The first that I ever heard of the new AEW champ, Darby Allin, having been accused in the summer of 2020 #SpeakingOut movement highlighting emotional, mental and sexual abuse in pro wrestling was last night, which suggests, there’s a bit of a Streisand Effect going on here.
How it came to my attention: I was being pummeled online because I posted a comment about how having a 5’8”, 170-pound skateboarder as the world champ of a pro wrestling company strains credulity, which, that kind of thing is going to happen, the pummeling.
As this was going on, I noticed people posting messages about Allin and #SpeakingOut in nearly every thread that I was being beaten up in.
Then I started seeing reporters writing about Allin’s shock win over reigning AEW champ Maxwell Jacob Friedman in the main event of last night’s “Dynamite” working the nugget about #SpeakingOut into their articles, though the reporting, such as it was, was almost entirely bereft of specifics.
The #SpeakingOut matter involving Darby Allin first came up in June 2020, at the ugliest part of the early months of the COVID pandemic shutdowns, first in a tweet from his ex-girlfriend, indie wrestler Hawlee Cromwell.
Cromwell, in the tweet, alleged that a person that she originally didn’t name, but later confirmed was Allin, “ruined my mental health on a lot of things I’m still struggling with,” specifically accusing him of rape, dating to their on-again, off-again relationship in 2016 and 2017.
Allin, Cromwell wrote, “would threaten to leave me if I didn’t have sex with him or do sexual things and preform sex acts with him.”
“I took me a long time to realize that threatening someone to have sex with you isn’t consent. It’s rape. I struggle with this to this day and have so many fears around sex and around intimacy,” Cromwell wrote.
“Darby Allin abused me,” Cromwell wrote. “He abused me, and I’m tired of being called a liar by ‘fans’ who have no idea the shitty person he really is. Somehow no one remembers. I’ll never forget how you treated me like shit.”
Indeed, the timing of how and when this came up seems to have allowed it to get swept under the rug.
All I can find is a couple of offhand mentions of Allin having shown DMs or texts to AEW President Tony Khan to tell his side of the story, and that was that.
Now, Khan is famous for being very public with his company’s efforts to conduct serious investigations into allegations involving talents and prospective talents – for instance, he cut ties with his biggest star, CM Punk, after a brief investigation into the “All Out” backstage fight in 2023; and he either didn’t hire Jay Briscoe, or just followed the marching orders of Warner Bros. Discovery, over a homophobic tweet dating to 2013 that Briscoe acknowledged was hurtful and apologized for.
Jay Briscoe died in a car accident in 2023; Khan hired his brother, Mark, weeks after Jay’s tragic passing.
With respect to #SpeakingOut, Khan did end up releasing Jimmy Havoc, who was accused of mental and verbal abuse by a former partner, in August 2020, and Sammy Guevara, who joked on a podcast that he wanted to rape then-WWE star Sasha Banks, now known in AEW as Mercedes Mone, was suspended without pay for a month and required to undergo sensitivity training before being allowed to return to work in July 2020.
The matter with Darby Allin, though apparently swept under the rug, would not go away quietly.
A Twitter spat between Allin and then-NXT star Cora Jade over their respective skateboarding gimmicks in 2021 turned ugly when Allin hit at Jade with the line “(s)kating is a huge part of my life not a fake character for tv lol,” and Jade hit back, hard:
“Being a good person with no abuse allegations against me is a huge part of my life and not just a character I play on TV.”
Needs to be noted here: Cora Jade was in a tag team with Hawlee Cromwell on the indies, and at the time of this Twitter spat, she was teaming in NXT with Gigi Dolin, Allin’s ex-wife.
Yikes.
The Streisand Effect aspect to this: the story involving Darby Allin and the alleged abuse was out there, but largely beneath the surface, as Allin was rising up the card in AEW, but now that he’s the champ, it’s natural for those who think justice wasn’t done in his case to use his elevated status to try to draw attention to his alleged misgivings.
I’d like to see Tony Khan address the matter publicly, but doubt that he will.
If you’ve ever endured a Tony Khan press conference or podcast appearance, you know that he’s expert at filibustering off-topic.
Seriously, TK has a future in politics in DC, he’s so good at filling dead air with worthless platitudes.
I don’t expect Darby Allin’s reign as the AEW champ to be too long, but I would expect his #SpeakingOut detractors to continue to use whatever time he has at the top of the card to try to bring attention to his past.
One more expectation: I will be the only mainstream journo to address this in print.
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Chris Graham
