A nonprofit organization has gone public with a claim that Jacob Fatu failed to return money for a fundraiser event that he did not attend.
Darby McCarthy, a reporter for Wisconsin affiliate TV station NBC 21, first broke the story.
Jenn Harper, director of Jake’s Network of Hope, explained that the nonprofit decided to stage a wrestling fundraiser show in April at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI.
Harper commented:
One of my old coworkers is a wrestler and he’s like, “Hey, I know a guy. Are you interested?” And I was like, “Yes, yes we are.”
Sonn after, Billy Gunn, Vampiro, Tatanka, Brian Pillman Jr, and Jacob Fatu were booked for the show.
However, Jenn Harper said that Fatu pulled out of the event:
Jacob called and said that there was a family emergency. We gave him the benefit of the doubt because, at Jake’s, we are 100% about family and I said, “If he can’t make it, that’s fine.
Harper said all she asked was for her nonprofit to be reimbursed for the money spent on Fatu’s fee and plane ticket:
We rescheduled the flight that he missed originally and about an hour after that flight took off, we were made aware from him that he wasn’t coming. After that, he ghosted us, he ghosted the production team that puts together the wrestling show and he ghosted the person that booked him for us.
The total amount the organization says it is owed is $2,633.
Harper stated that she and her staff originally planned to keep quiet about the incident. They went public after seeing posts on social media from other organizations claiming that Fatu had done the same thing to them.
Harper added that “a major name from Jacob Fatu’s wrestling family” heard about the incident. The unnamed person, who no longer wrestles, reached out to offer an appearance at Jake’s wrestling fundraiser next year:
It was kind of really out of the blue to get a phone call from somebody of that magnitude to say, “Hey, what can we do? How can we help?”
At the time of publication, Jacob Fatu has not commented on the allegations, either to NBC 21, or publicly through his social media channels.
