Joe Gacy had been trying to get rid of the name before he ever signed with WWE. The company liked it, bought it off him, and now owns it, which is why he is starting again as Joseph Sawyer.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, he explained how it happened when he arrived at the Performance Center in 2020.
“So at a time I did. When I got hired, just like anybody else that gets hired and begins at the Performance Center, they suggest like, hey, come up with a list of names. I had like a list of 20 names, and I went through a bunch of them, and I’m like, I don’t like a lot of these, or whatever. And then I had one I really liked. Funny enough, it was Mason King. That was the one I really liked. This was before they had Lexis King, so that was one I was really pitching. And then they were like, we actually like Joe Gacy, and I was like, you do? I was very confused, because at the time I was trying to get away from the Gacy name. I thought of it when I was very young, and then when I grew up and matured a little bit, I’m like, well, this is probably not a name I want to keep using.”
The name he had picked as a younger man carried an obvious association with a notorious American murderer, which is what he had come to want rid of.
“So I think, you know, when I was younger, I thought it was a cool thing or whatever, and then I grew up and got more mature, and I’m like, no, I hate this name. I want to change it.”
“So getting hired, I was like, great, we’re gonna change my name. This is gonna be awesome. And then they go, no, we like Joe Gacy, and I said, are you sure? So they offered to buy it from me, and at the time, I just thought, well, I’ll use it here, and if the time comes where I leave, then I’ll be able to do what I want to do and change my name anyway. So that is ultimately what happened. So they bought it from me. They now own the name, and now I am continuing forward with a new name.”
That name is Joseph Sawyer, which was among the new names WrestleCon announced in May for all five former Wyatt Sicks members. Taylor Rotunda, Nikki Storm, Samuel Shaw and Erick Redbeard are the others.
Gacy signed with WWE in 2020 and debuted in NXT the following year. He held the WWE Tag Team Championship with Samuel Shaw from July 2025 and was released along with the rest of the group on April 24.
