Rob Feinstein's version of the ROH split

[ADouble]

Former ROH owner Rob Feinstein posted this on the Botchamania facebook page following all kinds of abuse he received regarding THAT incident a decade ago. Worth a read.

Rob Feinstein


feel free to do what you want

Since you asked a few questions, I will take the time to give you a few answers. In doing so, my words will get twisted, people will call me a liar, but I felt that I would shed some light on some of the inaccuracies that you had written.

I honestly won’t respond again because I am going to say what I have to say and move away from this page as I was told about the thread. Posting on a board on FB or any message board for that matter about this matter will do nothing for me as I have seen that over the last ten years and I have moved on from this subject a LONG time ago.

First of all none of you know me personally. You all have read about me or heard about the incident. Nobody except a few people know what led up to that day. Nobody knows what was going on internally in my office between Cary and myself and a few other close staff members. Nobody knows the internal fighting that was going on and how Cary wanted to start his own RFVIDEO by filming indy shows and doing shoot interviews. Nobody knows how I was going to fire a few key staff members before that day in March of 2004. To fully understand you fully need to know what I was dealing with for about 60 days that led up to that day.

I had one key member of my staff that was telling Cary that he should split away from me and that he could start his own version of RFVIDEO with him. This fight all started over a raise that I refused to give him because he was already being paid by myself. Cary wanted Syd to get a raise and I refused to give him one, so Cary started to pay him with his own money as a bonus which caused major heat. This was not a normal raise but Cary wanted Syd to get another $1000 from me per month to over see the company. It made zero sense because he already was getting a pay check from us to do that very same job. There was something not right going on between the two during this time. I was fighting on a daily basis with Syd who I could not fire because Cary had given him a raise with his own money and basically told me if Syd was let go he would stop funding the company.

I also found out that Cary and Syd were talking a lot behind my back in early 2004 and they would deny it to me. I was told there were closed door meetings and I was being kept unaware of them because they were doing them out of my office but I was told to another office worker at the time who was close with Syd who was aware of them.

A month before the incident I had a MAJOR power play with Cary once again at the ROH show in Baltimore MD where Cary asked for majority ownership of ROH or again he threatened that he would not pay any of the talent that night and he would also stop funding the company. In 2004 I needed his money or there would not have been a ROH. I also was bringing someone into the company that was going to be a major investor and who was going help us with the booking but that person could not come in for at least a year. There were a few key people who knew if this were to happen they were going to loose power. Syd for one did not want this person to come into the office because he was very threatened by him. Around this time he was one of my worst enemies who worked in my office. You have no idea how bad I wanted to fire him and was going to, but waiting for the right time because I could not fire him until I had someone that I had lined up to come into the company that way I did not have to rely on Cary to fund the company. Internally the office was a nightmare because we all worked out of one office. It was my RFVIDEO office and I shared it with the ROH office all under one roof since we used my staff. I also had everyone that worked for me under contracts so even if Cary were to split with me he could not hire Syd, Ross, Gabe, Doug or anyone that was working there at the time. Keep in mind they wanted me out of ROH before that day in March. There were two sides in my office at the time. There was Cary, Syd and Ross and there was Doug, Joe, myself and a few other non important workers who were going to go where ever the money was. Gabe was also there at this time and he was loyal with us because he had his own issues with those guys which is not important to this story.

Ross was another person who at one time I considered a friend that knew everything personally about me. He was also friends with Syd and unless you worked for me you do not know how Syd was a manipulator. He turned my friends against me over the years. He had me fire people that were close to me and lied to me to get me to fire different people so he would have power in my office. First he had me fire my long time friend Eric and than he wanted me to fire Doug Gentry for the longest time so he had job security. There were times that he wanted me to fire Gabe and we did at one point but brought him back a few days later. There is a lot I could say here but I won’t I will leave it at that but unless you know the guy, you will never understand what I went thru. This person got many people in my office to go against me because Cary had the money and if they could find a way to get me out of the picture they all could work for Cary because he had the money and promised them longevity and would dangle a carrot over their heads. I was dumping my own money at the time into ROH and I was killing RFVIDEO. Something was going to break…..There were secret meetings behind my back that I had learned about too after March between Cary, Syd and other office employees I had at the time.

