Martha Hart, widow of deceased WWE legend Owen Hart, has been conducting a number of interviews with media outlets leading up to tonight’s season finale of VICE’s Dark Side of the Ring, which will center around Owen’s tragic death back in 1999. During an interview with CBS Sports Hart went through the different aspects of the accident that caused Owen to fall more than 80 feet from the rafters of the Kemper Arena in Kansas City during the Over the Edge pay-per-view and repeatedly claimed WWE had cut corners leading up to the spot.
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“WWE is a billion-dollar company,” Hart said during the interview. “Owen never questioned his safety. He thought for sure they were hiring people that knew what they were doing. He was putting his life in their hands, and they didn’t care. They didn’t have any regard for Owen’s life whatsoever.
WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt released a statement to CBS Sports after the initial interview was published.
“The reality is, we’ve never told our side of the story of what happened — at least not outside of court,” the statement read. “We told it in court, but when she talks about the way the lawsuit unfolded over the years, it really isn’t accurate what she’s saying. What she did whenever this happened is, she hired a lawyer in Kansas City who we caught essentially trying to fix the judicial selection process to get a judge that was more to their liking. We caught them and went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. The Missouri Supreme Court said, ‘No, no, no. We’re not going to let that happen.’ They essentially appointed an independent judge to come in from outside of Kansas City to oversee the proceedings. We were basically trying to find out what happened that night. Martha was not even remotely interested in finding out what happened that night; she just wanted to used it as a vehicle to beat up a business that she didn’t like that her husband was in, the wrestling business.”
In a separate interview with ComicBook.com, Hart explained why she won’t allow Owen to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
“There’s always been this talk that, ‘Oh, we want to put Owen in the Hall of Fame.’ Their Hall of Fame? They don’t even have a Hallway of Fame,” Hart said. “It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing. It’s a fake entity. There’s nothing real or tangible. It’s just an event they have to make money. They put it on TV and have a celebration, and it’s just so ridiculous. I would never even entertain it. It’s garbage.”
