WWE Slam “Gory Self-Mutilation” In Recent AEW Women’s Street Fight

Written by James Holder • Published 8th July 2022
AEW Rampage Street Fight

WWE have commented that they are a “very different business” to AEW in light of the latter’s recent blood-soaked women’s Street Fight on Rampage.

On the special New Year’s Smash edition of AEW Rampage at the tail end of 2021, Tay Conti teamed with Anna Jay to take on The Bunny and Penelope Ford. While the two teams had been feuding for a number of weeks, few fans, if any, could have predicted the carnage that followed.

There was suplex through two chairs, a super-plex onto a pile of thumb tacks, a piledriver from the ring apron through a table before the madness ended with Anna Jay wrapping barbed wire around her arm to lock in the Queen Slayer on The Bunny. Unsurprisingly, throughout the carnage, there was a significant amount of blood shed, with The Bunny and Tay Conti in particular both ending with the proverbial crimson mask.

While this wasn’t the first time that an AEW women’s match had gone down in such brutal fashion, it felt to many as though the violence had reached a new level.

Over the course of their illustrious history, WWE has played host to a stunning array of violent matches, although the edgier content of the Attitude Era is now firmly in the rear-view mirror. In a statement issued to the Toronto Star, WWE have now attempted to distance themselves even further from the type of bloody carnage seen on that December night in AEW.

Embedded in an article looking at the competition between the two companies, a WWE statement said that they didn’t believe such content was appealing to commercial partners or fans.

“If you look at the gory self-mutilation that bloodied several women in the December 31 event on TNT, it quickly becomes clear that these are very different businesses. We had an edgier product in the Attitude era and in the 2022 world, we don’t believe that the type of dangerous and brutal display is appealing to network partners, sponsors, venues, children, or the general public as a whole.”

This is not the first time that WWE have commented on AEW’s edgier content, with Chairman Vince McMahon openly questioning whether TNT would tolerate such a product on WWE’s Q2 earnings call back in 2019.