I also never hid my personal life from my friends. I never did anything wrong in the past. I did indeed meet someone who I talked to. I met them in an adult chat room. I saw pictures of this person as they had sent me their pictures. The person was not a kid but a college person. I had talked to the person on the phone and it was clear as day it was an adult. The chat that you claim you read is not real. Anyone can add anything that they want to text. The infamous LOL Ill pretend line is not mine. I never said half of the conversation that they claim I did. The bottom line is that I was 100% set up and I never once talked about having sex or anything to that nature.

My office staff and the one guy there who I thought at the time was my friend knew all about this conversation because he was my close friend and was in my office the day I had met this person and started to talk to them. This is the same person who was close to Syd and who was manipulated by him and who also backstabbed me. You can do the math here.
​

The owner of the site used a gimmick name Xavier Von Erich. He is a wrestling fan and told people he knew who I was the entire time. I never lied or hid who I was. After this came out my personal pictures from my office desk were plastered on message boards from these people that were stolen out of my office desk of myself with Doug Gentry and my friends at a concert with our shirts off implying we were gay along with my friends that day. These were personal pictures that I had from Ozfest that were in my desk draws. How did ANYONE get these pictures? That is an easy answer, they were stolen from my office staff. They were taken out of my desk and given to this guy as they had scanned them into this website when this all came out.

After talking to this person for the amount of time I did and talking to them on the phone we made plans to meet and go to the mall which was close by to their location. First of all, I went there with my friend who had NOTHING to do with my conversation but who went with me because he was my friend. If you watched the video at the time my car was not parked on the side of the road. My car was parked NOT even against the curb. My car was parked on a angle basically on a slight angle and was left running because I was picking up the person and not going inside anyones house. Please go back and watch the footage you will see my car was parked basically in the middle of this street left running with a friend inside my car. I would hope that if anyone would be going in for anything else you would at least park your car against the curb and not leave it running in the middle of the street. Go watch the footage as you clearly will see that. I was not going there to have sex with anyone in the first place hence that is why my car was parked in the manner that it was, in the middle of the street, left running with my friend in the car!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I never lied or gave a fake name at any point when I talked to this person so when I knocked at the door and a camera gets shoved in my face and the guy calls me Timmy and the first thing he says to me is why I was there to have sex with two 14 year old girls and I saw the NBC symbol on the camera I knew I was set up and indeed did run. Why would I stick around, as I had a camera in my face and I had no idea what was going on. That was my instinct at the time, run as I was scared and thats what I did. I left and no police followed me, no police came to my house, nothing happened to me EVER. ZERO except I got outed on the news and it was not Chris Hansen either. I was never EVER on to catch a predator EVER. I aired during sweeps week on my local news. I wonder how that happened? In fact the news aired me on the station for 3 days in a row during a special that they produced. Later on after I hired lawyers NBC told them they would never have put me on if they read my transcripts because I did nothing wrong.

Now ROH had a HUGE show in the NJ just a few weeks after that had happened and I NEVER “quit” the company no matter what lies they told the public. I NEVER quit ROH. All the sudden Cary went and hired a PR firm the same firm that did PR for Daryyl Strawberry when he got busted for doing cocaine. This guy came to our offices and we had a meeting with everyone. It was myself, Cary, Gabe, Doug, Ross and Syd. In this meeting the guy wanted me to release a statement saying that I was going to step down until I cleared my name. I refused to release that statement because I had done nothing wrong but I wanted this to just blow over and come back and tell my side of the story. Again I was told if I were to come back right away there would be no ROH and it would be better to just sit out. I would still run everything but it would be smart to put the company in the name of someone that I could trust and that person would be Doug as he was the only one that I had trusted at the time. Keep in mind a month earlier in MD when Cary threatened to pull the plug on ROH he demanded that I give him 51% of the company. So I did what I had to do and we put out the statement which I did not want to put out and we did the gimmick where Doug was the owner. I was still calling all the shots but was just not at the shows any longer. That is why we never signed anything when we went to TNA. Gabe did not want to lie because he knew I was still there and so did everyone else.

