On the New Year’s Bash edition of AEW Rampage (December 31), Tay Conti and Anna Jay faced Penelope Ford and The Bunny in a brutal Street Fight.
The match saw all four women push each other to the limit, resulting in an exciting contest with a bloody ending before Conti and Jay came out victorious.
While the match had fans talking after it aired, it came back into the news over the weekend when WWE released a statement to the Toronto Sun, referring to it as “gory self-mutilation”.
WWE’s statement read: “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 a 2022 world, we don’t believe that type of dangerous and brutal display is appealing to network partners, sponsors, venues, children, or the general public as a whole.”
On Twitter, Conti, Jay and The Bunny appeared to respond to WWE’s comments, with all three posting defiant pictures from the match and backstage on Twitter.
Conti shared a photo of her bloodied face after the match while giving the middle finger and writing: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” along with a kiss emoji.
WWE has previously tried to dismiss AEW as being too violent, even unintentionally coming up with a name for an AEW match.
During WWE’s Second Quarter Earnings call in July 2019, Vince McMahon told investors that the company would not “do blood and guts and things of that nature, such as what is being done on our new potential competitor”.
On May 5, 2021, AEW presented Blood and Guts, a War Games-style match featuring The Pinnacle vs The Inner Circle.
Catch AEW Dynamite live every Thursday at 1am in the UK and Rampage every Saturday at 3am on FITE with an AEW Plus subscription. US customers can also watch both shows on TNT, and in the UK, Dynamite repeats air on ITV4.
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