The “Mr. McMahon” docuseries is out on Netflix and one of the episodes covers Chris Benoit and the double murder-suicide.
In June 2007, Benoit murdered his wife, Nancy, and their seven-year-old son, Daniel, before taking his own life over three days. WWE initially did a tribute show on Raw to Benoit, with various wrestlers telling stories about Chris. The tributes happened before news broke that it was actually murder-suicide.
McMahon claimed in the doc that CTE nor steroids played a factor in what Benoit did. Instead, he thinks Benoit went nuts.
McMahon said, “There is no correlation between taking steroids and what happened to Chris Benoit. Human beings are flawed. Chris went nuts. It happens in every form of life and everything. So that’s the only thing I can take away from it. This doctor came up with this ridiculous statement of, ‘Okay, here is why Chris Benoit did this. There was some sort of trauma to his head.’ Things were shown where Chris would dive off the rope and hit someone with his head. That’s a complete work…It looks like there’s damage, and there’s not. We know what we’re doing. We don’t hurt each other.”
Former WWE star/founder of Concussion Legacy Foundation, Chris Nowinski, believes after he analyzed Benoit’s brain that Benoit suffered from CTE. Steve Austin also dismissed CTE as having played a role in it, stating, “I’m not a CTE guy. I just don’t believe in it.”
McMahon spoke with Nowinski and changes were eventually made to the product to make things safer for the talent. One of the changes made by McMahon was to not have wrestlers take shots to the head.
All of the 6 episodes of the “Mr. McMahon” docuseries can be watched now on Netflix.