Than this is where I knew the writing was on the wall. We had a few shows in Chicago and MN and I think there was one in Philly where Syd and Cary took the money from the gate and my merchandise and counted it behind Dougs back in a hotel room and kept Doug away from seeing the gate’s #’s and what we did in merchandise that night. I started to find out that Cary and Syd were having secret meetings behind my back along with a lot of other stuff. I got a call from my lawyer that Syd personally tried to copyright the ROH logo which was insane because I already had done that in 2002. My lawyer told me that they were going to try to take over and that I better be on guard. There was ALOT of other stuff that was going on as I confronted Syd and he denied that he tried to copyright the logo and started to have stuff being stolen from my office like very expensive pieces of equipment along with other stuff that I had paid for.
There was also a secret meeting around this time between myself, Cary and my investor in a hotel in NJ. This person was still going to come into the company and invest money into ROH and Cary was very happy in this meeting. We had talked about getting rid of certain people once this was to go into effect and we all left that meeting with the understanding that I was going to be coming back at a certain time period. I was still furious as I was biting my lip because I never was able to come out and talk because of the deal Cary had set up with the PR firm for my statement and I did not want us to loose buildings at the time and I had given Doug control on paper of ROH even though Cary owned 51% of it so I was doing my job as I just wanted this to pan out and than I would come back when the time was right. Don’t think for a minute that I did not want to expose everything that was going on but it was not the time. I had invested my own money, heart and soul into the company and I had a dream along with Doug that I wanted to see pan out. If I were to speak out and come back Cary would have backed out and my investor was not ready to come in yet. The company was already a mess from all the bullshit.

Well after that meeting I had with Cary and the investor, Cary went to Puerto Rico and he called me from down there and told me that he wanted to meet me when he came back. Now keep in mind that when I was sitting out, I was keeping away from my own office because I ran the ROH school out of there and CM PUNK was running my school and Cary did not want anyone to see me working there because he thought it would leak to the sheets or to specifically Mike Johnson, which I always thought was funny. So I actually would go into my own office at night time to work on stuff that I had to do and that is when I started to notice stuff being stolen from my office.

I had also tapped my own computers to spy on a few of my employees. There was a program at the time that I had purchased which allowed me to record everything they did. Well one day I saw emails from one person to another talking about the plans that they had and how everything was working as they had planned. The next day I got a phone call from Syd himself saying that they knew I had tapped their computers and that anything that I had seen or read was a set up to see how I would react. I knew he was lying to me and I caught them red handed. Syd showed up at my door and I told him point blank that I was coming back tomorrow at my normal time and that I was going public with EVERYTHING that I had known. Well Cary had called me the same exact day and told me he wanted to meet me in a hour for lunch.

I drove to the dinner he wanted to meet at and instead of going inside he told me to get in his car. His quote to me was “I want to buy ROH right now from you or I am walking away from the company.” He told me that if I were to come back to the office he was going to quit and take all of my staff from me. I told him that I had them all under contracts and that it would be impossible but he could make me a money offer and I would think about it. I talked to my investor at the time and there was no way I could work with any of my staff any longer even if I came back. The money that he was offering to me at the time was a great offer and I could walk away from everything with a HUGE payday. I would have to release certain members out of their contracts which was not a problem for me because I hated them and wanted nothing to do with them any longer.

I made the deal with him and moved on and never looked back. It was not soon after that, that I found out my mailing list was stolen someone in my office, ROH started to try to take over filming indy shows that I was apart of like PWU in Philly and that they started to do shoot interviews just like they said they were going to try to do. I was being told by all my friends in the business and other promoters that they were trying to get them to stop working for me and for them to switch over and let ROH sell their DVD’s and shows. This is exactly what they wanted to have happen.

Their whole idea was to get me out of the picture and for Cary to fund a new RF VIDEO version under the ROH banner with my mailing list and everything that I had taught them. They started to mail to people that I worked with the DVD of me on the news, they personally got caught giving a copy of it to my landlord at the time, and went so far to give it to people who lived in my area. There was more drama than ever as I even confronted one of them and he had spit in my face and went to court over the matter and he lost.

I had my own customers back in 2004 tell me that they were getting newsletters in the mail but never ordered from ROH and that is how my lawyers proved they stole my mailing list.
Over the years I have talked to people who were still with ROH at the time of the split who were still loyal to me and who told me that there were indeed secret meetings behind my back, and told me all the evil things that the office had done to me.

