Former WWE Superstar Cedric Alexander recently recounted a disturbing experience from his pre-WWE days where a planned in-ring spot with Candice LeRae led to him receiving death threats.
Speaking on Sportskeeda WrestleBinge, Alexander detailed the incident, which occurred around 2015 at an Absolute Intense Wrestling (AIW) show. During a multi-person match, Alexander executed his Lumbar Check finisher on LeRae, a move they had discussed and agreed upon backstage. “Candice is great. She’s a champ. She’ll want to do anything,” Alexander explained. “I’m like, it would be funny if I hit her with a Lumbar Check… When we call it in the back, she’s like, ‘We’ll do this.’”
The spot created a dramatic visual. “There’s a viral video on this where I grab her and I throw in the air to hit the move, and you can hear the crowd gasp, and there’s an audible like, ‘Oh no.’ She hits my knees, goes flying halfway across the ring,” he recalled. While LeRae was fine and pleased with the outcome, the online reaction was severe. After waking up the next day to a phone “flooded with notifications,”
Alexander discovered many were negative. “I got so many death threats saying, ‘I’ll kill you. You dirty’ and [offensive language followed],” he stated. Alexander attributed the backlash to viewers unfamiliar with professional wrestling: “It’s mostly from people who had no clue what wrestling is. They just saw a giant man throwing a woman on his knees and she goes flying. That’s all they saw.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Sportskeeda Backstage Pass with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
