William Regal Reveals The Truth Behind His 1997 Airplane Arrest

Speaking on this week's episode of the Gentleman Villain podcast, William Regal provided more details surrounding his 1997 arrest.

Regal was flying back to the United States following a tour with New Japan Pro-Wrestling (who had a working relationship with WCW), when an incident on the airplane caused an emergency landing and ended with Regal (along with a couple of his colleagues) behind bars.

"There's an incident that happened on an airplane which has been blown out of proportion to what actually happened. I got on a plane in Tokyo, should have landed in Detroit, to do Nitro. I took some pills. I went to the toilet. The door was one of those old kinds of fashion planes with a concertina door. I stood there and my foot was stopping the door shutting. I hadn't locked the door. A stewardess came behind me and said, 'Excuse me, sir'. I turned around and nothing funny or clever about it, I peed on the lady's foot. They landed the plane and I woke up in a jail cell in Alaska. I wasn't the only person on that plane. I wasn't the reason that they landed that plane". 

Though the plane was forced to make an emergency stop in Anchorage before arriving at its planned destination, Regal wasn't the reason for it.

As he explains:

"There was a paparazzi guy in the back who flipped out and started punching people. That was the reason they landed that and they just threw me off. I'm not going to incriminate anyone, but they threw a couple of other wrestlers off because they were doing things as well. They were like me. They won't have any idea what they were doing. But I do know what they were doing because WCW investigated this and I found out what they were doing. They got away with it. I didn't. Soon as this went to court, this lady said, 'No, he wasn't doing anything malicious. It was just a drunken incident'".

While Regal declined to name the other two WCW wrestlers on the flight, a quick record check indicates he was accompanied by Scott Norton and Marcus 'Buff' Bagwell, who were known in WCW as the Vicious & Delicious tag team and had been invited to New Japan to participate in the G1 Climax tournament.

Regal's WCW status was up in the air (pardon the pun) following the arrest, but he was reinstated to work once the company had finished their internal investigation.

H/T WrestlingNews.co