Christy Hemme releases white paper on occupational risk to pro wrestlers and questions worker classification – POST Wrestling

Christy Hemme spent more than two decades in professional wrestling as a performer in WWE and TNA and also as a producer and department head with TNA. Her new white paper, “Wrestlers Are Wrestling: Occupational Risk and the Structure of Professional Wrestling,” argues that — despite the presumptive decline in substance abuse in the industry that contributed to many deaths a generation ago — wrestlers still carry a concerning health risk that is disproportionate to that of the general population.

In the interest of full disclosure, my own reporting is cited twice in the paper, and Hemme provided me with an advance copy. Before the paper was submitted to the Social Science Research Network, she shared with me the underlying data, which I reviewed. She also asked for feedback on it, which I gave her.

While it’s rare enough for someone who worked as a wrestler to do this kind of research, it’s rarer still for someone so connected to wrestling to openly question the employment classification that major promotions apply to wrestlers, which she does in this paper. Companies like WWE and AEW generally classify wrestlers as contractors rather than employees, and therefore aren’t required to provide the benefits they would otherwise be legally obligated to provide. Hemme points out that this leaves wrestlers ill-equipped to manage the health risks involved with their work. She also notes that wrestlers often turn to crowdfunding to deal with healthcare emergencies, rather than being able to rely on long-term healthcare benefits.

Hemme’s thesis rests on a dataset she compiled of 500 wrestlers who died before the age of 65, over about fifty years. She pairs that data with published research: a 2014 study and a 2026 retrospective study of WWE wrestlers co-authored by Reidar Lystad, with whom Hemme corresponded while preparing her paper.

The Lystad study found that wrestlers die from neurodegenerative disease at a rate roughly 68% higher than that of the general population. Neurodegenerative disease encompasses conditions including dementia-related disorders, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The latter has recently become more familiar in wrestling circles since “Rebel” Tanea Brooks disclosed she was diagnosed with the disease.

That makes the subject of Hemme’s paper more personal for her. In the paper, she calls Brooks “[o]ne of my dearest friends,” and acknowledges that AEW has continued to financially support Brooks since she was diagnosed with ALS. The company recently put on an episode of AEW Dynamite, branded “Rebel Heart,” that raised money for ALS research.

The second page of Hemme’s paper shows a chart that demonstrates an apparent increase in the number of premature wrestler deaths over time. It seems much or all of that increase can be attributed to growth in the population of wrestlers that a study like this can track, thanks to better recordkeeping in more recent decades or other factors. When I reviewed the underlying data, I found that wrestler deaths by age 40 peaked in the decade from 2000 to 2009 and decreased in the following decade from 2010 to 2019. It remains entirely plausible, though, that wrestlers still have a shorter life expectancy than the general population, due to the various health risks associated with the job.

Hemme makes a point about the risks that wrestlers and other athletes in heavy-contact sports face that will be novel to many readers. She links repeated hits to the head to heart problems. She quotes cardiologist Michael Tempelhof, who says concussions disrupt the autonomic nervous system, a part of the brain that regulates heart rate and blood pressure.

The paper makes clear that head trauma does not necessarily explain the broader heart-related death patterns among wrestlers, but presents head trauma as an added factor alongside frequent travel, lack of sleep, chronic stress, drug and alcohol use, and pressure to perform despite injuries.

The data Hemme shared with me, which she collected from public sources, supports her emphasis on cardiovascular risk. Of the 500 deaths she recorded, 142 are categorized as cardiac deaths, the largest single category. That is about 35% of the 401 deaths with a known cause, in the neighborhood of the 38% found by a 2014 study and the 41% found by the more recent Lystad study. These rates are at least somewhat higher than those of the general population globally and in the U.S.

Hemme’s collection of data related to crowdfunding for wrestlers, before or after their deaths, demonstrates how wrestlers rely on the generosity of the wrestling community rather than on any health or life insurance benefits or other policies provided by the companies they performed for. Like the Lystad study, Hemme’s paper points to fundamental issues within the wrestling business — namely, worker classification, worker organization, and compensation — that may need to change to better address wrestlers’ occupational risks.

The paper doesn’t go into a multifactor test to analyze whether wrestlers are broadly misclassified as independent contractors rather than employees. I’ve argued previously that there’s plenty of evidence to show that WWE wrestlers are generally misclassified. The case may not be as overwhelming for AEW’s wrestlers. Some AEW wrestlers have employee status. And some AEW wrestlers might be rightly classified as contractors. But the level of control AEW exerts over many of its independent contractor wrestlers is probably enough that they should properly be classified as employees, not contractors.

Of course, becoming a pro wrestler is a choice. No one is conscripted into the ring. And at least since the science about CTE became more common knowledge, wrestlers generally understand the risks they’re taking on by choosing that career path. Company executives might point out that the most successful wrestlers are compensated extremely well. Top wrestlers are probably raking in millions each year. Perhaps, though, concern is warranted for the many wrestlers who don’t achieve long-term financial security. Or maybe more money could go toward long-term benefits for wrestlers who face disproportionate health risks.

WWE wrestlers were paid about 15% of revenue in recent years, according to WWE’s own records that we found in court filings. The figure is a sharp contrast to top sports leagues, where players get as much as 50% of the league’s revenue. Meanwhile, lead executives like TKO’s Mark Shapiro brag to Wall Street about what a “cash geyser” WWE’s parent company is. Wrestlers could — theoretically — organize a union or association to collectively bargain at any time, albeit with the expectation of great individual career risk to anyone who attaches their name to such a movement if it doesn’t succeed.

Hemme has assembled a fact-based record that I’m not sure anyone else has comprehensively put together, and certainly no one with significant experience working for major companies like WWE and TNA. It might be a tentative first step toward wrestlers recognizing their own leverage. Though history tells us that turning that awareness into actual collective bargaining requires a kind of courage that, despite notions of “brotherhood,” few are willing to risk their careers for what could be dramatic increases in pay and longer-term benefits for those whose best years are in the past.