February 4, 2025 at 7:21 pm

Writer Published A Newsletter About Wrestling In The 1990’s, But When The Author Of A Competing Newsletter Was Trashing Him, He Found A Way To Get Him Fired From His Day Job

by Michael Levanduski

Source: Shutterstock/Reddit

In the early years of the Internet, there were a lot of fun ways to communicate about ideas with like-minded people.

What would you do if you ran a couple of newsletters online during that time, but your ‘competition’ was constantly causing you problems?

That is what the writer in this story experienced, so he plotted a revenge that ended up costing the author of a competing newsletter his job in real life.

Check it out.

Better check your facts, because people KNOW people

The internet has evolved quite a lot over the years.

Some people may remember UseNet groups, I know I do, used to have a lot of fun reading them.

Kind of similar in a way to today’s reddit in a way.

No matter what the subject was, someone would have a UseNet newsgroup for it.

But unlike todays reddit, it was strictly text.

You could download images, but they would take forever to download, and could often be across several different messages.

Just one of the messages missing, and you wouldn’t get the image.

Things then improved, download speeds slowly got faster, and then there was IRC that came about.

IRC saw the same thing.

There was chatroom for anything and everything and if there wasn’t, you could clearly create it.

If you were to try to watch a video over the internet back then, it could take you a couple of hours to download a music video.

You get the idea. This is important for the context of the story.

I bet this was a lot of fun.

I was a writer on a couple of wrestling newsletters during the mid to late 90’s.

We only published our newsletters online.

You could have it emailed to you, or go to a website to read it (think we hosted on GeoCities or tripod).

Both wrestling newsletters were independent of each other, and I used different nicknames on each.

One was more a review and preview newsletter, where we would post reviews of the most recent shows/events, talk about current feuds, and talk about what we may think will happen in the next big event.

The other newsletter, was a news and rumors newsletter, with a few fun puzzles/competitions thrown in to keep things interesting.

At the time, you had a few big name wrestling news and rumors websites, and a handful of small ones.

I was a writer on one of the small ones.

Sometimes we would get news and rumors from the big name websites, giving them credit where appropriate.

Sometimes, we would hear things from people in the business.

Everyone had their sources of information.

And sometimes we would make an educated guess on possible scenarios, based on current trends in the industry.

It did get a bit cut-throat at times, with some newsletters claiming that they broke the news first, when it had already been published in other newsletters first.

And you would even have some newsletters devote all of their time trying to rubbish the other newsletters for publishing false and misleading information.

It was rumors, we did not always get it right.

Through a couple of readers of my first wrestling newsletter, I learned of a huge surprise in the works for one organization, which could potentially lead to something happening at a big event coming up.

I won’t mention the surprise, but it involved a person from another sport.

No other wrestling newsletter had reported it, so I included it as a rumor on the second wrestling newsletter.

Why don’t they realize it is just a rumor, not news.

I was instantly rubbished by one of the major wrestling newsletters at the time, publishing a clearly nonsense rumor that would never happen only for that very same newsletter to publish the exact same rumor two or three days later, and claim to be the first ones to publish it.

This sort of stuff happened all the time, it did not bother me at all.

Anyway, I happened to have a few wrestlers who actually read my first newsletter.

No big names as such, but a couple of lesser known wrestlers in the big organizations.

I knew who they were, but refused to reveal their identities back then, and refuse to reveal them now.

One of them let me know of an unknown fact from a major match a couple of years earlier (it was to do with an injury that happened during a part of the match).

This fact had never been published anywhere else at the time.

I mentioned that I wrote for another wrestling newsletter, that dealt with news and rumors, and asked if I could repeat the information.

The wrestler said sure, but not to credit him.

So I go ahead and publish the rumor.

Straight away I had another of the smaller wrestling newsletters say that it was nonsense.

They said that it was impossible for the match to have continued, had the injury happened.

Who knew that competition in old newsletters was so vicious.

They then started a smear campaign on the second newsletter.

I was getting spam emails constantly, virus attempts originating from the competition, the competition even went so far as claiming that they had the full story of my wife of 10 years working as a woman of the night.

(don’t ask, they were trying to find anything to smear me with).

There was more sinister and disgusting stuff, but I won’t write it here.

Why it got so personal, I do not know.

The funny thing was that at the time, I was a 22 year old single university student, and if I had a wife of 10 years who was a working girl, I would have had to marry her when I was 12.

But his smear campaign was working, our readership dropped by nearly 50%.

It was time to get some revenge, although I had no idea just how far the revenge would end up reaching.

Firstly, I approached one of the bigger wrestling newsletters.

They would often run ads at the bottom or rear of their newsletters, for “affiliated” newsletters.

I organized a new affiliation with them, removing an affiliation they had with the competition.

Small potatoes.

I started promoting the second newsletter heavily on UseNet, in some of the wrestling groups, which ultimately led to an increase in our email subscription base, greater than what it was before his smear campaign.

This negated any effect that his smear campaign had but I was hungry for more.

I wanted to shove it where the sun don’t shine, so I contacted those wrestlers who read my first newsletter.

I explained the situation to them, and they were happy to help out.

That is cool that the wrestler would do this for him.

It took a couple of weeks, but eventually I was able to post a link to a 15 second video (hosted on a GeoCities webpage, as well as on a wrestling UseNet group), where the wrestler at the center of the injury rumor not only confirmed it, but gave a shoutout to my second newsletter.

While it validated me and my information, it still didn’t shut the other guy up.

Finally, a break.

While the guy used an alias for his newsletter, he did actually mention his name a couple of times, and where in the US he attended university.

Using this information, I was able to get a friend in the US to do some searching for me (attended that very same university), and discovered that the guy had actually completed a journalism degree several years earlier.

Further research indicated that he was now working as a reporter for a regional newspaper in the US.

His wrestling newsletter must just be a hobby.

So, I decided to send all of the information I had, his smear campaign etc, to the newspaper office.

I don’t know what, if anything, it would do but it was worth a shot.

About a month later, I got an email back from the newspaper, thanking me for the information.

Wow, this poor guy lost his job because he was trolling about a newsletter.

They discovered that he was using the newspaper’s system to run the wrestling newsletter, which was against their policy, so they fired him.

And because the newspaper was part of a chain of regional newspapers across the US, he was going to struggle to find another journalism job.

The newsletter got shut down as well, because without the newspaper’s system to run it, the guy had no way of continuing with the newsletter.

Wow, this guy really lost his job because of a silly wrestling newsletter? Brutal

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

That was a classic wrestling match.

Source: Reddit/Pro Revenge

I want to know which newsletter it was too!

Source: Reddit/Pro Revenge

Here is someone who used to read these types of newsletters.

Source: Reddit/Pro Revenge

This person loves the story.

Source: Reddit/Pro Revenge

This person says smear campaigns are like bad sportsmanship.

Source: Reddit/Pro Revenge

Smear campaigns are just playing dirty.

This is cool and niche little story.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.