[ad_1]
The Wall Street Journal has published the story of a second stage of the Vince McMahon sexual abuse/secret money scandalthe 78-year-old head of WWE and its predecessor entities for the past 42 years.
In 2022, McMahon temporarily “retired” amid revelations that his publicly traded company paid $14.6 million in hush money to employees who were victims of his serial abuse. But the character known on television as “Mr. McMahon” during the revolutionary late-1990s “Attitude Era” of professional wrestling’s dominant entity, managed to return to power, apparently sidelining his own daughter and the company’s CEO, Stephanie McMahon, in the process. (Stephanie is married to former wrestler and WWE executive Paul “Triple H” Levesque.)
McMahon then sold WWE to the Endeavor Group, which had previously acquired mixed martial arts group UFC. The combined company is now called TKO Group and is led by Ari Emanuel, brother of former Bill Clinton aide and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
At that time, two years ago, I shared with Salon readers the story of my own decades of reporting on WWE sex and drug scandals, which became the backbone of my 2007 book “Wrestling Babylon: Stories of drugs, sex, death and scandal”and my book”Chris and Nancy: The True Story of Benoit’s Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Death Cocktail”, first published in 2009 (with two subsequent editions).
My 2022 article focused particularly on McMahon’s long friendship and business relationship with Donald Trump, in keeping with the cliché of cultural criticism that all of American politics and public life have been “fought.” One thing I failed to mention in that article: you can’t think of everything on 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 biggest donors to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation , later closed by New York. Attorney General Leticia James. The McMahons’ charity was essentially payment for Trump’s antics in support of a WWE operation called “Battle of the Billionaires,” which in 2007 gave WWE’s biggest annual event, WrestleMania, its biggest numbers. of PPV until that moment. spot.
Vince McMahon’s circle of cronies also included Rudy Giuliani, who, as mayor of New York, officiated at the City Hall wedding of Marty Bergman and Laura Brevetti. Bergman, a shady character who was the brother of famed journalist Lowell Bergman, was investigated but never charged for bribing the testimony of McMahon’s former secretary, Emily Feinberg, at McMahon’s 1994 trial on steroid trafficking charges. Brevetti was McMahon’s lead defense attorney in that trial and won the jury’s acquittal. (Marty Bergman died in 2008).
The new legal case against McMahon, recorded in a 67-page civil lawsuit filed Thursday, goes far beyond merely summarizing the 2022 revelations. The plaintiff, former WWE employee Janel Grant, says she was among the recipients. of McMahon’s money to maintain his silence, although he adds that he initially agreed to a payment of $3 million, accompanied by a confidentiality agreement, but only received a first installment of $1 million. Grant seeks to have the NDA vacated, along with additional damages.
Want a daily digest of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
The narrative of the complaint, presented in a lurid novelistic style and including lightly redacted text messages supposedly written by McMahon, takes the story’s depravity to new depths. In one anecdote, McMahon defecated during a threesome and Grant’s hair was allegedly stained with excrement.
Also named as defendants, along with McMahon, are the company and its former executive John Laurinaitis (brother of late Road Warriors team member Joe “Animal” Laurinaitis). Another shocking allegation in the new lawsuit is that McMahon groomed Grant to have sex with an unnamed “WWE Superstar” as an inducement while that wrestler was being recruited for a new WWE contract after a gap in fighting in the UFC. In the world of wrestling, analysts who have studied the timing of that episode and the wrestler’s profile speculate that it could have been Brock Lesnar.
With Vince McMahon, as with his friend and former collaborator Donald Trump, there is no business like show business.
Read more
by Irvin Muchnick on the dark side of sports