“Rick Santorum was a lawyer for professional wrestling. It sounds like a surreal plot of political pulp fiction, but it’s true.”
The Daily Beast has an article detailing Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s ties to WWE in the late 1980s. Santorum was part of a team that lobbied the Pennsylvania government to get wrestling to be categorized as “entertainment” instead of “sport,” saving the company any government oversight as well as allowing them to avoid paying local taxes and fees to the state athletic commission.
Santorum has never denied his role in deregulating wrestling in Pennsylvania as an associate counsel at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart in the late 1980s, but when asked about this odd chapter in his professional history, he understandably focuses on the free-market financial benefits of his efforts.
“I was at the center of that,” Santorum proudly told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Pennsylvania was the most pernicious of states when it came to regulation. They made you pay all this money to the boxing [athletic] commission. They used to just rape these guys. You’d have to pay a certain percentage of the gate receipts to have these officials just stand around and watch the match. It was ridiculous.”
