Jon Moxley, formerly Dean Ambrose in WWE, just took his previous employer to the woodshed on fellow All Elite Wrestling (AEW) wrestler Chris Jericho’s podcast. Moxley, whose real name is Jonathan David Good, ripped ex-boss Vince McMahon less than a month after he left the world’s top sports entertainment company.
Among the things Good took issue with during his WWE tenure, the former “Lunatic Fringe” blamed McMahon for some of those promo lines Ambrose spoke about former Shield-mate Roman Reigns’ real-life cancer. Good referred to them as “very distasteful.”
“I went: ‘I’m not saying– are you kidding me?’” Good recalled thinking Wednesday on “Talk Is Jericho.” “‘This is clearly a mistake.’”
Ambrose says he took his complaint to McMahon in a production meeting, where the WWE chairman pulled a “Vince Jedi-Mind Trick” and convinced him the promo wasn’t “so bad.”
“As soon as that line left my mouth I went, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I just said that,’” he recalled.
We believe Ambrose is referring to the promo included in the WWE video above. His turn begins at the 2:50 mark.
“We were rotten to the core from the very beginning,” Ambrose said back then from the backstage area, responding to a Seth Rollins promo. “And now time has caught up to us, and we’re all gonna pay for it in different ways. You know how the old saying goes: What goes around comes back around on ya. And now it’s come back around on us in a big way and we’re all gonna get what we deserve. I mean, look at Roman. For Roman’s part, for what Roman did in the Shield — he has to answer to the man upstairs.”
All of this came after Good had informed WWE executives that he would not be returning when his contract expired in April. TheWrap reached out to WWE for a rebuttal to Good’s comments in this story and on the podcast, but we did not immediately receive a response.
Rollins is the third member of the Shield, one of professional wrestling’s most popular factions of all time. The two feuded while Reigns was recovering from a recurrence of leukemia, something he had battled years ago.
The following week, McMahon and the writers wanted Ambrose to take the verbal attack on Reigns even further, Good told Jericho, who himself left WWE a few years ago. That’s where Good drew the line, he said.
Good wouldn’t share on-air what the line was, but said that it was one that would have gotten someone fired — probably him — and possibly even compromised WWE’s partnership with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure cancer-research foundation.
In February, Reigns announced his cancer was in remission.
Before that comeback, which saw Ambrose turn heel (the wrestling term for a bad guy) shortly after returning, Good was rehabbing an arm injury.
At the time he remembered thinking, “I’m so excited to come back to wrestling, but I’m not excited to come back to WWE.”
“They screw everything up,” he added, referring to the creative staff and McMahon, whom Good referred to on the podcast as “allegedly a genius.”
“Looking back at it now, I can’t believe I hung in there that long,” he said. Good surprised fans on Saturday with his AEW debut during pay-per-view “Double or Nothing.”
“WWE’s creative process sucks — it does not work,” Good added. “It’s killing the company,” he said, adding: “I think Vince is the problem.”
Listen to the podcast below, during which Good also says that he was paid just $500 for his participation in a WWE Network sendoff special for The Shield.