A former WWE writer has sued the company for wrongful termination, alleging she was fired after she voiced objection to “offensively racist and stereotypical jargon” in scripts for scenes on SmackDown.
Britney Abrahams filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in New York naming WWE, Vince McMahon and other executives as defendants. Abrahams was hired as a writer on SmackDown on a temporary basis in November 2020 and brought on full time in May ’21. She was fired in April ’22. The suit claims that after Abrahams “made her complaints of discrimination, she was targeted for a pretextual termination by WWE’s executive management team and her direct supervisors.”
According to the suit, Abrahams, who is Black, repeatedly objected to racially insensitive material in SmackDown scripts. In one instance, WWE senior writer Chris Dunn wrote a scene for Bianca Belair, who is Black, in which she was scripted to say, “Uh-uh! Don’t make me take off my earrings and beat your ass!” Abrahams then wrote an email to SmackDown head writer Ryan Callahan saying the scene written by Dunn included “racial jargon and offensive stereotypes.” Dunn and Callahan are both named as defendants in the suit.
When Abrahams spoke to Belair the next day, the wrestler said she had told Dunn “three different times that I don’t want to say that line. But [Dunn] never listens to me. He puts that line in every week.”
The suit also alleges that Callahan proposed a racist story line for a Muslim wrestler. Abrahams and another writer were tasked with pitching a story line where wrestler Mansoor, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was keeping a secret from Aliyah, who is also Muslim. After Callahan shot down the initial idea the writers had, he suggested, “How about his secret is he’s behind the 9/11 attacks?”
The suit also includes two allegations of offensive pitches for Reggie, a Black wrestler: one in which he would have been made to dress in drag and another in which a white wrestler would have hunted him.
Abrahams claims that she was fired after complaining about the discriminatory environment fostered by Callahan and others. Officially, she was fired after bringing a commemorative chair home from WrestleMania 38, but the suit states that writers had previously been given permission to take the chairs and other writers who took them were not terminated.
