AEW All Out Backstage Fight: Will The Full Story Ever Come Out?

All Elite Wrestling was immersed in its first big controversy this past fall. Following AEW All Out in September 2022, then-AEW World Champion CM Punk blasted numerous members of both the AEW roster and management team during the post-show press conference. This led to three of the men that his comments were targeted at, AEW Executive Vice Presidents Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks, confronting Punk in his locker room. Things turned physical quickly, resulting in a now-infamous locker room brawl that claimed numerous suspensions and even one firing. Omega and the Bucks have since returned to television while Punk remains out of action with an injury he suffered prior to the backstage fight.

Even six months removed from the incident, there remains a significant amount of "he said she said" regarding exactly what went down. According to Omega, it will likely remain that way forever.

"It's a shame that the general public and a lot of people aren't ever going to know what went down, and how it could have been prevented or how it could have ended differently," Omega told Renee Paquette on The Sessions. "That's just sort of how things go again when it's a big business operation. I don't think anyone is happy that it happened, or is proud that it happened, or anything like that. I think across the board, everyone thinks that was a terrible situation that was unnecessary."

There is no word on whether Punk will return to the company, but the Second City Saint has teased on social media that there is a way to "forgive from a distance" between himself and The Elite. Omega drew a comparison to other sports, noting that the occasional bad blood between teammates is nothing out of the ordinary.

"I feel like if you have [been involved in team sports], you've probably been in a spat or two with a teammate," Omega said. "And maybe sometimes a time or two, it might come to blows, you know, it happens."

That said, Omega emphasized that AEW is a much larger operation than "high school football" and admitted that situations like Punk's comments at the AEW All Out 2022 press conference should never escalate into physicality.

"Especially now when you're in a multi-million billion dollar industry where there are sponsorships on the line, TV deal is on the line. It's not like high school football," Omega continued. "It's not, you know, a little tiff that you might have with someone on your fellow, amateur wrestling team or whatever, or maybe someone held a submission too long in jiu-jitsu training. It's not that – these things shouldn't even be happening."

While Punk's AEW future remains "on ice," Omega's immediate next steps come this weekend when he and the Bucks defend their AEW World Trios Titles against the House of Black at AEW Revolution.