Here's a story that should be getting more coverage than it actually has.
A few days ago WWE announced that, at this year's WrestleMania, there will be a battle royale for their women's division named in honour of The Fabulous Moolah, which is all part of the cynical PR campaign they've been on for the past three years by trying to position the company at the forefront of female empowerment that has always come across as horrifically forced.
However, there's a slight problem with this: Fabulous Moolah set back women's wrestling by at least three decades during her career, and was responsible for some incredibly ****ty business practices.
First and foremost, Moolah was a terrible wrestler whose offence mainly consisted of hair pulling and catfighting, yet she also trained every one of her students (which made up the vast majority of female wrestlers in North America between the 60s and 80s) in the exact same style, which meant she kept herself relevant as she was able to point at the next generation coming through and say "See? I'm as good as them, so why not book me on your shows as well?"
More than that, though, the way she treated her trainees was monstrous. First of all, all of her trainees were required to live in one of her many condos and pay Moolah rent, and if they didn't they wouldn't get booked for shows - and, as all of Moolah's trainees had to sign contracts handing over control of their careers, Moolah essentially had a monopoly on getting female talent booked and refusing to comply was essentially career death. If that wasn't enough, she would also skim off the top of whatever her trainees were paid - or to be more accurate, skim the 10% off the bottom of the fee and hand it to the trainee and keep the rest for herself. Yet somehow she managed to go even worse than that, with several of her former trainees telling how Moolah would literally pimp them out and (of course) pocket the money for herself.
Of course WWE thought they could ignore this and highlight Moolah's importance in company history, citing the match she had against Wendi Richter at Madison Square Garden that aired on MTV in 1984...although ignoring that, when Richter got into a contract dispute with WWE, they quickly booked a rematch where they instructed Moolah and the referee to get the title off Richter by any means possible without telling Richter she was losing - and, no, this isn't a wrestling storyline, they literally had Moolah (in disguise) hold Richter down and the ref count the pinfall in spite Richter kicking out, just to show her who was boss (immediately after the match, Richter left the arena still in her ring gear and hailed a car to the airport, not returning to WWE for another 25 years)
All of this has been well-known by wrestling fans for at least a decade, yet WWE thought they could ignore this and prove how they empower women by naming a marquee match in honour of someone who did the exact opposite of empowering women for decades - and only reversed their decision when those wrestling fans informed their corporate sponsors about Moolah's history, which led to a half-assed backtracking where WWE's stance was they would change the name but not give a reason why because they didn't do anything wrong, which probably has something to do with having Moolah as a part of their product sporadically between the early 80s and her death in 2007 as well as inducting her into their Hall of Fame.
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