Dijak recalls Vince McMahon wanting Mia Yim to have a seizure as part of a Retribution angle, whether he feels betrayed by Paul Levesque, expresses frustration with WWE contracts

By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)

Pro Wrestling Bits interview with Donovan Dijak
Interview conducted by Alfred Konuwa
Available at Pro Wrestling Bits YouTube

Dijak on Vince McMahon wanting Mia Yim to have a seizure as part of a Retribution angle: “This is a Vince’s idea. Vince wanted Mia to pretend that she was having a seizure. He wanted her to pretend she was having an epileptic seizure. And we were presented this by, I don’t know, the writer or the producer, and we didn’t want to shoot the messenger. You could see, I don’t remember who it was, but you could see in their face that they’re like, ‘I’m sorry, but Vince wants you to have a seizure.’ And she’s like—we’re all like—’what are you talking about? We can’t do this.’ I was talking about this with Pat Buck [at AEW Forbidden Door]. He was a producer at that, and maybe he was our producer, I don’t remember, but he was in the room when Vince came back and he pitched the seizure thing. But that’s the way that the production meetings worked back then under Vince. He’d say something, and everyone would just have wide eyes because you can’t call him on it.

Dijak on his WWE release and if he feels betrayed by Paul Levesque: “I don’t know that I’d say betrayed is the word that I would use. And a lot of this has to be taken with a grain of salt because the bottom line is, I don’t know. I never got an explanation, which for the record, that’s not cool. I wanted an explanation, and I asked lots of people for an explanation. I did not get one. Again, it’s a business. They don’t owe me anything. They’re not legally obligated to tell me anything. That being said, I felt like my tenure in WWE and my performance in WWE at a bare minimum, I think that warranted some sort of explanation as to what was happening and I never got one. And that’s disappointing. The word I would use the most to describe how I feel about WWE and the components of WWE and how this transpired would be disappointed. Not disgusted, not angry, not none of that.”

Dijak on wrestlers’ independent contractors Status and the need for unions: “I don’t think it’s a secret at this point that nobody’s a fan of the WWE contract, that isn’t a real contract, where they can just release you at any point for any reason. I think that’s silly nonsense. I don’t know why that’s allowed to be legal. It just feels illegal to me, and I feel like nobody’s taken the time and monetary effort to challenge the legality of it because we’re so clearly not independent contractors. That’s the most made up nonsense in the history of the world, and people have talked about this ad nauseam. Something needs to be done about it. It’s just silly. It’s silliness. That being said, if you’re going to allow people’s contracts to run out, I think there needs to be more communication, obviously.”