So the question I always read about is why he never sued. I was going to sue. I talked to a ton of different lawyers at the time of these events and this is what I found out. Who was I going to sue? If I sued perverted justice they had zero assets. Their website was from another country, and their owner uses a fake name and we found out that he had zero assets. We were contacted by other people that had similar stuff happen to them and they told our lawyers who already did the ground work that there was nothing to get out of them. Why I never sued NBC….my lawyer told me that I could have sued NBC but they would have appealed every time and I better have deep pockets because I would need a ton of money to sue them even if I were to win they would keep appealing and I would never see a dime and I would go broke. I was told basically to ignore it and get back to what I do for a living and move on. That is what I did, and in the end when I got more money from selling ROH than I expected and I was happy with that because there was no way I was going to work with anyone in that company ever again. If I stayed with ROH there was never going to be a RF VIDEO because I had kicked that to the curb and lost focus on to what brought me to the game.

So when you bark off facts like you think you know what your talking about, you really don’t. You only know what you read on message boards or from wrestling websites who by the way were getting paid to cover ROH because ROH was paying them ads on their site. So your basing your information from only hearing one side of the story. You print bullshit chat transcripts as if they are fact. There is a reason that was removed because they were fake. I never paid anyone to remove them as you stated. I could make a fake transcript of any two people talking it’s not that hard to do.

I never did anything wrong or illegal and I was set up. There are more personal facts that I will not get into. There were other motives to get me out of the company. There are the stories on how Cary wanted to pay Doug who was 100% hetrosexual to move into his house. How he tried to buy Doug by giving him large sums of money. Many facts have come out inside the industry that people who worked for ROH found out about certain other people there and saw stuff that went on behind the scenes. They know the truth….my real friends know the truth and most of all I know the truth. That is why I thrive and I have my haters that for what ever reason will ALWAYS bring this up and I have learned to live with it.

By the way the pictures of me with my butterfly wings were taken at indy shows long before 2004 where I did the FAG which stands for FUN ATHLETIC GUY not something that I ever wear around the house. Just another example on how the internet works to twist stories around. Eddie Gilbert once told me this quote, “believe half of what you see and nothing that you hear.”

[bik100]

Interesting read.

[Marketh.]

Looking at that thing on the Botchamania Facebook and if there's one thing I agree with Feinstein, why the fuck should he have to pay Maffew to advertise on a site where Maffew uses all his RF Video footage for free and sometimes without consent?

[Northwoods_Nightmare]

Pretty interesting, although I'll still take it with a grain of salt. I have to say, I dislike like him a lot less assuming at least some of that is true. That would be terrible if you were framed to look like a child predator and you indeed were not doing anything of the sort.
First time I heard anyone say anything bad about Cary. No matter whose side of the story you believe, I think it's pretty clear that after the "incident" ROH would have gone out of business if he stayed on, both from the scandal and from him splitting the company as he planned.

[JTCole]

Anyone here remember the insanely creepy letter Meltzer posted from an anonymous WWE wrestler defending Rob and accusing people who bashed him as homophobes?

[ROHFanAnthony]

Well there's another person who doesn't like Syd.

That was an interesting read. Has Rob ever even talked about his departure in depth like this before?

Don't know how he stays in business with his slow shipping service when ordering from his site?

[JTCole]

Maffew on Twitter:

"I respect RF's anti-Botchamania stance...but watching him debate with people on FaceBook is like watching Jack The Ripper give date advice."

[Northwoods_Nightmare]

Maffew on Twitter:

"I respect RF's anti-Botchamania stance...but watching him debate with people on FaceBook is like watching Jack The Ripper give date advice."

LOL

[McXal]

Is it surprising that Cary can be a tough business man? Isn't he a relatively wealthy guy?? I don't know many successful guys who haven't had to be tough at some point. Considering the source I highly doubt Cary will lose much sleep

There are plenty of other anti-Feinstein stories/anecdotes out there even if you disregard the 'lol, I'll pretend you said 18' thing. I feel bad for him if he was set up in that episode of course, but yeah, I don't have much time for his POV I have to say

It was interesting getting little pieces of his opinions on other ROH guys at the time like Doug, Ross and Syd I suppose

[ADouble]

I think Rob is telling half the story. It should be noted that a lot of people came out afterwards and said "it figures" when he was caught online talking to a kid online. Long before this, there was all this "Aaron Carter fetish" stuff going around about him. Rob Feinstein wasn't a saint that suddenly got exposed and people were shocked. He was a piece of shit online and to his customers for a decade before this came out. He was an absolute prick, who fell out with all his friends and treated his customers like shit. He was hated long before 2004. Sure you had the hardcore ROH apologists of the time, but even they were sick of him by then.

