WWE: Sol Ruca on Dealing with Online Criticism & Increased Scrutiny on Main Roster, Class Action Lawsuit Against WWE Over Misleading Claims About PLE Access on ESPN Unlimited Update, Update on Planned Date for WWE SmackDown Going Back To Being Two-Hour Show Again

Sol Ruca Comments on Dealing with Online Criticism & Increased Scrutiny on Main Roster

WWE Now held a recent interview with WWE Women’s Intercontinental Champion Sol Ruca. One of the topics discussed included Ruca’s thoughts about how she has been dealing with online criticism about her work in WWE and the increased scrutiny she has received since joining the main roster.

“100%. even in NXT, we get people that are, you know, watching every move and we get people that are, you know, leaving hate comments and all this negativity, and essentially being up on the main roster, you have more eyes, which means more hate, but also means more love. So it is something that I’ve had to kind of navigate because I wasn’t really, it wasn’t something that I thought of when I got signed that it was going to be like, oh, this means that there’s going to be more eyes or more people, you know, trying to nitpick everything. But at the end of the day, especially with people on social media. That’s such a small percentage of our fan base, and as long as the crowd in person is happy and, you know, everyone backstage is happy with what I do, then that’s fine with me.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com

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Class Action Lawsuit Against WWE Over Misleading Claims About PLE Access on ESPN Unlimited Update

As noted before, a class action lawsuit was filed this past January against WWE and ESPN alleging that both companies had committed deceptive marketing practices regarding WWE moving their Premium Live Events (PLEs) to ESPN’s new ESPN Unlimited streaming service. These claims revolved around marketing from both WWE and ESPN telling all existing ESPN subscribers that they would have access to WWE PLEs for free when that was not the case for those with certain cable or streaming providers. WWE filed a motion this past April seeking to force the lawsuit into private arbitration.

Post Wrestling and Wrestlenomics’ Brandon Thurston reported that the plaintiffs recently filed a motion asking the court for the discovery phase to not be stayed due.

In the filing, the plaintiffs argued that WWE can not be trusted to preserve evidence and brought up a recent ruling against WWE President Nick Khan for destroying evidence in the WWE shareholders lawsuit.

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Planned Date for WWE SmackDown Going Back To Being Two-Hour Show Again

As noted before, WWE SmackDown is currently expected to be moving back as a weekly two-hour format show on USA Network in a few weeks.

The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer reported that his sources stated that the final three-hour show for SmackDown will be taking place on June 26th.

Meltzer reported that the initial belief and assumption by many people was that SmackDown’s final three-hour show would have been this past week’s show due to the new season of Braun Strowman’s Everything on the Menu series but it will be starting at 11PM EST on USA Network until this July when it likely moves to 10PM EST.