EARL HEBNER claims he did not lie to Bret:
"I was sitting on a plane with Bret. His very words: ‘Will you count me out?’ I said, ‘If you keep your shoulder up, I will not count you out.’
I didn’t count him out. Did he get pinned 1.2.3?
When people ask if I ‘screwed Bret’, I say ‘Ya damn right I did!’ When I was walking to that ring, I was thinking Bret wasn’t screwing Vince; he was screwing everybody in that dressing room. Austin, Undertaker, Rocky - all the guys that put him over as being the Worlds Champion - we made him what he was.
When McMahon and Sgt Slaughter came to the ring - whether I had done it or not - that bell was gonna ring. The only thing that made it more official is that I motioned for the bell.
[Many years later, Bret] saw me and said, ‘I know you did what you had to do and I’m no longer mad at you.’ I said ‘Thank you’ to him and that was that.
WWE has treated me, my brother and my son awful wrong for the things that we did. Especially my brother, who took care of the office on the road for a long time and made them lots of money.
I did the bad things to get the jobs done because some of the other refs didn’t want to do it or didn’t know how to do it. You've got to be a team player.
If I’d have known then how I was going to be treated later in my career with WWE, I never would have done it. But at the time I didn’t know. It’s all hindsight.”