The facts are, he was set up by someone. He had to have been for all this to fall into place. I totally believe Syd Eck and possibly Cary had enough of his bullshit and decided to get someone to set him up and run him off. I totally dont believe the chat was edited. If there was any agenda in setting Rob up, it was based on outing him as someone who had a thing for young boys, as opposed to framing him and exposing him as something he's not. I can believe Cary and Syd said "this is what he's into, lets hire a PR firm and expose this prick". The "they had no assets" part is hilarious. All the more reason to sue and get the truth out there. If the people have nothing to fight against you, you should sue them and clear your name. His reasoning for not suing was so fucking pathetic, I'm stunned he came out with it. So much of what he said in terms of them setting him up sounds true. His defense regarding the chat sounded like bullshit.

[KL_]

Damn, quite long

[Rooskie]

Everybody's the hero of their own story

[krispywrestling]

Though over the years, the ROH fan base have been, in many ways, trained to support the company through thick and thin, I would strongly suggest that everyone read this post by Feinstein twice. Maybe three times. People in the wrestling business can be pieces of garbage, and in this case, the piece of garbage may not have been Rob Feinstein. Without a doubt, this company has given us a lot of great wrestling shows over the years, from various "regimes." But it only existed to begin with because of Feinstein's vision. Though many have labeled him a pedophile (and worse) in the time since, who really knows how much of that story is true and how much is false? What is for sure is that he created the company. I think he absolutely deserves to have his take on the situation from back in 2004 heard, and taken seriously.

[PoyzunTiiiger]

Honestly.................I really only want to know about Gabe and his falling out because I love ROH to death but when Gabe was booking it was at its best. RF Videos is ok I guess but If this was true wouldn't it have come out like......TEN YEARS AGO!? He literally has no one on his side to validate this story that has been kept in the dark for ten years.....hard to believe

[ROHFanAnthony]

I bought a best of Bryan Danielson DVD from him that has no sound in it. I sent it back, I know he got it, and have not heard back if he can fix it or not?

[Big Red Machine]

Though over the years, the ROH fan base have been, in many ways, trained to support the company through thick and thin, I would strongly suggest that everyone read this post by Feinstein twice. Maybe three times. People in the wrestling business can be pieces of garbage, and in this case, the piece of garbage may not have been Rob Feinstein. Without a doubt, this company has given us a lot of great wrestling shows over the years, from various "regimes." But it only existed to begin with because of Feinstein's vision. Though many have labeled him a pedophile (and worse) in the time since, who really knows how much of that story is true and how much is false? What is for sure is that he created the company. I think he absolutely deserves to have his take on the situation from back in 2004 heard, and taken seriously.

Yes, Rob deserves credit for creating the company, but "vision" is not the word I'd use. All Rob wanted was a cash-cow to replace ECW. You want to give someone credit for having the "vision" that made ROH so much more than just another indy, then need to give it to Gabe.

[Big Red Machine]

Honestly.................I really only want to know about Gabe and his falling out because I love ROH to death but when Gabe was booking it was at its best. RF Videos is ok I guess but If this was true wouldn't it have come out like......TEN YEARS AGO!? He literally has no one on his side to validate this story that has been kept in the dark for ten years.....hard to believe

Agreed on all points. If you want to validate yourself and you have names, NAME THEM. Don't just say "my friend" set me up.

I, too, cannot fathom why people say that Gabe's booking wasn't working at the time that he left (even Gabe himself said something close to this on Gabe's Book of ROH Secrets). Aside from the Steel Cage Warfare match at GBH VII, it was all great, and the stuff he had laid out for the rest of the year was also fantastic.

[ROHFanAnthony]

Yeah, but at that point he may have been burnt out. That's over 6 straight years of booking. I wonder if Delirious is burned out since not only has he been booking for 4 years, he also runs the ROH school.

Feinstein still hasn't responded to me about my dvd. I should file a dispute since I paid by paypal. By any chance do any of you have the Bryan Danielson dvds that he has on his site? It's all matches outside of ROH.