On May 4 in Lyon, France, WWE held their Backlash France premium live event.
The event, the first to take place in France in company history, received critical acclaim for the in-ring action on the show. But the post-show press conference has been a hot topic ever since.
Near the end of the press conference, reporter Lucas Charpiot asked WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque about allegations made by former UFC and WWE star Ronda Rousey about an incident regarding WWE wrestler Drew Gulak.
Gulak has been off TV since the allegation was made in early April, and Charpiot wanted to know if Gulak had been released, citing reports from Fightful and PWInsider, two wrestling news sites.
Levesque’s response was first to bash the sources named (he later apologized to Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp) and deny the reports, saying Gulak’s contract expired and he left the company, but he wasn’t released.
The story didn’t end there, however. Thursday on POST Wrestling’s Pollock and Thurston podcast, Charpiot was a guest and explained his side of the story in a video clip tweeted by POST’s Wai Ting.
I’m stunned by this. @LucasCharpiot shares what a WWE PR rep said to him following his Drew Gulak question at the Backlash presser. pic.twitter.com/nzwgYFw055
— Wai Ting (@wai0937) May 10, 2024
“One of the WWE PR people, as soon as I said my question to Triple H, said to me, ‘What a dumb thing to do.’ So I knew there was going to be backlash online,” Charpiot stated before co-host Brandon Thurston stepped in to clarify.
“Somebody from WWE PR said it was a dumb thing to do? To ask your question?” Thurston asked. “Yes, right after I asked it, he looked to me and said ‘What a dumb thing to do.”
Co-host John Pollock was taken aback by this, saying, “That’s very discouraging and disappointing to hear that that would be the reaction. This was a completely fair question to ask and I thought you conveyed it very clearly. The way it was asked was very easy to understand and I think Paul Levesque got very defensive in the moment. It’s not the first time we’ve seen him react like this to, I’d hazard to even call this a confrontational question.”
After January’s Royal Rumble premium live event, Levesque’s first public comments regarding Vince McMahon’s resignation following a lawsuit filed just days before, featured similar defensiveness, with the former WWE champion saying he wanted to “focus on the positives” of the event.
[Wai Ting]
