Chris & Nancy (16 page)

CHAPTER 11

(Tabloid, Mainstream, and Fan Flavors)

THREE MAIN STORIES WERE
splashing across the celebrity coverage on cable
TV
news networks on June
25
,
2007
. Britney Spears was rumored to be dating her drug counselor. Lindsay Lohan, who had checked herself into a drug rehabilitation center after a wild Memorial Day weekend, was confirmed to be extending her stay there. And Paris Hilton was being released from a Los Angeles County jail after doing three days there on a drunk-driving rap.

In crime news, bail was set at $
5
million for a former police officer in Ohio named Bobby Cutts Jr., who had murdered his pregnant girlfriend in front of their two-year-old son before rushing off to interview for the job as coach of his old high school football team.

For interludes over the next two weeks, the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide would overshadow all these stories. It combined the celebrity-mongering of the Spears-Lohan-Hilton party-girl indiscretions with the heinous crime aspects of the Cutts case. Live satellite feeds on
CNN
, Fox News, and
MSNBC
beamed news conferences and interviews with law enforcement figures, along with scenes of gawkers who had made pilgrimages to the front gate, providing eerie visuals for the haunted house in the distant background. Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck on
CNN
, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on Fox, and Dan Abrams on
MSNBC
, among others, hosted rotating panels of the same handful of journalists, current and retired wrestlers, and criminal and psychology experts to sift the known information and hazard guesses as to what had happened with the Benoits and why.

In his chapter of the book
Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport
(which I also co-authored), writer Steven Johnson did a quantitative analysis of both the content of the cable coverage and its impact on viewer ratings. In retrospect, the lack of staying power of that influential slice of the coverage is not at all surprising, but simply the nature of the beast. Moreover, I have concluded that the coverage itself, a fat target for derision, merited a few strangled cheers. Benoit was a sensational tabloid story, one that cable told as only cable could, with unflinching rough justice — a mess in the details, yet somewhat better overall than its critics would allow. Errors, such as Nancy Grace's repeated one about Benoit having just been “demoted from the Four Horsemen to
ECW
,” were incidental to the larger truth that the industry had not earned the benefit of the doubt or the right to weasel out of this latest and most grisly installment of its drugs-and-death scandals.
^[1]

Even the
bête noire
of the tabloid coverage, all that discussion of “roid rage,” wasn't as egregious as nitpickers would have it. Defenders of Benoit's image, both within his family and inside his sport, would like to deny as a factor — much less as the most important factor — that he possessed and used enough anabolics to muscle up a moose. They noted that Benoit's methodical crime spree, across an entire weekend, did not jibe with 'roid rage, which is more typically associated with short and spontaneous bursts of anger. But these apologists never conceded that clinical studies also isolate depression as a symptom of long-term steroid abuse.

Nancy Benoit likely wouldn't have been too interested in splitting these hairs: she and Daniel were just as dead regardless of what name you attached to Chris's emotional problems. Over the last months of their lives, she repeatedly exhorted Chris to clean himself up. As Nancy pointed out in her bull's-eye text message, “We both know the wellness program is a joke.”

***

Cable coverage shaped public perception of the Benoit tragedy. But the mainstream media were just along for the ride. Since the story was local, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and Atlanta
TV
stations threw resources at it. Since Benoit was Canadian and pro wrestling has more of a hold on the imaginations of legitimate sports fans there, news organizations to the north also gave the story slightly longer legs. The New York tabloids, the
Daily News
and the
Post
, got in a few shots.

The
New York Times
was the first to float the theory that Benoit's many untreated concussions may have been responsible for unhinging him.
The
Times
attributed the theory to former
WWE
wrestler Chris Nowinski, who himself had been forced to retire from the ring due to brain trauma before setting up the Sports Legacy Institute, which promotes concussion-related studies and reforms. Nowinski was a Harvard alumnus. Harvard alums have an easier time getting the ear of
the
New York Times
than the rest of us.

In the run-up to possible Congressional hearings that never materialized,
the
Washington Post
ran a long narrative linking the Benoit family deaths with the industry pandemic.

NBC
's
Dateline
planned a Benoit documentary, then canceled it after failing to get both sides of the family on camera.

CNN
's Special Investigations Unit did complete and air a November
2007
documentary called
Death Grip: Inside Pro Wrestling
. The piece had its moments, especially in exposing the
WWE
drug-testing loopholes, which were defended, none too convincingly, by Vince and Linda McMahon in an extended interview. But the
CNN
producers seemed to have paid a craven price for the McMahons' sit-down, scrubbing a counterpoint interview with industry authority Dave Meltzer.

The suspicion that banning Meltzer from the broadcast was a
WWE
quid pro quo cannot be proven, but that type of tactic has been evident throughout the company's media relations history. (When the Benoit toxicology reports were released,
WWE
representatives did live interviews on
CNN
's
Nancy Grace
on condition that wrestling newsletter writers Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez, who were also on the program, not appear on screen at the same time.) If it did happen that way, the blame lay with the documentary producers, who also did sloppy work in another area.
CNN
showed footage in which
WWE
's biggest star, John Cena, supposedly got caught answering with a non-denial the question of whether he had ever used steroids: “I can't tell you that I haven't, but you'll never be able to prove that I have.”
WWE
had taped the exchange with its own hidden camera, and after the documentary was broadcast, the company posted the complete Cena interview on its website, establishing that he had been quoted outrageously out of context. He was clearly referring to a hypothetical denial of steroid use by a hypothetical someone else.

