Joey Ryan, #SpeakingOut, and the Lawsuits That Followed

In June 2020, multiple women publicly accused Joey Ryan of sexual assault and sexual misconduct during the #SpeakingOut movement. The accusations reached beyond Ryan’s reputation as an independent wrestler. They immediately touched the companies he controlled and the promotion that employed him. Bar Wrestling, the organization Ryan owned, shut down on June 21. The next day, Impact Wrestling terminated his contract. Within forty-eight hours, a public dispute had become an employment decision and the closure of a wrestling company.

Ryan occupied two positions that made the consequences unusually direct. He was a performer working under contract for Impact Wrestling, and he was the owner of Bar Wrestling, an independent promotion built around live events and wrestler bookings. When the allegations became public, those roles produced separate institutional responses. Impact controlled his contract. Ryan controlled Bar Wrestling. One relationship ended by dismissal; the other ended with the promotion’s shutdown.

The timing mattered. The public accusations surfaced during a movement in which wrestlers and others in the industry used social media to describe alleged sexual misconduct. Ryan’s case moved quickly from individual statements to organizational action. Bar Wrestling closed on June 21, 2020, without continuing as the business Ryan had operated. Impact Wrestling followed on June 22 by firing him. The sequence left Ryan outside the promotion that held his contract and without the independent company attached to his name.

Impact Wrestling’s decision was a termination, not a temporary suspension. The company ended Ryan’s contractual relationship after the allegations became public. That distinction changed his position inside professional wrestling: he was no longer merely responding to accusations as a performer, but contesting the consequences imposed by an employer. Bar Wrestling’s closure had already removed the platform he owned. The two decisions narrowed the available routes back into the business.

Ryan’s next major act came in court. On September 24, 2020, he filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against three of the women who had accused him. The complaint sought more than $15 million in damages. The filing converted the public conflict into civil litigation, placing Ryan’s response against named defendants and a monetary demand measured in millions of dollars.

The lawsuit represented a change in leverage. In June, companies had acted against Ryan after the accusations entered public view. In September, Ryan used a civil complaint to challenge three accusers directly and seek financial compensation. More than $15 million appeared as the amount demanded, not as money awarded. The legal filing gave the dispute a formal case, but it did not by itself settle the competing accounts that had driven the original fallout.

Ryan also tried to present his own account outside the courtroom. He said he had made a one-hour YouTube video that further attempted to tell his side of the story. The video was later deleted. Its removal left the statement as a documented part of his response but not as a lasting public archive that readers could continue to examine.

By March 8, 2021, Ryan had changed the scale of his legal campaign. In a public statement, he said he was dropping most of his defamation lawsuits while keeping the lawsuit against Impact Wrestling open. The decision separated the claims against individual accusers from the dispute with the promotion that had terminated his contract. It also marked a retreat from the broadest version of the litigation strategy announced after the September filing.

The same statement included a personal disclosure. Ryan said he had been attending weekly Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous meetings for the previous eight months. That placed the meetings roughly in the period beginning in July 2020, shortly after the allegations, Bar Wrestling’s shutdown, and Impact’s termination. Ryan offered the disclosure as part of his response to the crisis, linking his public litigation posture with an account of private conduct and attempted change.

The public sequence ended, for this period, with Ryan’s employment already terminated, his promotion closed, most of his defamation suits slated for withdrawal, and the Impact lawsuit still open. The sexual assault and misconduct accusations remained allegations rather than findings entered after a trial. Ryan’s September complaint remained a filing rather than a damages judgment. What the episode established in public was the speed of institutional reaction, the cost to a wrestling company tied to its owner, and the legal counterattack that narrowed but did not disappear by March 2021.