WWE Crown Jewel 2026 is just a few days away amidst the tense situation in Saudi Arabia and its neighbouring countries. Amidst this chaos, former WWE Co-President George Barrios talked about an infamous incident that took place after the 2019 edition of the event.
After Crown Jewel 2019, a flight scheduled to take WWE talent and staff back to the US faced a delay in Saudi Arabia of nearly a full day. Vince McMahon and a few other top stars and executives left early in a private jet and didn’t face these issues. However, the company had to rewrite the following episode of SmackDown due to unavailability of talent.
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George Barrios was the Co-President of WWE at the time. He reflected on the incident during a recent conversation on Jeff Jarrett’s My World Podcast. He revealed that they were asked to pay an airport fee in a different country he didn’t name which felt like extortion.
“I think it was exaggerated to some degree, and again, look, back to doing business in other countries, there were other runways around the world where our plane was delayed. I remember somebody calling us like, ‘Hey, there’s a new fee –’ it was not in Riyadh. It was in a different country; I won’t name it. But we’re getting called. Our plane had been delayed… It had gotten serious enough; it had reached my desk. Usually this stuff is just getting handled. But it reached my desk because a new fee had been instituted in this country, airport fee, that was a lot of money to get out. Someone could look at this and say you’re being extorted to being left out of the country,” he said. [2:12:37 onwards]
Fans are hoping that no WWE stars or personnel face such an issue at the upcoming Crown Jewel event.
George Barrios just paid the fee to get the stars back from WWE Crown Jewel in 2019
During the same interview, George revealed how he just asked the people there to pay the fee so they can get back to the USA. The former WWE Co-President talked about getting into legal complications if he hadn’t paid the fee.
“I guess it depends how you wanna look at it. But in that moment, there was a fee… What did I say? I said, ‘Pay the f*cking fee. We’re coming home, right? So I don’t even know why you’re calling me. Yes, it’s a lot of money but yeah, we’re paying the airport fee.’ If anybody’s listening and is gonna charge me with a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I say bulls**t. That was the law in that country and we obeyed it. So when you ask about what happened in Saudi Arabia, I think for the most part, I don’t know exactly and I’m not trying to say there was an analog there. I’m just saying there was a delay and then we got out.”
WWE Crown Jewel is still scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia on November 7th.
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Edited by Ishan Dubey
