The last few years have been eventful for CM Punk to say the least. Unfortunately his run with AEW didn’t go as smoothly as some had hoped and he ended up making a surprise appearance backstage at Raw in May of 2023 despite the fact that he was still under contract with All Elite Wrestling. There were a lot of questions following CM Punk’s surprise appearance at Raw and he recently explained how it happened during an appearance on the MMA Hour.
“I saw him (Paul Levesque), I don’t know where it was when I went to the building to visit people and I got thrown out (he laughed)… So I saw him for like a heartbeat there… I think obviously, things happen behind the scenes in sports and they take on lives of their own and people run with it and people might not know the details and of course everybody thinks, oh, we hate each other. Like on-site, fist fight-hate each other and I don’t know if that was ever the case but, that’s kind of what we needed to talk about and I saw him back in May and then I think he had to make a phone call and somebody was like, ‘No, get him out of the building.’ I’m like, ‘Alright.’ Yeah (that was Vince McMahon’s call).
I was on a flight back to Chicago (from a C.F.F.C. show) and I’m sitting next to a guy named Jason Jordan, who, he was a wrestler, got a neck injury. Now he’s been a producer at WWE for quite some time and the last time I saw him was every bit of a decade ago when I was doing some charity stuff for Steve Keirn. This is pre-NXT, it was called FCW and I see him and I’m looking at him and he looks at me and he says, ‘Hi’ and I’m like, sh*t, dude doesn’t recognize me. Okay, you know? And then all of a sudden, he turns and he looks and he was like, ‘Holy sh*t, what are you doing here?’ And I’m like, ‘I thought it was you’ and I’m chatting with him and I see all these other wrestlers getting on the plane and stuff like that and then there’s a whole gap, there’s a generation of people I never met that started pretty much right after I left; 2014, 2015. Nice lady by the name of Liv Morgan helped me find my earbuds that fell out of my pocket while I was sleeping on the flight. She was a sweetheart. Whole plane empties and she’s on her hands and knees and looking around. She’s got small hands, she’s digging under the seats and looking for stuff and then my friend Bayley messaged me. She’s like, ‘Oh, my friend Liv was on the flight with you. She says you were so nice to her. We have a show in Chicago. You should come visit.’ I’m throwing Bayley under the bus now. Yeah, it’s all her fault and then I laughed because I landed, got on the train, went home and I was — no wife, no dog, I don’t have anything to do and I’m just like, yeah, I’m gonna go visit my friend Bayley and I went.
No, I expected it (that I was going to be asked to leave)… I wasn’t sure if Vince was there or if he — I think he was doing stuff remote via Zoom, because this in in-between Vince is gone, now he’s back and I didn’t know the politics of things. I literally just went to go say hi to Bayley, a few other people.”
CM Punk went on to say that some in AEW felt betrayed when he added, “Oh yeah (people from AEW were upset I was at Raw in April 2023)… I think the word ‘betrayed’ was used and I was just like, alright man. As a company, you’re allowing guys to go on their television show to do things. I went backstage to say hi to friends. It’s two completely different things. If you’re gonna be mad about it, okay.”
