A former WWE writer has taken to social media to address two separate departures from the company, one of which found him being fired “while trying to protect the company from airing a racially insensitive segment.”
Michael Leonardi, who worked with the company from 2001 to 2005 and had a brief second run in 2015, posted two videos to his LinkedIn account detailing the events leading to both departures.
In the videos, Leonardi explains that he enjoyed working with WWE and his co-workers, calling them “the most talented people I’ve ever worked with” before addressing a segment that aired on RAW on Martin Luther King Jr. Day of 2016.
Recounting the verbiage in the original script and changes he would attempt to make, Leonardi states:
The script called for Neville to speak up and tell everyone else that he’s got ‘a dream’ too and that dream is to win the Royal Rumble. And I remember Neville coming up to me after he read it and he was like, ‘I can’t say this.’
(Trying to compare) a wrestler who wants to one day win the Royal Rumble to one of the most iconic speeches in American history about civil rights and how important that was – to try and play on that was just dumb, it was poor writing.
It doesn’t make Neville look like a face. That would be something that a heel would say, right? That would be something that a bad guy would say in that way to undermine the importance of that speech.
The former writer goes on to say that the men who worked with Neville in the segment, R-Truth, Mark Henry, and Titus O’Neil, voiced their discomfort with the line, but as Leonardi recalls, the decision was made to change the script in a manner that was “light and fun,” having R-Truth deliver the line instead.
Leonardi then recalled the response he got from an angry Vince McMahon over the change made to the script:
I’ll never forget this, he’s staring at the screen, he takes off his headphones and he turns to me and said, ‘So, you didn’t give me what I wanted?’
I explained to him again what we did, the circumstances around it, the limitations that we had. I took full responsibility for it and then he just chewed me the f–k out, pardon my French.
The incident follows a similar situation in 2005 leading to Leonardi’s voluntary departure from WWE, in which he was tasked with creating a video package for the feud between Muhammad Hassan and The Undertaker.
Asking to work on a different project due to feeling the angle was insensitive, Leonardi believes he was demoted until UPN insisted the Hassan character no longer be shown on their network.
Source: F4WOnline