Veronica Van Dyne was hired by Apartment Championship Wrestling when the promotion was embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal brought about by Taylor Wilson and Heaven. Management thought that it would look favorable upon the promotion to have a female as the face of its defense team. Van Dyne, a graduate of Northwestern University Law School gained notoriety advocating on the part of women in many high profiles cases. Her acceptance of the ACW case came as a huge shock to many in the legal profession.
Van Dyne set out a strategy and put it right into effect. She attacked Taylor Wilson’s credibility and showed Wilson’s fingerprints all over the scandal. In the press she appeared on all of the tabloid television shows as well as on the cable news networks. Polls soon showed that the public found Wilson to be manipulative and believed her to be fabricating facts.
When Veronica got Wilson into a deposition she tore her story to pieces. After a few weeks, rather than be embarrassed in court, Wilson quietly dropped the case. Van Dyne encouraged the me to sue Taylor for the damage she had brought upon ACW but considering how much it had harmed our resources, and in particular our finances, I didn’t feel like we could afford to fund a lawsuit.
Now, what followed was most unexpected. In press conferences that followed, Veronica defended the promotion from feminists group condemning the promotion for taking advantage of and exploiting women. Veronica said that the promotion offered opportunities for women to travel and to pursue a career and that it empowered women to control their bodies and their sexuality. If fact she said that she would be proud to be a catfighter herself. When further pressed, she said that she was proud of her body and wasn’t afraid or embarrassed to showed it off. When further prodded she stunned the room by stripping off her business suit and showing off her killer body.
The whole thing took us by surprise but we ran with it as fast as we could. It turns out that Veronica had been planning something like this for a long time and had been a fan of catfighting for years. Within days she began releasing private photos of her in revealing attire and began showing up at the ACW Dojo for training. She took a leave of absence from her legal practice and began negotiating with a cable channel to develop a reality television show to focus on her new exploits.
She took well to her training and was very diligent about it, but to be honest she was average at best and didn’t display any unique natural talent that led us to believe she would really play a factor within the promotion. However, she was gaining major national media attention and knew how to work the media so we were more than happy to keep working with her. We announced her first match a few months later and she promoted it well. The match was going to be shown on her reality show which was in the process of being filmed. A week before the match, however, she had to withdraw from it due to an injury.
She followed up with another surprise. She had a younger sister who was interested in apartment wrestling as well. Tabitha was two weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday so we waited to sign her. Our marketing department went into high gear, ready to promote the first “sister tandem” in the history of the promotion.
Tabitha premiered on her show and Veronica released preview clips to an eager audience. Tabitha entered the ACW Dojo for training and developed her own character, nicknaming herself ‘The Schoolgirl.”
At this point, a number of the ACW roster began to complain about the level of attention and promotion that two unknown and untested rookies were receiving. We thus rescheduled Veronica for a match, this time against former European champion and catfighting legend Lisa Nash. This satisfied the locker which believed that someone with Nash’s experience would easily take Veronica to the wood shed.
As anticipation for the match reached a near crescendo, Veronica once again had to withdraw, citing another injury. Needless to say, the locker room erupted with protests and catcalls. More importantly, both to Veronica and ACW, the production computer behind her televisions show threatened to pull the plug on the project. Quickly Veronica announced that her sister Tabitha would be taking her place against Nash. While this elicited even greater laughs from the locker room it seemed to quell the anger coming from the production company. While no official odds are kept on apartment wrestling matches, behind the scenes Lisa was favored 50 to 1. A defiant Veronica began accepting bets, promising that her sister would whip Nash’s ass and shut everybody up.
The match began and to no one’s surprise Lisa Nash took complete control. She seemed to lead Tabitha around by the nose, exploiting her inexperience and began putting on a wrestling clinic. She dominated the match from pillar to post but kept pulling up from pinfalls at the count of two, seemingly to continue her punishment.
At the twenty minute mark, Tabitha looked like a rag doll, helpless and being thrown all over the room. Nash, however, had begun sucking wind and had slowed her pace noticeably. She continued to put Tabitha in one hold after another but began holding onto them for longer each time trying to gather a second wind.
From out of nowhere, Tabitha performed a “schoolgirl roll” and pinned Nash to the ground for a 1-2-3 pinfall. The room went totally silent in astonishment, broken only by Tabitha yelping in victory. Veronica quickly entered the scene and conducted an impromptu interview of her sister for the reality show’s cameras as Nash quickly fled the scene. In the locker room, angry wrestlers screamed bloody murder in confronting Nash. She nonetheless, quickly dressed and left without answering any question.
The anger in the locker room was met with an equal sense of incredulity on the part of management. For a former European champion to lose a match to an inexperienced wrestlers was one thing, but to lose to a rookie in her debut match was almost beyond belief. I called Nash at home and she would only say that she lost and it wasn’t her best day. Something really stunk so we reviewed footage of the match but we couldn’t quite find anything. However, it was strange that Veronica was ready with the microphone so quickly, with a list of already “prepared” questions for her sister about a “surprise” victory.
Two days later we were shocked to find out that Lisa Nash, with two years left on her contract, had packed up and moved back to Paris. Now things were looking too suspicious and we engaged our private detectives to look into the matter. Within days that found out that Nash had been scammed by a boyfriend and had lost almost all of her savings but deposited a large sum of money on the day she departed for France.
We had never before had a case of match-fixing in the promotion and endeavored to move swiftly. We fired Tabitha and Lisa from the promotion and suspended Veronica indefinitely. After one of the production crew admitted that Veronica had indicated that she had made sure that Tabitha would win, the production company shut down production and cancelled the television show before even a single episode had been broadcast. I personally fired Veronica the next day.
The fallout was immense. The state athletic commission shut the promotion down for two months while it conducted an inquiry. While the promotion was cleared of any wrongdoing, it took almost three years to remove the taint from the ACW brand. Neither Tabitha nor Lisa ever wrestled again and Veronica lost almost everything she had. The production company sued her to recoup their losses, she was investigated by the Illinois Bar Association and voluntarily gave up her license for five years. She ended up trying to eke out a living catfighting at bachelor party and jello-wrestling at local bars. It was a sad ending for what once looked like a star in the making.