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This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records.
The FBI charged a man with stalking members of a nude wrestling website after he allegedly used multiple phone numbers, Facebook messages and WhatsApp texts to threaten their friends and families.
From March through May 2023, a New York man named Steven Santiago called a wrestler for BG East 533 times, according to the criminal complaint. In 1980, BG East “started as the principal producer for BG Enterprise, the original gay-oriented wrestling company,” according to its very good website. Wrestlers use stage names and do erotic, nude wrestling, which fans can buy as subscriptions to the site or on a pay-per-view basis.
The “Philadelphia Victim,” as he’s called in the complaint, started receiving messages from an unknown person who demanded information about other wrestlers as early as 2015, the complaint says, but the messages started again and became more intense and violent in 2023. The messages and calls came from dozens of VoIP numbers.