Dr. Christopher Amann, a part of the WWE medical team, filed suit on 2/18 in Cook County (IL) Circuit court against Philip Jack Brooks (C.M. Punk) and Scott Colton (Colt Cabana) for their comments about him on Colton’s “Art of Wrestling” podcast in November.
Amann, who lives in Libertyville, IL, was hired by WWE in 2010. He claimed the statements on the podcast by Brooks and Colton were “false, defamatory and put him in a false light by improperly insinuating a lack of integrity and/or inability or lack of competence to perform his professional duties as a medical doctor.”
The lawsuit is largely based on Brooks claiming Amann misdiagnosed a growth on his back, refused to remove it when asked, and Brooks claimed the growth, which ended up the size of a baseball, was purple, and ended up being diagnosed by another doctor as a life-threatening MSRA staph infection.
Amann is seeking more than $2 million in compensatory damages, plus an undetermined amount of punitive damages.
Brooks, on the podcast released on 11/26, said Amann had misdiagnosed the growth as fatty tissue and given him antibiotics for it. The lawsuit contained a transcript of the entire long story told by Brooks about the diagnosis, antibiotics, having constant diarrhea before leaving the company, and having another doctor look at the growth and tell him it was MSRA staph that he could have died from.
Amann, who was given clearance by WWE to file the lawsuit against Brooks, claimed Brooks’ entire story was fabricated, that Brooks never told him about any growth, and never showed him the lump, and that he never made any diagnosis on it.
While Brooks’ charges against Amann were the most serious part of his podcast interview, most of the media coverage coming out of it centered around his claim, that Vince McMahon later admitted was true in an interview with Steve Austin, that WWE fired Punk via Fed Ex on his wedding day. McMahon stated, however, that it was just coincidental that legal sent out the letter the day before. Brooks said he didn’t believe that at all.
Brooks had said he had suffered a concussion in a late 2013 match with Luke Harper, and then went on the November European tour. He blamed that on himself, but said he was either throwing up or dry heaving after every match. He said he had no appetite and couldn’t train and that the doctor gave him a Z-pac (antibiotics) and he took so many that one night on Smackdown he shit his pants.
He said that he had a lump on his back, went to the doctor, who said it was a fatty deposit. Brooks said he asked the doctor to remove it, but the doctor didn’t, which Brooks said was because he was lazy, and instead prescribed him even stronger antibiotics. He said this made him feel even worse and had diarrhea for three weeks.
He then claimed in the Royal Rumble that Kofi Kingston hit him with a clothesline and he suffered a concussion and motioned to the doctor, and the doctor said, “What do you want me to do?” Brooks claimed he said, “You are the most useless fucking doctor in the whole world.” He said after the Royal Rumble, he wanted the growth cut out because it was green and he had a fever for weeks, but Amann wouldn’t do it.
He said that eventually another doctor, claimed to be a doctor his wife knew in Tampa, diagnosed his growth as an MSRA staph infection in around mid-February (I was told this was within days in either direction of 2/7), and he got the lump cut out of his back (this was about two weeks after he left WWE) and said it was the worst pain he had ever felt in his life.
Amann claimed in the lawsuit that the entire story was false.
The lawsuit stated, “Amann was not requested by Brooks to treat and/or excise a lump, let alone a purple, baseball-sized lump.”
The WWE followed up with a release the day after the suit was filed, saying that the company had performed an investigation of the situation.
“In light of C.M. Punk’s allegations regarding WWE’s medical staff and the subsequent defamation lawsuit filed by Dr. Amann against C.M. Punk, WWE continues to have the utmost confidence in the ability and expertise of our world-class team of physicians, including Dr. Amann.
“C.M. Punk claimed this past November that during the Royal Rumble pay-per-view event on January 26, 2014, he performed with a baseball-sized purple lump on his back located near the waistband of his tights.
WWE’s investigation has shown the following:
*C.M. Punk did not discuss this alleged condition with WWE’s team of physicians and trainers, nor did he discuss it with anyone in our Talent Relations department.
*Subsequently, WWE has no medical records documenting this alleged condition.
*The first time WWE was made aware of this alleged condition was when we received a letter from C.M. Punk’s attorney on August 22, 2014, after WWE terminated his contract.
