Former WWE Writer Reveals Charles Manson Wanted To Meet Bray Wyatt, WWE ‘Immediately’ Shut Idea Down

Stories about the late Windham Rotunda.

The newest episode of Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Wrestling with Freddie podcast featured former WWE writer Nick Manfredini. Manfredini worked closely with the late Windham Rotunda a.k.a. Bray Wyatt.

He stated that a lot of Rotunda’s early on-screen work was inspired by criminal/cult leader Charles Manson. One of Windham’s old college football teammates ended up becoming a guard at the prison where Manson was incarcerated. Manfredini shared that the guard showed Manson some of Windham’s wrestling promos, and Manson wanted to meet him.

Windham’s father, Mike Rotunda, worked as a producer for WWE, and he mentioned that Manson wanted to meet his son. Manfredini said that got back to either Vince McMahon or Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, and the idea was immediately shut down. Nick had the idea in mind for him and Windham to go visit Manson on their own time, but he later realized the entire idea was terrible.

“So, he was very Charles Manson-inspired, right? My YouTube search history back then was just Charles Manson and cult leader for anybody who looked it up. So I’ve probably seen every Charles Manson quote, every video, every promo that he ever cut. We were trying to take little pieces from each one, and that was the style we wanted to go for. To get off topic, Charles Manson — I don’t know if this story has ever been told — Windham’s teammate, former teammate in college football, became a prison guard at Charles Manson’s prison. Allegedly, this guy showed Manson the Bray Wyatt promos, and he wanted to meet him, and this was a whole thing. I swear. It is 100 percent true, and so, Mike Rotunda knew about it, and I think he brought it up to somebody. I don’t know if it was Hunter or Vince (McMahon) or someone and they immediately squashed it. Obviously, that’s terrible… Because they were like, ‘Can we shoot a Network special with Charles Manson?’ It was immediately squashed, and then afterwards, I was like, ‘Let’s just go. Next time we’re in Northern California, me and you, let’s just put on a hat or something. Nobody will know it’s you. Let’s just go meet him.’ I thought more about it and obviously it was a terrible, terrible idea. Would have been a good story but, a bad idea… It was like, wait a minute, this would be so fun — weird to do. But, obviously, Bray Wyatt probably would have never seen TV again if we did that.”

Elsewhere on the Windham front, Nick Manfredini shared that before his passing in the summer of 2023, he had been speaking with Windham about developing a TV series.

“We always — both kind of looked at it like, this is a springboard to that. So let’s stick together at WWE and then, move on to something else. Because that’s always what he wanted to do. The summer of 2023, he called me. I think this was the last time I spoke to him on the phone and he said he was having these meetings with people about developing stuff for TV. So his mind goes 100 miles an hour, and he’s like, ‘We gotta do this, do this, do this.’ So, we started putting together an idea for a TV series. This was like June 2023. So, I started putting together stuff, doing research, and obviously, nothing came of it. He had all these ideas that were not used. We had a lot of WWE stuff that wasn’t used. I don’t wanna see it go to waste, so, gotta figure out a way to take some of that, do something with him, obviously with his family. I’m not doing it on my own, and kind of figure out a way to bring this stuff to life and make his dream come true, in a way. So, hopefully we can do that at some point. It was a little hard to get back to it but, I wanna start relooking at that stuff again and finishing it. Seeing if we can do something with it.”

Windham’s last match was a Lights Out Street Fight against L.A. Knight at a WWE house show.

If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Wrestling with Freddie with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.