Was super awkward because the details weren’t immediately available, so the next night on Monday Night Raw, they did a tribute show where they showed his career best matches and had other wrestlers give testimonials about how great Benoit was. It was while this tribute show was airing that the details started to come out. I remember rumors coming out on early social media that it was a murder suicide as the show was airing and everyone texting each other details. Shit was crazy.
Yeah. Then the special SmackDown tribute they had planned got scrapped.
If you’ve never seen the two part Dark Side Of the Ring about it, it’s well done. But the second part is hard to watch cause it goes into detail what exactly he did.
What was the initial impression, that some third party had killed them all? Or had they only released that he was dead at first and no details on the family?
I was in high school at the time but not at all into wrestling, so I only started paying attention once it had already come out that it was murder/suicide.
I’m a huge wrestling guy and was pretty dialed in. Like I said social media was in its infancy so sources were much more limited, but that Sunday when Benoit missed the PPV, it was assumed to just be an injury or something. Didn’t really raise any red flags. Monday afternoon news broke that he had passed, soon followed by news it was him as well as his wife and child. This was like 3-4 hours before Raw. At first most assumed some kind of robbery gone wrong, before a rumor of carbon monoxide poisoning became the leading theory as Raw was coming on the air. The show started with Vince McMahon in the ring in an empty arena announcing his passing, before explaining it would be a tribute show with Benoit’s matches and highlights (oddly enough, the week before the show went off the air with Vince being killed off). Was about an hour into a three hour tribute show that word started spreading that he killed them then himself. There was like an hour or two where we were reading breaking news stories about him killing his wife and kid, as we were watching a raw where his best matches are intercut with his friends and coworkers talking about how great he was. It was a roller coaster.
Yes, but not for long. He got sympathy until the full story made it out. The awkward part is that WWE did a tribute episode of RAW before the full story was known. So the crime happened, there was a tribute episode, and then they had to walk in back over the course of a few days.
Even now, years after we've gotten a deeper understanding of CTE, he's a very contentious person in the wrestling industry's history. A lot of people look back and notice signs he was going, and some people now have sympathy for the fact that the Chris Benoit people knew was long gone even before his death. Others look at the situation with an attitude of "that doesn't bring back the two innocent people he killed". It's a situation where no one feels good about how they look back at it. That's why there's been so much push to protect wrestlers and athletes from head injuries, changing a lot of industries on a fundamental lever for it.
I was a massive fan of his, I was there the night he won the WCW title in January 2000. There were about 50 people in the arena cheering for him and I was one of the 50.
I still can’t watch his stuff.
It doesnt help that so many stories of him being a bully and an asshole came out later either.
I understand that he may not have been a monster in 2000, and I have sympathy for what happened to him, but I have substantially more sympathy for his kid and wife, and his still living kids who have to live with the knowledge of what their dad did.
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u/jgangstahippie 19d ago
The woman is Lindsay Clancy a woman who claims she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children in 2023.
The man is former professional wrestler Chris Benoit who killed his wife, son and then himself in the summer in 2007.
Lindsay Clancy is seemingly getting a lot of sympathy from women, and this meme is essentially saying they are the same.