Passing Of Young AEW Star PAC Comes As Former Wrestler Reveals Industry’s Alarming ‘Premature’ Death Toll

Christy Hemme Calls For Better Pay, Protection For Pro Wrestling Peers

Benjamin Satterley started wrestling in 2004 and took his high-flying style from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to rings around the world. In WWE, as Adrian Neville, he won the NXT Championship. In 2019, he became one of the first professional wrestlers to sign with All Elite Wrestling, where fans knew him as PAC. On Sept. 27, hours after wrestling for AEW’s National Championship, the chiseled star was found dead, slumped over behind the wheel of a car parked outside an Illinois restaurant. He was 40.

Multiple media outlets reported that police found no signs of foul play, and the mysterious cause of death is for the Cook County Medical Examiner to determine.

Pro wrestling has said early goodbyes before. Former wrestler Christy Hemme has counted 500 professional wrestlers who died before 65 across 50 years, in an essay titled “Wrestlers Are Wrestling.” Satterley isn’t part of that count, which runs through 2024, and Hemme is clear that it measures lives lost, not risk. What she wants to know is whether the business takes care of its performers for the long haul.

Hemme, who spent more than two decades in wrestling as a performer, producer, and department head, posted the essay to the research-sharing site SSRN. She writes that safety concerns she raised in earlier industry roles went unaddressed, and that those experiences led her to study the issues more systematically. She also stresses that she is not trying to steer anyone away from the business: “I love and revere professional wrestling,” she writes.

Her essay has not been peer-reviewed.

Hemme pairs the count with published death-rate studies, fundraising records, pay figures, and court filings. She argues that the problems are not confined to any one era, company, or generation of talent. At the center of the essay is a question about employment: whether wrestlers on exclusive contracts are truly independent contractors, or employees who should have bargaining rights and long-term healthcare protections.

Tracking 50 Years of Pro Wrestler Deaths

Hemme drew her entries from publicly available records, then filtered and cross-referenced them, keeping only people whose wrestling careers could be confirmed through public documentation. Most were far from obscure, she writes, with major promotion exposure, championships, industry awards, or Hall of Fame recognition. She does not spell out which sources she searched or how she resolved conflicting records, so readers can’t retrace every step.

Grouped into five-year blocks, the count climbed steadily, from roughly 13 deaths in 1975 to 1979 to about 94 in 2020 to 2024, based on the essay’s bar chart. Those are raw counts, and Hemme herself writes that her analysis “does not assess individual risk of premature death.” Wrestling has grown over those decades, and without knowing how many people wrestled professionally in each period, nobody can say from these numbers whether an individual wrestler’s odds of dying young have gone up or down.

Hemme’s point is narrower. Many in the business assume, she writes, that modern wellness policies and concussion awareness have begun correcting wrestling’s darkest historical patterns. She counters that as more wrestlers have reached their 40s and 50s, long-term health concerns have remained visible across multiple studies and datasets.

A second, smaller review in the essay looks at the top of the card. Hemme examined 40 performers featured in WrestleMania’s closing main event, the most coveted slot in the business. Of those, 28 (70%) experienced what she calls “a serious and medically disruptive outcome,” meaning early death, medically forced extended breaks or retirement, or life-threatening medical conditions. Her essay doesn’t list the 40 names or the years covered.

Heart Disease Leads Pro Wrestler Deaths

Hemme’s essay doesn’t break down causes of death within her own dataset. Instead, she cites two published studies. A 2014 study in the journal PLoS ONE found heart and blood vessel disease was the leading cause of premature death among professional wrestlers, accounting for about 38% of the deaths it examined.

A 2026 study of professional wrestlers, which Hemme describes as a WWE cohort study, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine and co-authored by Reidar Lystad, found heart and circulatory disease accounted for about 41% of wrestler deaths.

Those numbers stand out because elite athletes usually fare better than everyone else. They are generally expected to outlive the general population by about four to seven years, thanks to lower rates of heart disease and cancer. Research comparing NFL and Major League Baseball players found a different story in football, with elevated death rates from heart disease and brain-wasting diseases among NFL players, who compete in a collision sport.

Hemme, who describes herself as a former collision sport performer, lists many forces that can wear down a wrestler’s body: drug and alcohol use, constant travel, lack of sleep, chronic stress, injury, and “the pressure to perform through all of it.”

She also points to a less obvious link between the brain and the heart. Through the autonomic nervous system, the body’s automatic control network, the brain helps regulate heart rate and blood pressure. Researchers have been examining whether traumatic brain injuries and repeated hits to the head may throw that system off, including changes in heart rate variability, a measure of how the timing between heartbeats shifts.

This graph shows 500 premature wrestler deaths over 50 years; of the deaths where a cause was known, 35% were cardiac.

