Coach Smiley wrote:disturbing story that we still can't really comprehend, only assumptions, I assume domestic violence coupled with dementia
but what I can understand and quite franky makes me laugh today was the news media for weeks running stories on this every day, digging up Marc Mero from the grave lol, Suoperstar Billy Graham, Chris Nowitzki, all these people with their agendas, and what really shocks me is how well WWE survived that vicious storm of backlash, first steroids and then this, in spite of how bad their PR was (although they've made far-reaching efforts since to make it better), that company can survive anything
I think Nowinski deserves a bit of a distinction from the others. He's made this issue the focus of his post-wrestling career and he was involved with it before Benoit's death and is still involved with it 5 years later. He's not Mero or Graham who have terrible relationships with WWE and seemed to use this platform to even the score so to speak.
Also, as you mentioned WWE has made numerous efforts to reduce the likelihood of this circumstance or something similar repeating itself. And if you look at the things WWE was saying in the immediate aftermath of this story, most notably Vince McMahon's comments about not realizing he'd been around a monster after all these years giving the impression that Benoit was pure evil and his condition was not at all related to the profession he was in, it was not a shoo-in that WWE would take the issue of head trauma as seriously as they should have and have. And that shift was partially because they couldn't ignore the science but also public pressure. In both of those areas Nowinski deserves credit because his center has been at the forefront of the research on this topic and he's been a very strong public advocate on the seriousness of this issue.