Speaking on the My World podcast with Jeff Jarrett, former WWE Chief Financial Officer and Co-President, George Barrios, recounted the night WWE Superstars and crew got stuck on an airplane in Saudi Arabia in 2019, calling the incident somewhat “exaggerated” by the media.

Barrios said that before the plane was set to depart, he received a phone call saying that there’s a new airport fee they had to pay, calling it “a lot of money.” Barrios said that the issue was not at Riyadh airport, but in a different country he did not want to name.

It had gotten serious enough that it had reached my desk. Usually this stuff is just getting handled,” Barrios said. “But it reached my desk because a new fee had been instituted in this country, an airport fee, that was a lot of money to get out.”

He recounted how he instructed the staff to “pay the f*cking fee” and bring everybody home and wondered why they even called him since it had to be paid anyway to depart.

“If anybody’s listening and is gonna charge me with a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I say bullshit. That was the then law in that country and we obeyed it,” Barrios continued.

The FCPA is a federal law, enacted in 1977, which makes it illegal for individuals or U.S. companies to bribe foreign government officials to obtain or retain business.

“I think for the most part, and 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. I’ll leave it at that,” Barrios concluded.