They’re on to him. (Screenshot: Twitter. The same credit goes for all of the other screenshots in this article.)

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Late Friday night, former ROH and WWE wrestler/producer Adam “Joey Mercury” Birch tweeted a fairly loaded message. Among other things accused Ring of Honor General Manager (the real kind) Greg Gilleland of using a burner account to smear him, @im24tank, to smear him on Twitter. I’m not embedding the actual tweet because Substack currently handles multi-image tweets oddly, so in addition to the link, here’s a screenshot:

He had also hinted at this earlier in the day:

Based on the content of @im24tank’s oddly sporadic tweet history (archived here, as well as here and here as screenshots), whoever behind the account is clearly someone who wants to be seen as an ROH insider, regardless of whether or not they actually are. Gilleland, meanwhile, has long been a target of those venting about their experiences with the Sinclair Broadcasting-owned version of the promotion, most notably Jim Cornette. He has been the biggest target of Mercury’s ire, eventually joined in the public crusade by Women of Honor Champion Kelly Klein and her husband, All Elite Wrestling producer B.J. Whitmer. Friday’s deeply sourced Newsweek article about ROH mentions Gilleland numerous times, doing everything from shading talent to Mercury to seemingly admitting that ROH has a policy of paying all female talent at the exact same rate.

As for “im24tank,” they haven’t said much of substance, but they appeared to be trying to discredit Mercury by bringing up his handling of Klein missing a South African indie booking after she suffered a concussion in England. The account also (archived here for context) said in a reply that they “heard joey was one of the main people that pissed Juice [Robinson] off,” punctuating the tweet by classifying it as “Irony,” (Mercury included a screenshot of text messages from Juice denying it with the aforementioned accusation that the account belonged to Gilleland.) Perhaps most curiously, after a five month break, the account replied (archived here for context) to a September tweet speculating a 2020 sale of ROH to WWE by Sinclair, saying that it could explain a lot of their recent decisions. with the instructions to “Getcha popcorn ready!”

So, is it Gilleland? Well, there is one way to try to figure that out.

If you don’t have two-factor authentication turned on for your Twitter account (you really, really should turn it on), then using “Forgot your password?” function it brings up a menu asking if you want the password reset link sent via email and/or text message. Here’s the thing: It does so with the menu showing mostly starred out versions of your email address and/or mobile phone number. (If you have two-factor authentication turned on, then it asks you to enter the email address and mobile phone number yourself.) It’s probably not the most secure move on Twitter’s part, but it can be journalistically useful. I figured I’d try this trick for @im24tank, and, well, look what I found:

According to screenshots I've seen*, one of Gilleland’s work emails at ROH/Sinclair is gsgilleland@sbgtv.com, which matches up perfectly with the masked email that comes up when you start the process to reset the password for @im24tank. (He appears to also have valid emails at the ROHWrestling.com and SBGI.net domains.) It also validates as a legitimate Sinclair email address on email validator websites. Why someone would use their work email address for something like that, I have no idea, but I’ve reached out to Gilleland to get his side.

On that note, I apologize for writing about burner accounts, but this also feels like a weirdly good way to get this blog/newsletter going again. So hey, it is what it is.

* Uodated Monday 11/25 at 8:46 a.m. with regards to the email address formatting that doesn't change the overall substance of the story.

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