TITLE: “It’s Too Sick and Disgusting to Really Imagine”
https://slate.com/culture/2024/02/wwe-vince-mcmahon-federal-investigation-janel-grant-bret-hart.html
EXCERPTS: Of all the people who [Vince] McMahon damaged in his long career as the emperor of American professional wrestling, arguably no one had more reason to hate him than Bret “the Hitman” Hart. Still, despite all McMahon put him through, Hart could never bring himself to fully denounce the man who had done so much to hurt him—until now.
The bombshell lawsuit filed on Jan. 25 in Connecticut—in which a former WWE employee named Janel Grant accused McMahon of not only sexually coercing and assaulting her, but also trafficking her to others at the company—finally broke McMahon’s hold on Hart, he said. McMahon, for his part, denies the allegations.
As one of McMahon’s stars in WWE’s predecessor company, the World Wrestling Federation, Hart faced during his time the exploitation that McMahon’s wrestlers—and many American workers—have faced: hired only as a contractor, no health care, no union, a workplace plagued by near-mandatory drug use and harassment.
But McMahon’s mistreatment went further with Hart.
McMahon began by purchasing Hart’s family’s wrestling promotion in Canada and then, Hart said, never paying the $1 million he’d promised them.
In 1997, when Hart asked McMahon to script him a graceful exit at his final match in a major pay-per-view event in Montreal, McMahon agreed—then flipped the script during the performance, humiliating Hart on live TV in front of millions of fans. The incident, known as “The Montreal Screwjob,” became Hart’s professional epitaph, eclipsing the rest of his career.
Then, two years later, McMahon had Hart’s brother, Owen, perform a dangerous and under-rehearsed zipline stunt. Owen fell 70 feet to the ring and was killed. The Hart family fell apart during arguments over a wrongful-death lawsuit against McMahon.
But Hart stayed loyal through all of it. In fact, he had even returned to McMahon’s payroll for a few years, starting in 2010. When we spoke for more than eight hours over the course of 2020 to 2022 for my biography of McMahon, Hart told me he still respected, even loved McMahon. He called him a “father figure,” a person Hart had reached out to for comfort when he was about to go under the knife for cancer surgery in 2016. He even said he admired the way McMahon had executed the Montreal Screwjob.
“You couldn’t have written it better,” he said back then. “Like, you couldn’t have given them a better concept or idea. It was new, it was fresh, and it was masterfully done.”
When allegations of sexual misconduct have dogged McMahon in the past, Hart has dismissed them or even spoken up to discredit them.
[But] Hart had been warned by fellow wrestling insiders a few months ago that McMahon “was in big trouble that he wasn’t going to be able to sweep under the rug,” as he put it to me.
On Jan. 25, Hart learned the specifics of that trouble when the Wall Street Journal reported on Grant’s lawsuit. The 67-page suit came with alleged dates, details and—most damning of all—screenshots of text messages.
Within 48 hours, something remarkable happened: McMahon resigned from WWE and its corporate parent, TKO Holdings.
The company said in a brief statement that it had cut ties with him. He retains a minority share of TKO stock, but is effectively powerless. This was unprecedented: There has not been a world where Vince McMahon isn’t the driving force in American pro wrestling since the mid-1980s. Jaws dropped across the industry, and they’ve remained on the floor.
Part of McMahon’s problem this time is structural: Last year, he sold WWE to Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Holdings, which meant McMahon had a boss to answer to for the first time since he bought the WWF from his father in 1983.
But that, alone, doesn’t explain why virtually no one in the world of wrestling has leaped to defend the man they’ve so often gone to bat for. What made the difference this time, Hart told me, were the details of one alleged incident described in Grant’s suit.
On one hand, the alleged events in that encounter were extreme, even bizarre to Hart. (A warning to readers that the following paragraph is a graphic description of the alleged assault.)
According to the filing, McMahon coerced Grant into a three-way sexual encounter, during which McMahon allegedly defecated on Grant’s head and back while she was being raped by another man, then forced her to continue being assaulted for an hour and a half before letting her shower.
It was too much for Hart. “When you get that vision in your head, you go, ‘That’s messed up,’ ” Hart said. “It’s too sick and disgusting to really imagine.”
