A federal judge from the District of Connecticut has granted the World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.’s motion to dismiss a pair of wrongful death lawsuits, which alleged that the WWE’s negligence led to the wrestlers suffering traumatic brain injuries and ultimately their deaths.
The lawsuits were brought by the families of the late Matt “Doink the Clown” Osbourne and Nelson “Big Daddy V” Frazier Jr.
The widow of Frazier, Cassandra Frazier, claimed that her husband’s passing in 2014 was due to the cumulative effect of the punishment he took in the ring, including concussions and brain trauma in more than 400 WWE-sanctioned matches.
Meanwhile, the family of Osbourne, alleged that the traumatic brain injuries he experienced led to “depression and drug abuse, which ultimately resulted” in his “untimely death” in 2013. Osbourne’s official cause of death was an accidental painkiller overdose.
Central to the court’s reasoning regarding Frazier was the fact that no autopsy was performed, making it “factually impossible” to connect the cumulative brain injuries with his death. Similarly, the lack of an autopsy made it difficult to accept the plaintiff’s claim that Frazier suffered from CTE.
With regard to Osbourne, the court found that nothing in his autopsy records suggested that a “relevant analysis” of his brain had been done. “It is impossible to plausibly allege, much less prove that either wrestler had CTE,” the court wrote.
In addition, both plaintiffs failed to show that the WWE was directly responsible for Frazier and Osbourne’s deaths because of an “unbroken sequence of events. (C)ounsel for the plaintiffs could identify only four vague and conclusory assertions of ‘fact’” connecting the WWE’s alleged negligence with the wrestler’s death.
The court was also critical of the attorneys representing the families, especially Konstantine Kyros of the Massachusetts-based Kyros Law Office.
The judge wrote Kyros, and the other attorneys, presented false and misleading statements.
“The court would be well within its broad discretion to sanction counsel for their failure to adhere to the court’s instructions and trim the inflammatory content and unnecessary length of the carbon-copy complaints in these consolidated cases,” wrote the judge. “Their failure to do so forced the court to needlessly expend resources combing through hundreds of paragraphs of allegations, to find a single shred of relevant factual content indicating whether the plaintiffs asserted a plausible claim. In doing so, however, the plaintiffs only further underlined for the court the lack of substantive factual content actually contained in these complaints.”
