Rob Van Dam says he doesn’t believe a writer came up with Jon Moxley’s spike spot in AEW, because in his view AEW lets its wrestlers run the show.

The WWE Hall of Famer made the comments in a live interview with Wrestling with Rip Rogers, which was posted to YouTube on Tuesday. He was responding to fans who called him a hypocrite for criticizing the spot, given his own time in ECW and TNA.

“Are you telling me that you think that Moxley was given this idea from a writer and they just went along with it? Maybe he thought it was stupid. I don’t buy that because I think the inmates are running the asylum. I think that’s what AEW is about, is the wrestlers get to do more of what they want,” Van Dam said.

“And that’s why there’s more of a variety, and that’s why it’s overall, in the big picture of things, going to be a different style that to me is more amateur-ish, just like the backyard matches, than WWE, who seems to be going back to telling the stories with the wrestling, keeping it simple and making it make sense,” he said. “It was getting so out of hand for a while that, you know, with AEW, they burnt someone’s house down, and I’ve never liked that when someone put staples in their face and stuff.”

Van Dam said a lot of today’s wrestlers weren’t taught to protect the business.

“If the move that you want to do out in the ring, if the setup for it takes so long that it kills the whole match and kills the feeling of competition, then don’t do it because it exposes the business. And now it’s so obvious watching the guys, the young guys,” he said. “And, you know, especially in the smaller company of the two, I’m getting heat for bashing AEW, and I’ll talk about that in a second, which I don’t do, but that is a place where it seems more like the inmates are running the prison, you know? And it’s always been that way. I think that’s the idea with them, is the boys have more control and power.”

Rob Van Dam responds to being called a hypocrite

Van Dam said he has always disliked what he calls garbage wrestling, including during his time in ECW.

“My opinion that I said on my podcast was that I’m not a fan of that stuff. Never have been. And I have always called that garbage wrestling,” he said. “So the fans are saying, ‘You’re a hypocrite. You’re known as one of the most hardcore wrestlers. How can you be bashing AEW?’ Alls I’m saying is that’s not my preference. I think the guy could have got paralyzed. And I don’t want to be anywhere around that myself.”

He also said he “never even bladed one time in ECW.”

Fans pointed to TNA writing Van Dam off TV in 2010 with Abyss attacking him with Janice, a board covered in nails. Van Dam said that happened because he had gone over the number of appearances in his contract.

“One year I had to deal with TNA 75 matches per year. If we go over that, I make extra money. Well, we went over. We were like on 80 something and I wasn’t telling them, and they were so disorganized they didn’t know,” Van Dam said. “They found out, and so they killed me. They had Abyss. He had Janice, which was very similar to that brush of spikes that Jon Moxley had.”

“I thought it was stupid at the time, but I didn’t care. I’m getting paid for it,” he said. “I’ve always said that was stupid. … It wasn’t my idea.”

The spot Van Dam was talking about came in Moxley’s street fight with Adam Copeland on Dynamite in March 2025, when Copeland suplexed Moxley onto a spiked weapon that stuck in his back. Van Dam criticized it on his 1 Of A Kind podcast at the time and later said the worst part about AEW is “the fans on IWC.” Tony Khan defended the spot, saying it brought outside fans in.

Van Dam made his AEW debut on Dynamite in August 2023, challenging Jack Perry for the FTW Championship. He said in the interview that he wrestled for AEW four or five times, each on a one-match deal.