Former WWE writer Michael Leonardi uploaded two videos to his LinkedIn page where he tells the story of why he was fired by the company in January 2016.
Leonardi talks about a backstage segment on the Jan. 18, 2016 episode of Raw, which was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, featuring Mark Henry, R-Truth, Titus O’Neil, and Neville (who currently wrestles in AEW as PAC). The script called for Neville to compare his dream of winning the Royal Rumble to MLK’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Nobody involved with the segment was comfortable with the racial insensitivity of Neville’s scripted lines. Leonardi called an audible to improve the segment and protect the company, and he says Vince McMahon was so angry about it that he fired him as a result.
Here is Michael’s story, courtesy of the transcription from POST Wrestling:
“So I was fired over a very particular segment which quite frankly still rubs me the wrong way and I think about it all the time and I always think about what I could have done better if anything to have not gotten fired.
So, essentially I was given a segment and this had already gone through a couple of rewrites and this was one of the days where there was a lot of late-minute rewrites, there was a lot of backup with shooting segments. We had another big segment that was being shot at the time with New Day and they were doing a eulogy for their trombone that got destroyed or something. My segment though was involving four talent; three African-Americans. It was R-Truth, Titus O’Neil and Mark Henry and Neville, a Caucasian guy.
So this happened to be the Martin Luther King edition of Monday Night Raw…when I finally got the new script and brought it in, we did not have a lot of time to shoot it and essentially, the script called for Neville to speak up and tell everyone else that, well, he’s got a dream too and that dream is to win the Royal Rumble, and I remember Neville coming up to me after he read it and he was like, ‘Mike, man, I can’t say this.’ For anyone that is trying to understand this, trying to compare…a wrestler who wants to one day win the Royal Rumble to one of the most iconic speeches in American history about civil rights and how important that was. To try to play on that was dumb. It was poor writing and I’ll tell you why, number one, it doesn’t make Neville look like a face. That would be something that a heel would say, right? That would be something that a bad guy would say in that way to undermine the importance of that speech at the end of the day.
So not only was Neville not comfortable saying it, the other three guys in the room, Titus and R-Truth and Mark Henry were like, ‘Yeah, this is f*cking terrible and so we did not have time to go back and get rewrites and I was not comfortable at all, nor did I even think this was an option quite frankly to try and get them to do it as is. The talent didn’t wanna shoot it that way. So what do you do? So, we worked together and we tried to find a way that we could pull this off and it not come off racially insensitive or to basically mock, to some degree, one of the most prolific speeches of all-time by a guy who’s supposed to be a good guy too. There was no way that was gonna be pulled off. So…we had R-Truth say it for Neville in a way that made it fun and warm and not insensitive in any way or not basically making light of just an — on the day of M.L.K. Day!
So we shot it that way, we shot it that way, we are running out of time and everybody — my boss, Dave Kapoor was in the room and he approved it and afterwards, Dave said to me, ‘Hey Mike, why don’t you just go down to Gorilla and tell Vince what we did here, and just give him a heads up.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ So I go down to Gorilla and Vince is sitting in Gorilla where he always used to sit. I mean he’s got his headphones on and I said, ‘Hey, Vince, just wanna give you a heads up. We shot this thing. Talent had a little bit of an issue with how this was written and so we had R-Truth say the line as well. We think it felt good, we’re happy with it. I know it’s my responsibility. But, just wanted to let you know,’ and I’ll never forget this. He’s staring at the screen, he takes off his headphones and he turned to me, he said, ‘So you didn’t give me what I wanted?’ And my eyes got big and I’m like, ‘Umm…’ and I said, ‘Yes sir, I know, I understand.’ I explained it again, what we did, the circumstances around it, the limitations that we had. I took full responsibility for it and then he just chewed me the f*ck out, pardon my French. Chewed me out.
Vince was just chewing me out and I’m saying to him, ‘Yes sir, yes sir.’ I’m just trying to tell him I acknowledge, I’m listening, I’m trying to learn and man, he goes, ‘Stop saying that! You’re only saying that because you just wanna get out of here!’ And I’m like, what do you want me to say? I’m just listening, I’m acknowledging you. It was a disaster and you know, I remember the next day, we were at SmackDown and he had basically given me another thing with Titus and basically, the assignment was, Titus has to say this and do this whole segment literally word-for-word. Not one word in the two paragraphs that he had to memorize and say, he had to deliver it. Every single word exactly the same. Every word that was written on that paper had to be said. It ended up taking us two hours to shoot it.
…I think he was just really pissed off that the script was changed and even despite explaining the circumstances and the fact was, we were all just trying to protect the company. We’re trying to protect the company from putting out a segment that was racially insensitive that just was poor, that just put us potentially in a bad light, over nothing… I have replayed that moment thousands of times in my head and I’ve asked myself, could I have done something to have not gotten fired?
…The segment comes off funny and fun and warmhearted. It puts everyone over at the end of the day and doesn’t put the company in bad light. I can tell you, that would have been the best outcome. But, when you have a talent that is like, ‘I’m not saying this. I’m not comfortable saying this’ and you have three Black guys on a racially insensitive thing, they’re like, ‘This is terrible. We can’t put this out’ and you have no time to go back and get rewrites or anything else like that, you gotta make calls on the fly sometimes and what did we do? We collaborated, we all put our heads together, my boss included and you know, we put together what we thought was the best possible thing. But, Vince thought that was a major, major no-no and I got fired for it, and it is what it is.”
This isn’t the first time a former WWE writer has attributed their firing to their pushback on racially insensitive or racist creative ideas.
The part of the story where Vince says, “So you didn’t give me what I wanted?” is consistent with other stories and rumors we’ve heard over the years about how WWE writers were under pressure to cater their scripting towards what Vince liked, even if it made for very bad television.
Leonardi said this is something “I’ve wanted to get off my chest for a while,” and he felt “super compelled to talk about it” in the aftermath of last month’s sex trafficking lawsuit against McMahon.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login