For the record, Cena himself always offers a categorical denial. Categorical but questionable. In
2007
–
08
he missed months of action after surgery for a torn pectoral muscle — one of those injuries that were almost never seen before the steroid era but now are found among users.

In partnership with Chris Nowinski, Mike Benoit took to the airwaves in his campaign to explain his son's multiple murders as the culmination of untreated brain damage from reckless wrestling chair shots and bumps.
ABC
and
CNN
both did Benoit brain-damage exclusives in
2007
, and early the next year the Sports Legacy Institute doctors reproduced their findings as part of an hour-long piece,
A Fight to the Death
, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
the fifth estate
. The concussion research got snapped up for its freshness and probably, as well, for its unconscious appeal to the sympathy of Chris's fans who, like his father, did not want to believe the worst about him. Unfortunately, the concussion theory, which had value, was grossly oversold. At best, untreated concussions are part and parcel of the same culture that bred steroid mania; concussions can supplement, but not replace, drugs as the explanation for the Benoit tragedy.

During the same period, Bennet Omalu, one of the forensic pathologists who developed the postmortem brain analysis showing unhealthy protein spots on Benoit's brain — indicating severe damage that could only be attributed to repeated hard blows to the head — authored a book,
Play Hard, Die Young: Football, Dementia, Depression and Death
. Omalu's research resonated more in the press for the anecdotes of his studies of the brains of Mike Webster, Terry Long, and Andre Waters: three National Football League players who died young, in two cases by suicide, after scary post-career trajectories of mental illness.

But despite its useful spotlight on brain injuries in every corner of sports, Dr. Omalu's book sinks under circular logic. The doctor asserts — sometimes with a degree of rationalization echoing that of the players themselves, and conflicting with the known record — that Webster, Long, and Waters were not steroid users, or at least not heavy enough users to explain the dementia syndrome. And the syndrome itself, dubbed “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy” or
CTE
, turns out to be a catch-all: vague enough to include just about anything Omalu wants, from depression, paranoia, and anxiety, to phobias and insomnia, to alcohol abuse. Omalu's methodology has major cause-and-effect flaws.

Most revoltingly,
Play Hard, Die Young
, a thin volume, does not confine itself to science. A fervent Catholic following a strain of mysticism found especially in his native Nigeria, Omalu relates the time a brain that he was transporting in his car for an autopsy started playing supernatural tricks, such as spontaneously turning on the Omalu home dishwasher in the middle of the night. Without a shred of doubt or irony, the doctor construes this as a sign from the heavens that he had a calling to get to the bottom of
CTE
. Which, of course, calls to mind yet another one of
CTE
's laundry list of purported symptoms: “increasing religiosity and quasi-spiritual insights.”

***

The root flaws of the Benoit coverage were epitomized in the treatment of the Wikipedia affair by the Associated Press, the wire service collective that is subscribed to by many mainstream news outlets of all sizes. For several days from late June through early July
2007
, thousands of newspapers, radio and television stations, and websites hyped, then summarily declared a nonstory, the mystery of why an unauthorized Wikipedia editor had posted the news that Nancy Benoit was dead before that fact was publicly known (see Chapter
9
). These secondary accounts had many different bylines, and they cut-and-pasted different facts and emphases from the
AP
stories, as rewrites of wire copy always do. But all the stories jumped to the same faulty conclusion, based at least in part on the same erroneous fact.

According to the LexisNexis database, the first
AP
file on Benoit and Wikipedia came through on June
28
at
9
:
57
p.m., Greenwich mean time. Subsequent feeds over the next forty-eight hours never wavered on one key paragraph:

WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt said that to his knowledge, no one at the WWE knew Nancy Benoit was dead before her body was found Monday afternoon. Text messages released by officials show that messages from Chris Benoit's cell phone were being sent to co-workers a few hours after the Wikipedia posting.

The second sentence is false: Benoit's text messages were sent nearly twenty-four hours
before
the Wikipedia edit. Further,
WWE
itself had published the chronology of those messages two days earlier. So how did
AP
get duped?

I put the question to Harry Weber, the
AP
reporter who wrote the above paragraph. Was McDevitt the source for the statement that the Wikipedia edit preceded the text messages?

Weber said in an email, “To be clearer, the story should have said the messages were ‘received' by various people after the Wikipedia posting, rather than were ‘sent' after the posting. At that early stage in the case, there was confusion caused by police,
WWE
attorney and others as to the timeline.” Weber acknowledged that
AP
spoke to McDevitt “at length.”

I followed up: “Since you were aware that the sending of the texts preceded the Wikipedia edit, is there a reason why the story didn't explain that?” I added that I was trying to figure out if the confusion was deliberately sown. (Tactfully, I failed to add that the text messages were already in both versions of the
WWE
timeline.)

Weber: “I do believe some of the confusion caused by the timeline discrepancies provided by the
WWE
were [
sic
] intentional. We used a lot of discretion and news judgment and the best information available at the time.”

A few days later Weber backed away from an earlier promise to talk further with me. “
AP
does not allow reporters to comment outside of
AP
or discuss our stories beyond what we have reported. I must exercise caution and not proceed any further. I think you are on the right track in the line of inquiry you are pursuing,” he said.

AP
also perpetuated an inaccurate statement by McDevitt, in its June
27
stories, about the sources of all the steroids found in Benoit's home:

Long-time WWE attorney (and former personal attorney of Hulk Hogan) Jerry McDevitt said all of the steroids found in Benoit's home were from a legitimate prescription. “We know which doctor prescribed it,” he said. “There's no question, none of these drugs are out there, none of these drugs came from Internet pharmacies.”