Last month, AEW suspended Jimmy Havoc after he was accused of sexual assault. Sammy Guevara was also suspended when a 2016 podcast clip surfaced of Guevara saying he wanted to “rape” Sasha Banks.
Tony Khan spoke with the New York Post about the circumstances surrounding the suspensions of both Havoc and Guevara:
“I suspended them both. Very different situations. I just needed to address both. We are addressing both. I think Jimmy really needed the counseling. If and when he were to wrestle again, the most important thing for himself and everybody here is that he sought treatment and counseling. When he asked for that help, we’re gonna help him.
With Sammy, I think the right thing to do was to suspend him. The comments he made were horrible. I can’t defend them. I can’t even comment on them because they’re unspeakably bad. He has also done a different kind of counseling and he’s in a different kind of counseling and it’s a different kind of coaching. Everybody here, male and female pretty much up and down the roster we talked to felt like Sammy had no history of this kind of behavior. Really people were shocked Sammy had said that.
Certainly, it’s an old clip. I think the video was four years old. I had never seen that video and it’s something I would have addressed with him before Sammy started here. I never had an opportunity to address it because I didn’t know it existed and neither did anybody else or if they did nobody told us. For both of them, we really needed to address the situation before talking about what to do in the future afterward.
I didn’t want to rush into making a decision on either person, so it felt like until I had all the facts suspending was the right thing to do. Then I could make whatever the right decision is. I knew the right decision wasn’t for those guys to just come to TV and not address this stuff.”
Based on Khan’s characterization of Guevara’s offensive words being from an “old clip”, as well as Sammy’s peers expressing that he has “no history of this kind of behavior”, it seems like a pretty good bet that Guevara will be back in AEW soon after his counseling is finished. There’s also the fact that Executive Vice President Cody Rhodes has already offered a strong vote of confidence about Guevara being a better person when he returns.
Things are more uncertain regarding Havoc’s future with AEW, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like the door is closed.
How do you feel about the way Tony Khan addressed the suspensions of Havoc and Guevara?