The Wall Street Journal has broken the story of a second phase of the sexual abuse and hush money scandal surrounding Vince McMahon, the 78-year-old head of WWE and its predecessor companies for the past 42 years.
In 2022, McMahon temporarily “retired” when it was revealed that his publicly traded company had paid out $14.6 million in hush money to employees who had fallen victim to his abusive streak. But the character known on television as “Mr. McMahon fought his way back to power during the dominant pro wrestling company's groundbreaking “Attitude Era” in the late 1990s – seemingly ousting his own daughter and the company's CEO, Stephanie McMahon, in the process. (Stephanie is married to former wrestler and WWE manager Paul “Triple H” Levesque.)
McMahon then sold WWE to Endeavor Group, which had previously acquired mixed martial arts group UFC. The combined company is now called TKO Group and will be led by Ari Emanuel, the brother of former Bill Clinton adviser and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Back two years ago, I told Salon readers the story of my own decades-long reporting on WWE sex and drug scandals, which became the backbone of my 2007 book Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drug, Sex, Death, and Scandal, and my book “Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death,” first published in 2009 (with two subsequent editions).
My 2022 article focused in particular on McMahon's longstanding friendship and business relationship with Donald Trump, in keeping with the cultural criticism cliché that all American politics and public life is “wrestlingized.” One thing I didn't mention in this article is that you can't think about everything when it comes to the deadline! – was that Vince and his wife Linda McMahon (who invested $100 million in two failed U.S. Senate campaigns in Connecticut and later served in the Trump administration) were the largest donors to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation, which was later closed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The McMahons' charity was essentially a reward for Trump's antics in support of a WWE promotion called “The Battle of the Billionaires,” which gave WWE's biggest annual event, WrestleMania, its highest pay-per-view numbers ever in 2007.
Vince McMahon's circle of friends also included Rudy Giuliani, who, as mayor of New York, presided over the wedding of Marty Bergman and Laura Brevetti at City Hall. Bergman, a dubious character who was the brother of famed journalist Lowell Bergman, was investigated but never charged for undermining the testimony of McMahon's former secretary, Emily Feinberg, in McMahon's 1994 steroid trafficking trial. Brevetti was McMahon's lead defense attorney in this trial and he managed to secure a jury acquittal. (Marty Bergman died in 2008.)
The new legal battle against McMahon, captured in a 67-page civil lawsuit filed Thursday, goes far beyond the mere outlines of the 2022 revelations. The plaintiff, former WWE employee Janel Grant, says she was among the recipients of McMahon's hush money – but adds that she initially agreed to a payment of $3 million, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement, but only received an initial installment of $1 million. Grant is seeking revocation of the NDA and additional damages.
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The complaint's narrative, written in a lurid novelistic style and featuring lightly redacted text messages purportedly written by McMahon, takes the depravity of the story to new levels. According to an anecdote, McMahon defecated during a threesome and Grant's hair was allegedly smeared with excrement.
In addition to McMahon, the company and its former CEO John Laurinaitis (brother of the late Road Warriors tag team member Joe “Animal” Laurinaitis) are named as defendants. Another shocking allegation in the new lawsuit is that McMahon solicited Grant to have sex with an unknown “WWE Superstar” as an inducement while that wrestler was being recruited to a new WWE contract following a stint with the UFC. In the wrestling “dirt sheet” world, analysts who have examined the timing of this episode and the fighter's profile speculate that it may have been Brock Lesnar.
For Vince McMahon, as well as his friend and former employee Donald Trump, there is no business like show business.
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by Irvin Muchnick about the dark side of sports