Kevin Kelly Vows AEW “Will Get Theirs” After Explosive Firing
Not many people have been fired by AEW but veteran announcer Kevin Kelly is one of them and now he’s lifted the lid on his exit with explosive comments.
Kevin Kelly was fired by AEW after going public with his frustrations with the company and comments made by fellow AEW announcer Ian Riccaboni online.
Speaking at a signing for K and S Wrestlefest, Kevin Kelly finally lifted the lid on what led to his AEW exit and began by giving his candid views on what Riccaboni had to say about him:
So, Ian recommended me. Great, cool. I go away — they knew this. I go away to do the G1, 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. 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, and it was almost like hand in glove. It was never a good fit, me being there.
Riccaboni had also mentioned that Kevin Kelly gave him a hard time for wearing a cowboy hat on the Calgary Stampede 2023 edition of Collision, headgear that is more commonly associated with the legendary voice of wrestling Jim Ross:
The other thing that he said was that I knocked him for wearing a hat on Collision, which I did, a cowboy hat, because he’s sitting right next to Jim Ross. Because they’re in Calgary in Stampede and I was like, saying it because guess what? You’re gonna get heat with J.R. if you’re wearing a cowboy hat sitting next to him at the announce desk.
Whether he says it’s okay or not, that doesn’t matter… And it was born in Calgary, it was born at the Stampede and he’s the one who wears the f*cking cowboy hat. Why would you do that? Whatever. Listen, Ian got upset about that. Give me a break.
Kevin Kelly Wouldn’t Treat His Worst Enemy The Way AEW Treated Him
As far as AEW goes, Kevin Kelly made it very clear that there is no water under the bridge as far as he’s concerned and he says he wouldn’t treat his worst enemy the way the company treated him:
Of course (I have ill feelings towards AEW for how things ended). I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy like that. Mike Mansury (told me I was being let go). 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 (Riccaboni) 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.
Kevin Kelly also opened up on how the situation has affected his mental health and admits he was much happier in NJPW than he ever was in Tony Khan’s company:
My mental health was not good, from when this began and it was taking a toll on my marriage, on my family, on me personally, physically, mentally, and I mean, it’s really nobody’s business, but, my mental health was not good. It’s better now, thank God. I’ve gotten some help, I’ve gotten fixed — well, working on being fixed, as we all can be.
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, David Weinstein. 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 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.
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.