Kevin Kelly on his AEW exit: I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy like they treated me

In early March, Kevin Kelly was removed from the AEW roster page. The move came after the long-time pro wrestling announcer, who was brought into the company to call their Saturday night Collision show when it launched last year, posted a series of messages on X/Twitter that were critical of how he was being utilized at AEW, and which accused Ring of Honor’s Ian Riccaboni of libeling him and sabotaging his career. That news was quickly followed by reports that Kelly had been fired over the tweets.

The story has been relatively quiet since then, with AEW & ROH owner Tony Khan declining to comment on Kelly’s departure when asked about it. But over the weekend, Kelly did a virtual signing with K & S Wrestlefest and offered his side of the story.

Kelly documented his history with Riccaboni, which involved bringing him into ROH when Kelly was the lead voice on their programming. Things were allegedly fine at first, but Kelly says he later heard that Riccaboni was bad mouthing him to ROH officials while Kelly was away working for New Japan Pro-Wrestling.

Riccaboni was AEW’s first choice for Collision, but he didn’t want to take on the travel involved due to his commitments at home and suggested Kelly, which led the veteran announcer to think everything was fine between them. However, Kelly. says that changed when he left for Japan to call NJPW’s G1 Climax tournament last summer.

“I’m gone five weeks, I come back and it’s like, Ian’s hammered me on Discord on this New Japan message board about, you know, I did all these different things to him, over the years, which I never knew. I had no clue, and then, to top it all off, he accuses me of being some QAnon conspiracy theorist for supporting a movie that was against child trafficking [Sound of Freedom, which shares associations with the right-wing movement without being directly tied to it].

“That’s neither here nor there. The part that bothers me so much is that I thought we were friends and if he would have called me, we could have talked about it. ‘Hey Kevin, listen, you’re really pissing me off,’ and even if we would have agreed to never be friends before, if he would have just called me up and said, ‘F you, I hate you, I never wanna see you again’, at least I would know where I stood and then I could work towards fixing what I had done wrong.

“But instead, the way that he went about it painted me with a nasty brush and it was done on purpose so that the fans would turn against me because he did it in a New Japan Discord board, and people were messaging me that I’m friends with because I’d go there all the time.

“That’s how I found out about it. Jet lag, post-G1. I wake up, I was like, ‘Oh, let’s see what they’re saying about us. Hey, wait a minute. What the hell?’ And people that I’m friendly with in there were like, ‘What is Ian doing? Why is he doing this?’ ‘I have no idea’ so I message him and it’s like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ ‘Well, you said and did a bunch of different things to me over the years and I’m pissed off about it.’ ‘Okay, but, well let’s talk about it.’ ‘Well, I’ll only talk to you if you guarantee that you’re not gonna record the call.’ I’m like, ‘I wouldn’t know how to record a call off a cellphone. What are you? Crazy? Yeah, sure. We need to talk about this, we need to talk about this’ and we never did and then, things started to change within AEW.”

One of the things Kelly says Riccaboni was upset about was Kelly giving him a hard time for wearing a cowboy hat while seated next to Jim Ross on an episode of Collision from Calgary. Kelly also says he was bumping heads with AEW officials at this point. While he didn’t know if Collision was part of a roster split deal designed to keep CM Punk in the company after Brawl Out, he says he was trying to “make it different” from Dynamite but had “all these people” pushing back (Kelly was replaced as Collision’s lead announcer in October of last year).

It was after going to management with his concerns and issues that Kelly says he was fired:

“I talked to them and I told them that I was mentally getting really in a bad spot over this too, and I vented and when I vented, that’s when they let me go… Again, no harm, no foul with AEW — no. Big blame. Big blame there but I always wanted to straighten things out with Ian and I feel terrible that he was mad at me over something he never told me and it led to a bunch of different problems.”

Kelly said he still has ill feelings towards AEW for how things were handled:

“I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy like that. [Asked who told him he was being let go] Mike Mansury. The Executive Producer, and the new Vice President of Human Resources who I’d never met and spoke to ever before. I knocked the company on Twitter and vented on a voicemail to the H.R. lady that I had been working with. Problem was I never knew where — I brought up this whole thing with Ian and they said, ‘Yes, good. Thank you for bringing it up.’

“‘What’s going to happen?’ I said, ‘What’s the process?’ ‘Well, we’ll discuss it, we’ll let you know’ and apparently, the disciplinary got together — committee got together and made a decision. ‘Okay, what was the decision?’ ‘Well, we can’t tell you because it’s private.’ ‘Wait a minute, I was the one who was the victim here. I need to know what happened so I could put this to bed in my mind.’ ‘Well, we just can’t tell you.’ ‘Okay, this is very upsetting for me. You have to understand this?’ ‘Nah, we really don’t understand and we don’t care.’

“So, whatever. They’ll get theirs.”

After reiterating the his mental health was not good during his AEW run, Kelly says he’s since gotten help and is “working on being fixed”, but that AEW was not sensitive to that. He also says he can forgive Riccaboni, but talked about the role Riccaboni’s online criticism played in his mental state, using the suicide of joshi star Hana Kimura as an extreme example of where that can lead:

“But, for a company that cares so much about their athletes… I booked an appointment with the psychiatrist and I got all the text messages of me just ranting and raving with the poor guy... I set up an appointment with him on Thursday because we were taping TV that next day and then they fired me on Wednesday. So, you guys really care about the people that you employ.

“So, yeah, it wasn’t about Ian at that point anymore. But I did kind of lump him in-in all of it. But now it’s like I’m trying to process it. So forgiving him is easy. Forgiving him, it’s already done as far as I’m concerned. But, again, you cannot do something like that. It happened to a much greater extent — I’m not comparing myself to it at all — but to Hana Kimura.

“Because when you bring down the force of social media onto a person, wrongly accusing someone, there are consequences. You can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that and I mean, what happened to Hana, of course was much worse than what happened to me. I’m not even comparing those but, again, it’s the same type of thing and that’s really just it.”

Overall, Kelly just says he didn’t fit in Tony Khan’s organization:

“I was not a fit for AEW. I just felt like it was a very different kind of place and very stressful. So many people. There was so much chaos and it just really stressed me out a lot. So, I was much happier in New Japan, except for the flights.”

h/t Post Wrestling for transcription