Reminder: Martha Hart Owes You Nothing

Owen Hart should still be alive, and the fact that he's not shouldn't be cause for your whining.
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Dark Side of the Ring, the documentary series on VICE TV, will be winding down its second season tonight with perhaps its most cutting episode yet, one chronicling the death of Owen Hart at Over the Edge '99. Hart's death remains the result of a pointless stunt conducted negligently from ideation through execution. Hart died so Vince McMahon could get another one over on World Championship Wrestling, and his entire history as a promoter and a human being shows he'd have done it even if he knew there was a risk the worst could happen. From his Hulk Hogan-assisted union busting through his refusal to pay Drew Gulak more money despite having more than enough cash on hand to give him a raise commensurate with the role he'd been taking on WWE television, nothing in McMahon's sordid history suggests he cares about his labor outside of a few trusted confidantes from time to time.

With more attention paid to the grisly end to Hart's life, there will be a call from the peanut gallery for him to be inducted into WWE's Hall of Fame. Each time, that argument will be rebuffed, most of the time from the person who rightly doesn't want her husband's memory associated with the company that killed him in the first place, Martha Joan Patterson Hart. Even at the cost of alienating herself from the rest of the Hart family, Martha has been steadfast at not wanting her husband's memory to be co-opted, to be seen as an absolution for the gross negligence perpetrated by McMahon the night her husband died. For this "sin," she has sustained harassment from fans online who think they're owed whatever they want for spending money on wrestling.

I shouldn't have to say it as much as I do, but Martha Hart doesn't owe you a goddamn thing. Laborers and unions have fought for worker safety increases for as long as work has been embedded in the DNA of civilization. The fact that it has taken thousands of years for significant rights and protections to be won for workers in just part of the world shows how precarious the idea of coming home safely at night has always been, and how it can never be taken for granted. The world would stop if no one was able to work, but the people who expect work to be done for them take the workers for granted. When a worker whose death was calculated into the cost of building a bridge in the 19th and early 20th centuries died, it was a tragedy even though the fat cats expected it to happen. When a worker dies after these so-called protections are put in place, the sadness of the death now has the righteous anger to use as a weapon.

McMahon, however, never faced consequences for the stunt gone awry because of the way he classifies his wrestlers as independent contractors and not employees. One of the perks that comes along with this blatant flaunting of disdain for your workers is that McMahon is not responsible for the safety of independent contractors the way he would be for employees. He was negligent with Owen's harness because he was allowed to cut the corner. He wasn't bound by the bare minimum guidelines set forth by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, so Martha or any member of his family had no recourse to go after McMahon. If I saw my husband die on television, had to raise my children without their father to be there with them, had to live with that grief for the rest of my life, and had no way to make the person who was DIRECTLY responsible for that death be held accountable outside of an $18 million civil settlement which, as McMahon will remind you, is barely a dent in his overall wealth, I might not give a flying fuck what some dipshit wrestling fan says about honoring my husband. Do you know who doesn't get to honor Owen Hart? The man whose hands his blood is on and the people who willfully neglect that fact just to have him talked about for a half-hour at some bullshit show the night before WrestleMania.

If it were just the fans, the problem would be annoying but not major in the grand scheme of things. The problem comes when McMahon and his company surrogates start mouthing off. Take for example Jerry McDevitt, WWE's legal counsel. With the DSotR episode forthcoming, Martha spoke to CBS Sports' Brent Brookhouse in an interview. The article text contained responses from McDevitt, who predictably played the company line on all accounts, including trying to paint Martha as some kind of parasitic opportunist because she wanted double what the settlement eventually ended up being. You can't put a price on life, but for someone worth 10 figures like McMahon, I'd think the pain of losing a husband and a father can be worth $35 million. But what do I know, right? Regardless, what McDevitt said that really turned my stomach was this line:

Martha was not even remotely interested in finding out what happened that night; she just wanted to used it as a vehicle to beat up a business that she didn't like that her husband was in, the wrestling business.

I guess it takes a corporate lawyer defending a billionaire to have the gall to say those words in that order in a sentence describing a woman widowed by the business, but it's still shocking to see to what lows someone can stoop in defense of capital. It shouldn't matter if Martha didn't want Owen in the wrestling business; it certainly didn't matter that McMahon himself hates wrestling and yet has made a fortune off it. All bets are off when a person goes to work with the expectation that they'd survive the day and then doesn't come home in one piece if at all. You can read the accounts of the corners that McMahon cut to get that stunt off, how they used "hackers" instead of qualified riggers or the wrong equipment. It's sickening, and the fact that Martha won her settlement with an admission of guilt from McMahon, whether or not it was "genuine," shows the law was on her side, as discomforting as that can be where McMahon served no jail time or loss of business.

Forces greater than anything a neckbearded rando who still treats wrestling more like a possession rather than a hobby in their 40s are at work to make sure Martha Hart doesn't find peace, that she hands over things they feel are owed. I will repeat it. Martha Hart owes no one anything. She doesn't owe Vince McMahon or Jerry McDevitt a goddamn thing. Maybe they should be thankful that she wishes them no specific harm other than being unable to profit from the image of her dead husband. In a normal world, one might consider that a slap on the wrist given how culpable WWE was for his death with how little justice it faced for the action.