There were two notable AEW departures last week as Rafael Morffi is leaving to start working in a high-level position at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY. Also, AEW’s Chief Marketing and Merchandising Officer Dana Massie is finishing up.
The departures
Both had been with AEW since the beginning. Before AEW even ran its first show, Dana, Matt Jackson’s wife, had been selling merchandise for the promotion. This comes at a time when Kevin Sullivan had been let go, and QT Marshall left the promotion.
The All Out brawl between The Elite and CM Punk & Ace Steel will be a permanent black eye on the promotion as a dark period for the company. Some people believe the promotion hasn’t been able to recover from it since Punk ripped several wrestlers, including The Young Bucks, at the post-event press conference before the brawl broke out in Punk’s locker room with Steel, Punk, Kenny Omega, and The Bucks.
All Out tie-in
The promotion did try to re-sign Massie, but she opted against it. While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted wrestlers usually go with the flow with what a promoter says, but in Massie’s situation, they thought she would be there forever and that wasn’t the case.
“I think what happened … .with everything that happened over the last year with her husband and brother-in-law [Nick Jackson] vilified and never defended and never being allowed to defend themselves [because of NDAs] and the company never defending them, it made it really difficult. They [The Young Bucks] re-signed, they didn’t go to WWE basically because they got a great offer to stay, and it was the best thing for the family, and it was the best thing financially to stay. They [The Elite] all agreed to the majority vote [to stay with AEW or go to WWE together], that was one of the things they all agreed to so they stayed. With her, I think it just got too tough. I’m sure there are other things, too, but that was a lot of it. The fact that she felt they were never defended at a time when they probably should have been defended by the company. There was the situation where [CM] Punk went after her too and she was never defended either at that point,” Meltzer stated.
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