cabaret, it was before the big #SpeakingOut moment happened,” says Thorne. “However, both James and I were very committed to making sure that we had safeguarding and dignity at work policies in place regardless.”
Riot Cabaret founders James Lawrence and Sean Thorne
(Credit: Riot Cabaret/James Musselwhite)
Lawrence adds: “I'm an actor and I would really think twice about accepting an engagement on a show that didn't have something like that. And that's just in the normal theatrical environment, never mind when you're asking people to have the level of training and physical trust in each other as you are in wrestling. So, to us, it was a no-brainer.”
With its robust processes and codes of conduct in place, Riot Cabaret has since welcomed many of the world’s biggest wrestling stars, including a packed women’s division that has hosted the likes of Mexican superstar Thunder Rosa and British stalwarts Nina Samuels and Millie McKenzie.
“Coming out of that situation, particularly for us as new promoters anyway, building trust was the key thing that we wanted to do,” says Thorne. “But it wasn't just about promoters building trust with talent, it was that the whole triangle had to be rebuilt – promoters to audience, audience to talent, talent to promoters. All three sides of that triangle were just completely in bits during the pandemic.”
Nichols hopes that politicians can continue to help too, with a new incarnation of the APPG currently in the process of recruiting MPs. “The more established the group has become, the deeper the networks we've got in different parts of the country with different parts of the industry,” she says. “The more that the people we're speaking to within this forum reflect the diversity of wrestling, the better the decisions we're able to take in helping to make the industry better for everyone – whether that's in employment practices, safeguarding, licensing, promotion of the industry, and what frameworks there are for education, training, and skills. It's an exciting time and I'm pleased with what we've been able to do in recent years, but I think there's much bigger and better to come over the next couple of years.”
Through her work at Loughborough, meanwhile, Warden has been able to do extensive consultation and research around the working conditions for athletes in the British wrestling industry – including research on the effects of repeated concussions. She says that this health and wellbeing work, along with the wider changes as a result of #SpeakingOut, have certainly helped to make the industry a more open and honest place.
She says: “One of the things that came out of the health and wellbeing project in particular is that we felt like wrestlers were feeling more free to speak their minds and to say what they actually felt about things. Not just to go along with stuff, not to say ‘yeah, of course, I'll take that bump, even though it's super dangerous’ or ‘yeah, of course, it's totally fine to have mixed gender spaces to get changed in’ and all that sort of stuff.”
Nina Samuels and Thunder Rosa go head to head at Riot Cabaret
(Credit: Riot Cabaret/James Musselwhite)
There’s no doubt that #SpeakingOut put wrestling under a harsher and more intense microscope than it had ever been viewed through before. Suddenly, audiences and wrestlers alike are more interested in making sure everybody is safe behind the scenes, being paid properly, and has access to proper medical support. For a business that has so long operated under something of a Wild West mindset, scrutiny is a very good thing indeed.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done. But with the APPG set to fire up again and promoters like those behind Riot Cabaret leading the charge on a more transparent and safety-first industry, those changes feel far more likely to happen than they did a decade or so ago.
“Obviously in terms of lockdown and everything like that, #SpeakingOut happened at quite a unique moment in history,” says Lawrence. “I also think it's quite naive if anyone thinks of #SpeakingOut as being a thing that's firmly in the rearview mirror. People still need to be alert to the possibility that something like this could happen again. There's no question that the sector has improved in a great many ways, which were long overdue. But you need to be alive to the possibility that progress is not necessarily inevitable.”
As with any of the art forms we’ve discussed in our #MeToo Legacy series, wrestling is still adjusting to the aftershocks of its rude awakening – a much-needed chair shot to the back of an all-too-complacent industry. But with so many intelligent, innovative, and caring people at the forefront of preserving the art form, wrestling is in very safe hands indeed. And with those safe hands in place behind the scenes, the wrestlers themselves can focus on doing what they do best – offering up blood, sweat, and tears under the brightest possible lights to provide fans with the greatest show on Earth.
0 Comments