*There is clear video evidence from the 2014 Royal Rumble, which allows all to decide whether there is any appearance of a baseball-sized growth on C.M. Punk’s back.”
WWE supplied certain clips and closeups of Punk’s back in several different periods of the match and there is nothing large enough to be noticed. If there was a lump and infection, it was not anywhere close to the size of a baseball, or even a golf ball. However, Punk has in public on a few occasions shown his back, and there is a spot just under what would be the waist band of the trunks where there is a small indentation of where it would appear something was cut out. In addition, there are photos from a prior match with Ryback in September 2013 that may indicate a lump in the same spot where the growth was removed.
Punk also at one point tweeted at the time that he had shit his pants on December 3, 2013, at a Smackdown taping, but WWE made him take down the tweet. So at least the story of that happening was not something he made up on the Cabana show but something there is evidence he talked about when it happened.
Two days before the Royal Rumble 2014, or three days before he walked out, at a Wizard World convention in Portland, OR, he said, “Right now, I feel a lot better than I have. There was the three months there, for a while, where I felt really, really horrible. And then we were trying to figure out what was wrong. And I think I was literally getting an MRI a week, and blood work, all this stuff, to just try to narrow down exactly what was wrong with me.”
The argument isn’t that there was or wasn’t a lump or infection that was removed. There was. The argument is whether Punk had any interaction with the WWE medical staff. That’s an open-and-shut yes-or-no question, but at this point it isn’t clear, nor is there any real evidence, which side is telling the truth and which side made a story up. It may end up complicated and there is almost certainly far more to this than meets the eye, but ultimately, that’s what the case is about.
Amann also said that he followed proper protocol during the Royal Rumble by telling Brooks to leave the ring after a preliminary diagnosis of a possible concussion and requested further evaluation and treatment afterwards in the training room. Brooks didn’t leave the ring and worked exactly how things were scripted for him even though WWE sent out Kane to eliminate him in an audible early and Kane had to stay at ringside for a long time because Punk had refused to go out early.
Amann alleged Colton helped Brooks falsely depict Amann as a lazy and bad doctor and that they “knowingly fabricated the false and disparaging statements,” about him, and that the show was streamed more than 1 million times on YouTube and reported on by several media outlets.
Amann said the statements made by Colton and Brooks “are highly offensive in that they accuse (Amann) of gross lack of integrity as a medical doctor, an inability to perform his professional duties as a medical doctor, and in placing the financial interest of his employer above life-threatening health conditions of his patients.”
Proving whether Amann examined or didn’t examine a lump could be in question based on how records are kept, although one would think, for legal reasons, WWE doctors would be expected to keep very thorough records
It also brings up the strange and awkward Michael Landsberg interview, where Landsberg brought up Punk had complained about his medical care in WWE, and Punk annoyingly blew off the question. While the tabloid media concentrated on the story of him being fired on his wedding day, which Vince McMahon admitted was true and a mistake, the real story out of the interview were the medical treatment claims and business interactions he described.
That said, going after Colton in the lawsuit is a low move, even though a lawyer would recommend it because if Brooks slandered him, Colton can be held accountable because he provided the outlet. Colton was just the guy hosting the podcast, but from a legal standpoint, he has control over its content, booked Brooks as a guest and may have known what Brooks was likely to say without ever trying to reign him in or give a different perspective.
You could do it legally, of course, and if this was a large broadcasting company that aired the interview, it would be an accepted part of the suit. But in the real world, Colton is a guy squeaking out making a living wearing different hats, and while he provided a forum for his friend, and you can make a legal argument against him, the act of going after him is so clearly a low-rent move. He obviously doesn’t have the money to fight this kind of a high-priced attorney suit (whether he’ll get covered or not is immaterial). He never went after Amann in any kind of a malicious form past reaction to what Brooks said. The key here is that they may have thought Brooks may blow it off, but his sense of being Colton’s best friend, that by naming Colton in the suit, he would be under more pressure to settle. It’s not unexpected to do so, but in my mind it changes this from a battle to see who is telling the truth to simply lawyers playing lawyer games and whatever the truth is far less important than pressure games. Then again, that is what a high-level lawsuit is about. If Amann is out with a balls-to-the-wall lawsuit trying to use every psychological tactic to make Brooks’ life miserable, of course that is one of them and it makes sense from a legal situation. But if Amann is out there simply to right his reputation, he could have handled it with more class, and that isn’t saying he wasn’t wronged and doesn’t deserve his name cleared.
