Last night, All Elite Wrestling returned to The United Center for the latest installment of their annual marquee Chicago area event, AEW: All Out. This year’s show was capped off in the ring by Jon Moxley defeating Orange Cassidy for the AEW Intercontinental Championship and was followed by backstage media scrums with various talents from the card. Infamously, last year’s All Out media scrum featured a series of wild comments from a muffin-eating CM Punk, where he laid into what he perceived as a lack of management within the promotion, among other issues.
Punk was not present at this year’s All Out because the day before the event, Tony Khan formally terminated his contracts with the promotion. His termination comes on the heels of an internal investigation into an altercation he had with Jack Perry at All In. During the post-All Out media scrums this year that was, thankfully, much less tense, Wrestlenomic’s Brandon Thurston asked Khan if Punk’s release from the company came with a non-compete period where he couldn’t appear for another promotion, like WWE.
“I didn’t want to discuss the terms of the separation in that sense,” Khan said. “I think it’s best to say, first of all, I would very much want to thank CM Punk, Phil, for everything you did for AEW as a wrestler. But I don’t think it was an easy decision for anybody on the Discipline Committee or for the outside counsel, or for me to do something like that, but I do think it was the right move. And as far as what’s going to happen in the future, I can’t speak to that, but I’m not the attorneys who interpret all that language and stuff.”
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