Seth Rollins, in one of his better moments. Credit: wwe.com
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]an someone fill me in on the happenings on Raw last night?
I’m dead serious. I remember watching Paige go ham on Brie Bella, Ambrose stomp a hole into Curtis Axel and demand a shot at the IC Title and Jeff Far…er, I mean a Fake Sting cause Trips to turn into William Shatner for a second in the ring.
I ended up being completely distracted by the events going on outside the ring involving Mr. Money in the Bank himself, a girl in developmental and his fiancée. I believe someone in a group I post in, Kult of Kayfabe, dubbed it “The Fappening: WWE Edition”.
In case you were actually paying attention to Raw and haven’t seen the news all over Twitter or missed this tweet last night:
Some rather inappropriate images were leaked onto Seth’s Instagram, Twitter, and thusly his company ran WWE Facebook page for millions to see of a recently signed NXT talent who is probably never going to see the inside of the ring after this. Followed by equally inappropriate pictures of the man himself on his fiancée’s Twitter. HIGHLY NSFW so they will not be posted here, but they made it to Reddit, so you can assure that they’re never leaving the Internet.
Essentially, it looks like his (now ex) fiancée busted him cheating and laid everything out for the world to see during the one point in time he and WWE couldn’t immediately cover up: during a live broadcast. At first, people thought it was a hacker. Hell, I even thought it was a hacker. But the girl made it abundantly clear that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially when she has access to all your social media accounts.
I’ve been sitting here for the past hour, after getting very little sleep last night, trying to think of what to objectively say about the situation. Because this is not something we all should have witnessed. Yes, we all got jokes out of it. I initially started a thread in regards to the hack in the aforementioned group, right before Raw, having no clue what was about to go down and thinking once the picture was removed, that’d be it. Over the course of the night, I watched my thread go from maybe 30 posts to nearly 800, so I’m probably one of the biggest perpetuators of this and therefore a huge asshole. I got caught up in the excitement of what was going on and it didn’t occur to me until later just what I and thousands of others were doing. Word spread fasts and all the blogs flew to this like moths to a flame. Tumblr probably exploded, and it looks like a lot of people have been making pretty cutting comments all over the place, especially as replies to Rollins on Twitter.
Should we have fed into this though?
Social media is an integral part of our daily lives now. How many of us practically live on our Facebooks, Instagram and Twitter accounts? In an age where news can spread at the drop of a dime, it’s hard to prevent what could turn out to be PR disasters from spreading like wildfire. Especially since a lot of people on the Internet feel they can play the role of keyboard warrior because they’re offered anonymity and therefore can take on a sociopathic mindset of “Hey, it’s not me, so what do I care? It’s for the lulz. S/he deserves it for [insert reason],” and so on and so forth.
That doesn’t make it right though.
We essentially saw three lives get destroyed last night, in terms of personal and professional. This shouldn’t have been a public spectacle. I’m not one to pass judgment on the private lives of others. What you do behind closed doors is your business, period. It looks like homeboy got busted with a side piece. Should he have ended things with either girl? Yeah. But does that make what his fiancée did okay? No. Far from, actually, and I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t encounter some sort of legal retribution for this. Like with the whole Lita/Matt/Edge fiasco, this is something that should have been handled privately. All of the parties involved are adults, and should have acted accordingly. Going on that fact, we as fans should have, too. Spreading the pictures, making the memes, and tweeting the jibes doesn’t make the situation any better, but rather, digs the hole deeper.
There are no innocents in this. Not him, not the women, and certainly not us.
This incident, while small in comparison to other “celeb” image leaks, I feel, is a great example of how far humanity has started to fall in the technology age in regards to compassion and treating others like…well…humans. We should probably be at least a little ashamed of ourselves. Nevermind this mindset of “Oh, well, they’re famous, they signed up for this.” No. I’ve never bought into that mentality and I never will. Like with The Fappening, no one signs up to be publicly embarrassed or shamed, regardless of the intent behind their actions at the time. No one signs up to have the most intimate details of their lives exposed to the public. No one wants to be put on display. We’re still human, we make mistakes, and we all bleed the same. If you’d never want your images posted online for people to run with, why should you want others to fall victim to it?
I don’t expect people are going to agree with this. In fact, I expect that people may troll this or otherwise brush it off with a comment that will distance themselves from the events that transpired and follow it up with asinine behavior. Lord knows I’d probably do the same thing. Or they’ll just read and move on. (Actually, the latter is the most likely.) I do hope, at the very least, that maybe, just maybe, one person will read this, realize how screwed up the entire situation is and do what we all should have done all along: ignore it and move on.
