A federal judge in Connecticut has issued a written smackdown of the litigation between the WWE and former wrestlers in a contentious lawsuit claiming that the company knew of information concerning a link between repeated head trauma and permanent neurological conditions that it exposed to its wrestlers.
The lawsuit involves former pro wrestlers Evan Singleton and Vito LoGrasso and World Wrestling Entertainment. The Plaintiffs originally filed their lawsuit in Pennsylvania in January 2015. They were among several former wrestlers that filed suit which were represented by the same lawyer and law firm. The WWE successfully moved the case to Connecticut where the company is headquartered. Judge Vanessa L. Bryant issued an order denying a motion for summary judgment from the WWE on the issue of fraud by omission claim brought by the wrestlers.
As part of the summary judgment motion, the parties must submit a statement of undisputed material facts (“SUF”) . The party opposing the motion, has the opportunity to admit or deny the facts submitted by the moving party and then assert its own SUF.
The judge chastised both sides for submitting briefs that were longer than the rules allowed. “[T]he parties have buried the Court in extraneous information, a substantial portion of which is argument and not fact.
The Court allows briefs for Motions for Summary Judgment to have a maximum limit of 46 pages. However, WWE’s brief was 60 pages. Plaintiffs submitted a 125-page statement in response to the WWE’s overlong brief.
As a result, the Court determined that the parties should refile its statements as they were “unnecessarily long and argumentative, and reviewing them in full would be wasteful of the Court’s scarce resources.”
The Court order both parties to submit revised Statement of Facts with a limit of 30 pages for the WWE and Plaintiffs to file a short response admitting or denying Defendant’s SUF and then filing 30 pages with its own disputed issues of material fact.
Order Denying Defendant’s MSJ by JASONCRUZ206 on Scribd
Payout Perspective:
The venom between the lawyers in this lawsuit is exemplified by the overlong briefs as they cannot agree on even the undisputed facts of this case. As a requisite part of the filing, a concise statement is required. Here, long does not necessarily mean effective. Moreover, the order issued by the Judge shows she is not happy with either side.
Singelton and LoGrasso are the last WWE wrestlers standing as Judge Bryant dismissed similar claims brought by Russ McCullough, Ryan Sakoda, Matthew Wiese and William Albert Haynes, III as the Court concluded they didn’t wrestle with WWE after the company allegedly learned of a link between concussions and degenerative neurological diseases in 2015.
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