Nary a year goes by without a wedding taking place in a wrestling ring. This year, Bully Ray tried to tie the knot with Brooke Hogan. Last year, it was Daniel Bryan being jilted at the altar by AJ Lee. Wrestling weddings are so commonplace and so consistently wacky that, frankly, about the only thing you would never expect from a wedding angle is both the bride and groom saying, “I do.”
Well, that, and rape.
If you weren’t watching WWE in 2004, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, prepare yourself for a story of coerced sex, miscarriage, and real-life infidelity.
Hold up, that sounds like a lot to cover in just one induction, so for now, let’s just stick with the “coerced sex” part.
Our story began with Kane stalking Lita (but, unlike DDP, Kane would only do it on Monday nights). Matt Hardy, having a quick change of heart after having dumped Lita months earlier, would have none of that, and would come to Lita’s rescue…
…and continually get beaten up for his troubles. Kane was understandably frustrated; after all, that Hardy character was such a cock-block!
After more stalking, Lita finally gave in to Kane’s demands, but only under the condition that he leave Matt alone. Put another way, Kane would continue to physically destroy Matt Hardy unless Lita had sex with him, which meets the legal definition of rape. Fast forward a few weeks, and a positive pregnancy test had proven the Team Extreme alum to be with child (Lita, that is, not Matt. That would have to wait until 2010).
Matt Hardy marked the occasion by proposing to Lita, saying he was glad to start a family. This was wrestling, of course, so every special moment had to be ruined. Kane came onto the Titantron and revealed that it was not Matt who was the father, but himself, adding that they didn’t call him the Big Red Machine for nothing! I made that last part up, but the rest was true.
Matt was initially devastated, but decided that he would marry Lita anyway, demon-seed and all. He was willing to get married anywhere and under any conditions, even eloping. A shotgun wedding, however, would never have had the honor of being booked second on the Summerslam card, so such a ceremony never materialized. Instead, Lita McFly had to prove she wasn’t a chicken by agreeing to marry whomever won the upcoming Kane-Hardy match; viewers at home just hoped the baby wouldn’t inherit his mother’s intelligence.
Still, Lita was confident in her stupid and unnecessary risk with no conceivable (pun!) upside, insisting to Kane that Matt was “twice the man that you will ever be.” Sadly, she did not follow this up by declaring that Matt had half the brain that Kane did. Considering that Matt ended up agreeing to the “winner-marries-Lita” stipulation, that Freudian slip wouldn’t have been too far off.
The stage was set, and at Summerslam, Matt battled for Lita’s hand in marriage in the “Till Death Do Us Part” match (or, as Lillian Garcia called it, the “Till Death Do Us Apart” match). With Hardy needing to take time off for an injury, though, Kane won the match and the right to marry Lita, leaving Matt to wonder why he and his fiancée didn’t just elope the night before.
As the big day approached, Trish and the other heel Divas organized a bridal shower for Lita to rub it in that she was going to marry her abusive rapist. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Molly Holly say the word, “condoms,” then shame on you.
Then came the wedding day itself. For the big day, Kane decked everything at ringside in white, even wearing a white tuxedo. This kind of macabre spectacle was not what Billy Idol had in mind when he wrote “White Wedding.” No, wait, it probably was. Seriously, people, stop playing that song un-ironically at your wedding receptions!
Lita protested by wearing a black gown and vowing, “I love, and I will always love, Matt Hardy.“
Ha! Good one!
Kane spared no expense on the wedding, hiring a string ensemble to play his entrance music and getting some little people to be his best man and flower girl (because he’s evil and they’re icky). He even put together a video package highlighting the great moments in his and Lita’s relationship, such as the time she went into a bathroom stall to pee on her pregnancy test. I have to hand it to Kane: this might have been the only time that footage of the bride in the ladies’ room has ever been shown at a wedding (although I have never been invited to witness any of Jerry Lawler’s nuptials).
Really, it’s amazing that with all the video evidence of stalking and rape, Kane never so much as got arrested and hauled to a jail across the street from the arena, a la Goldberg. At least that way, it might have inexplicably taken the Devil’s Favorite Demon half an hour to make his way back to the arena after being released, by which time Matt Hardy would have taken his place at the altar. (Note: I will refrain from making any jokes about Lita laying down for Matt, and I will definitely not make any jokes involving a “Fingerpoke of Doom”)
Eric Bischoff then read a passage supposedly from the Bible’s book of “A-fizzy-ins” that sounded more like it came from a cheesy 80’s R&B love song you might hear on a commercial for the Body+Soul compilation CD. In fact, I think Kane might have even used one of those songs in his video package.
Finally, when it came for the “I do”s, Lita gave hers with much hesitation, but right before Kane could say “I do” himself, he was interrupted by none other than Matt Hardy. Coincidentally, Matt’s music began with the words, “Ohh yeahhh!” It’s a shame the minister didn’t confuse the sound bite for Kane’s voice and pronounce The Big Red Machine and Lita man and wife right then and there.
Matt Hardy declared that the wedding could not take place because the night before, he and Lita had gotten married at a drive-thru chapel. He showed the video footage, proving that the bride was now Mrs. Matt Hardy, and there was nothing Kane could do about it! With Kane fuming, Lita left the Big Red Machine at the altar and rode off into the sunset with Matt, a perfect conclusion to this awful angle and a clever reference to Triple H and Stephanie’s “wedding” five years earlier. Of course, nothing in this paragraph actually happened.
Instead, Matt Hardy tried to save the day and escape with Lita (which he could have done literally any time before 10:40 Eastern Standard Time, August 23rd, 2004 without having to worry about being savaged by Kane). The effort was all for naught, however, as Matt was quickly chokeslammed off the entrance ramp, his fall broken only by a group of tables placed conveniently on the arena floor below for whatever reason. Kane then said “I do,” binding Lita to him for life, unless she got a divorce or an annulment, which would have been pretty easy to do considering that she was physically threatened and blackmailed into sex and then forced into the marriage by the outcome of a wrestling match, two things that courts these days frown upon. Feminists.
But no, The Big Red Monster and Lita would for the foreseeable future remain “Mr. and Mrs. Kane,” as Jerry Lawler dubbed them. Speaking of which, what exactly happens with the last names when two people with one name each get married? Would Lita be Mrs. Lita ______? Mrs. Lita Taker? Mrs. Lita Bearer? Whatever the case, Kane deserves credit for organizing a rare, “successful” wrestling wedding, which hadn’t been seen since Al Wilson and Dawn Marie’s naked wedding on Smackdown. Plus, Kane gets bonus points for not dropping dead from excessive love-making on the honeymoon.
Oddly enough, it is next to impossible to find footage of the wedding online that hasn’t been removed by WWE. Do you think it’s because of the midgets used as “freak show” props? Or because Trish came out wearing this?
Nah, it’s probably because of the rape storyline.
(Author’s note: There is a whole other chapter to this Kane-Lita saga, but that will have to wait for another induction, lest this article run on too long. What I’m saying is, when it came to writing up only the first chapter of this Gooker-worthy storyline, it wasn’t my fault.)