At the end of the day, my thought is that this is not so much financial, because it will be next to impossible to prove that Brooks’ allegations against Amann cost him any money–since WWE never dropped him. The object is more to get Punk to settle and publicly apologize for what he said, or for WWE to get a public “win” over Punk because Punk bettered them badly in round one in the court of public opinion, and then waltzed over to the company they are most compared to and most paranoid about those comparisons with.
If he apologized for anything about the Amman story, the WWE could take it as a victory and throw into question everything he said about Paul Levesque, which is the real key to all this. Brooks painted Levesque as someone incompetent at his job, who couldn’t even remember basic dates of tours that anyone in wrestling would know without thinking. He also painted McMahon as an out-of-touch old man. Whether his stories were real or not, or exaggerated, since both of them are clearly public figures, them suing over those statements would both be difficult, time-consuming and in the end, viewed negatively.
In addition, there is the question of whether or not Amann is a public figure, particularly since on many occasions, including this week’s NXT broadcast, he was playing the role of a doctor giving diagnosis’ for injuries that never happened. By that standard, he is both a doctor and an entertainer playing the role of a doctor, which could change aspects of burden of proof and him being a public figure. As a public figure, he would had to prove that Punk not only lied but did so with malice or reckless disregard for the truth, a higher standard than if Amann was just an anonymous doctor. That’s what makes his performance on this week’s NXT show so strange in hindsight. Amann was doing a made-up television diagnosis as a performer, and one which made him seem like an questionable doctor since he stopped a match due to a concussion on Wednesday and then allowed Sami Zayn to fly to Abu Dhabi to wrestle the next day because Zayn wanted to do so, a television version of what Punk had ridiculed. Since WWE worked with Amann in the suit, and whether they are really the ones behind it or simply just signed off and allowed him to do it depends on who you talk to, them putting him in television the very week the suit got filed in a situation that changes the burden of proof in a case, particularly for an angle that was a bad idea to begin with, is so weird.
The key is that a basically true story with some exaggeration of it is not going to be enough to win the case. But either way, there should be some medical records, as far as dispensation or prescriptions for antibiotics that are either there or not.
If he went on a television show as an entertainer, in the role of portraying a doctor, and publicly gave diagnoses for injuries that never happened, which he has also done for worked WWE television injuries in statements on television and on the web site, it becomes a confusing issue regarding exactly what his public reputation really is, in the sense if a guy who makes up a medical story on television or on the web site is suing a wrestler for claiming he made up a story, that’s where the TV portrayal of Amann muddies the waters. The key is that it’s not a defense for Brooks for lying or absolving him of some penalties if he did so, but as far as damage to reputation and financial loss, it confuses the issue.
That said, Ryback claimed that Punk made up their entire confrontation story during an interview on Chris Jericho’s podcast. Jericho himself also claimed Punk didn’t tell the truth about his attempts to contact Punk during the period after he left the company. On the flip side, there is clear proof that Ryback did drop Punk wrong on a slam that was supposed to be through a table on the floor that completely missed the table and he was injured. And to an extent, Punk used Jericho as a metaphor for a lot of wrestlers who tried to contact him after he disappeared that he never called back. Punk absolutely spoke to his closest friends, and I know of one wrestler who he had a lengthy conversation with about the wrestlers’ issues with the company, but there were also a number of very well known guys who tried to check on him and he ignored them. Perhaps he knew it was going to end up as a legal issue and cut his contacts down to those he was sure he could trust.
There were stories he told on that podcast about his verbal interaction with both Vince McMahon and Paul Levesque that I found difficult to believe in the way he told them, because of timing issues with the McMahon story and because I really don’t want to believe Levesque is as completely incompetent at his job and/or so arrogant about his position to insist being clearly wrong isn’t wrong as Punk described both. That said, he could just as easily have been telling the truth and this legal action isn’t about those conversations.
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