Peer-reviewed research has found 35–41% of deaths in studied wrestler cohorts were cardiovascular/circulatory, with cardiovascular mortality elevated compared… pic.twitter.com/fTZcvvLh4k

— Christy (@hemmepowered) September 30, 2026

Those hits don’t have to produce a diagnosed concussion. When a wrestler takes a bump and lands on the upper back, the brain can shift backward and rebound forward inside the skull even if the head never hits the mat, according to an illustration in the essay. Researchers have found such repeated non-concussive impacts may affect that nervous system over time.

Hemme is careful here too. Repeated head trauma “does not explain the broader cardiovascular mortality patterns observed in professional wrestling,” she writes, though it may be one more factor in the strain that builds over a career.

Brain health is a concern in its own right. Wrestlers in the 2026 study had about 68% higher death rates than the general population from neurodegenerative diseases, a group that includes ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other dementias, according to Hemme. In personal correspondence, she writes, Lystad told her his study may have undercounted those diseases, since former athletes who die from causes such as drug overdose or suicide may have underlying brain disease that is never recorded as a contributing cause of death.

For Hemme, the issue turned personal during her research when, she writes, one of her dearest friends, a former wrestler, was diagnosed with ALS. Hemme notes that ALS remains relatively rare and that no single diagnosis explains the wider health problems in wrestling. Citing Lystad, she stresses that many factors supporting brain health can still be influenced, from prioritizing sleep and limiting alcohol to staying physically active.

She also flags a gap: many wrestlers may not know where to turn when neurological symptoms appear. Her essay lists the Concussion & CTE Foundation’s HelpLine and Research Registry as starting points.

Crowdfunding, Contracts, and Pay

Hemme opens her essay with an October 2024 match in which wrestler Chris Bey was left paralyzed from the neck down by an ordinary maneuver. By her account, Bey, still conscious, told the referee to take the match to “the finish,” wrestling’s term for a bout’s planned ending, and his opponent delivered the closing move after the referee turned Bey into place. Hemme calls that instinct “a reflex ingrained in wrestling culture.” In the days that followed, she writes, the industry rallied, and a fundraiser brought in more than $100,000 for his recovery. “It was an act of community and generosity,” Hemme writes. “It was also a signal.”

Public fundraising campaigns appear repeatedly in her data. Across her dataset, Hemme found more than 50 documented public fundraising efforts tied to wrestlers who later died before 65. Together they raised more than $1.5 million for medical care, funeral costs, and financial hardship. A large majority, she writes, involved performers who had worked within major promotions’ exclusive contract systems. Hemme calls it “increasingly strange that crowdfunding has effectively become part of professional wrestling’s healthcare safety net.”

She ties that reliance to how wrestlers are classified. Wrestling largely operates on an independent contractor model, she notes, and existing labor and safety protections depend heavily on that label. Yet contracts at major promotions, she writes, often restrict outside work and give the company broad control over a performer’s professional activities. She cites a clause that she says appears in many agreements: “Performer may, subject to the company’s prior written consent, engage in other professional endeavors…”

Pay is the other half of her argument. In the NFL, NHL, and NBA, she notes, players collectively receive about 50% of league revenue through negotiated labor agreements. WWE talent, by comparison, were paid about 15% of company revenue in 2022, according to 2026 POST Wrestling reporting based on court filings that Hemme cites, with company materials projecting similar percentages through 2028.

StudyFinds reached out to WWE for comment but did not receive a response.

According to Hemme’s summary, researchers behind the 2026 cohort study concluded that reducing early deaths in wrestling will likely require addressing worker misclassification, inadequate government regulatory oversight, and financial rewards out of proportion to the risks performers absorb.

She adds that not every wrestler should be classified the same way, and that fans, who already cover rising ticket prices and repeated crowdfunding appeals, should not bear the cost of stronger protections.

Road Warrior Animal and the WWE Concussion Lawsuit

Joseph Laurinaitis, who wrestled as Road Warrior Animal, was among the plaintiffs in a concussion-related class-action lawsuit that, as Hemme describes it, challenged the industry’s classification structure and long-term health protections. In the complaint, he described the pressure to keep working: “WWE is a big dance, if you don’t do it, someone else will, and 99% of the time you perform under duress. Injured you suck it up and perform, keep your mouth shut.”

Laurinaitis, a former tag team legend who took Hemme under his wing when she was breaking into the business, died of a heart attack at 60.

The case was eventually dismissed, and none of its claims were proven in court. Of its 53 named plaintiffs, 19 are now deceased, according to Hemme

In the days after his death, Satterley’s peers praised his skill, his professionalism, and especially his kindness. Hemme’s essay asks the industry for something harder than a good tribute. It asks wrestling to decide, while its performers are still in the ring, whether the people who are the product have a real claim to bargaining power and long-term healthcare.