CM Punk’s controversial departure from AEW is completely absent from the company’s new official book—and now, the author is revealing exactly why.
This Book Is All Elite: The Inside Story of All Elite Wrestling, written by veteran wrestling journalist Keith Elliot Greenberg, was released to chronicle AEW’s first five years. But one glaring omission stood out to fans: there’s no mention of Punk’s backstage issues, his fights, or his eventual firing. Speaking with Futures of Wrestling, Greenberg explained the decision.
“Some people have brought this up. Whenever I write a book, I’m always going to be criticised… One of the criticisms I telegraphed in advance, and I even discussed this with AEW, was that people were going to be unhappy that I don’t talk about whatever chicanery occurred backstage that led to the departure of CM Punk.”
According to Greenberg, this wasn’t meant to be a full exposé. AEW brought him in to write a tribute, not a tell-all. He even compared it to writing a celebratory book about his favorite baseball team and intentionally leaving out the scandals.
“This is a tribute book. If I wrote a book about the New York Mets… I would talk about the two World Series runs, I would talk about their marquee players, but I wouldn’t talk about the fact that the owners at the time were supposedly investors with Bernie Madoff… I was asked to do a book that is a tribute to AEW during the first five years, and that doesn’t belong in a tribute book, because really, we’re just talking about one or two incidents.”
Despite the absence of CM Punk’s drama, Greenberg insists the book still delivers meaningful behind-the-scenes content for fans.
“There’s a lot of backstage stuff in it, and a lot of positive backstage stuff in the book… So it’s not like it’s all surface stuff, there’s deep stuff that you wouldn’t know about, and I don’t think the book suffers at all from not mentioning an unfortunate incident backstage.”
One example? Greenberg points to the origin of Stadium Stampede, how The Acclaimed were formed, and even stories involving Toni Storm and Mariah May—who he notes is now in NXT under the name Blake Monroe after signing with WWE in June 2025.
So while This Book Is All Elite skips the chaos surrounding CM Punk’s exit, it does so by design—not by oversight.
Do you agree with leaving CMPunk’s exit out of AEW’s book? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comment section below.