But at the same time, the lewd text messages included in the suit, allegedly sent by McMahon after the incident, have a convincingly familiar ring, Hart said.
“They sound like Vince,” he told me.
Wrestling has long tolerated sadistic alpha males who exploit women. Indeed, Hart spoke at length of all the sexual abuse he heard whispered about during his time in the industry. It was commonplace: “I don’t think this is the only incident of this kind of predatory behavior,” Hart said. “I think you’ll find that it’s everywhere in [WWE].”
TITLE: WWE Wrestler Ashley Massaro Accused Vince McMahon of Sexually Preying on Wrestlers in Previously Unreleased Statement
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epv78z/ashley-massaro-wwe-vince-mcmahon-sexual-divas
EXCERPT: In a previously unpublished statement given before her 2019 death by apparent suicide, Ashley Massaro, a former WWE wrestler, said company founder Vince McMahon sexually preyed on female wrestlers and that she was punished for rejecting his advances by being given bad scripts she believed were meant to destroy her reputation—behavior, she said, he was known for. The statement was given to her lawyers as they worked up a sworn affidavit, published shortly after her death, in which she said she was raped on a military base while in Kuwait on a WWE tour and that management covered it up. The attorneys ultimately left it out because it wasn’t relevant to central claims in the lawsuit in which they were representing her, which concerned concussions.
“I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable,” Massaro said, describing what she said were McMahon’s attempts to get her to come to his hotel room alone late at night. “He began calling the hotel room phone and my cell phone nonstop.”
As VICE News has reported, WWE publicly denied that its upper management knew about the rape allegation, but that was untrue. A lawyer for former executive John Laurinaitis said that he and “most of upper management” were aware of it, a claim corroborated by previous statements from a former WWE doctor.
A spokesperson for TKO, WWE’s parent company, declined to comment when provided a detailed accounting of the allegations in the statement and questions raised by it, aside from confirming that a top backstage employee named in the statement, Michael Hayes, currently works for WWE and clarifying the nature of his job. A lawyer said to represent McMahon did not respond to a request for comment.
In the previously secret statement, Massaro—who joined WWE as a wrestler in 2005, represented the company as a Survivor contestant and Playboy model, and ultimately was released in 2008—asserts that she saw McMahon “making out” with female wrestlers in the locker room, and that he sexually harassed her. She also says that after she rejected his advances he wrote demeaning scripts for her to perform that she inferred were meant to end her career and destroy her reputation—something that, she said, had previously happened to another female wrestler before she left the company. (VICE News is withholding the name of this wrestler to protect her privacy; she could not be reached for comment.) She also details two of McMahon’s long-serving lieutenants counseling her on how to deal with his behavior.
Rumors have long circulated about a WWE casting couch, in which women were put in position to either yield to the sexual demands of male managers or be humiliated on camera or fired—or both. They have been difficult to substantiate, in part because women believed to have been subject to such schemes have been hesitant to speak out for fear of retaliation from WWE, which until recently was controlled by McMahon and his family. Currently it is controlled by TKO, a conglomerate headed by Hollywood power player Ari Emanuel, whose Endeavor merged its own UFC with WWE last year. McMahon was brought in as chair of the newly-formed company after he had resigned from WWE following Wall Street Journal reporting on secret hush-money payments and allegations of sexual abuse of women who worked for WWE.
TITLE: What Trump (and evangelical pastors) learned from pro wrestling
https://baptistnews.com/article/what-trump-and-evangelical-pastors-learned-from-pro-wrestling/
EXCERPT: From his earliest days, Donald J. Trump has been a big wrestling fan. In the 1980s, Trump hosted WrestleMania (McMahon’s yearly extravaganza) at his Atlantic City hotel. McMahon became the closest thing to a friend Trump had known since the infamous Roy Cohn died in 1986. Trump’s “you’re fired!” gimmick line from The Apprentice was actually stolen from the heel McMahon played in the ring.
In 2007, the future president of these United States challenged Vince McMahon to a wrestling match. The loser had to let the winner shave his head. The two men were represented in the ring by wrestler-surrogates. They called it “The Battle of the Billionaires.”
By this time, Stone Cold Steve Austin was in semi-retirement. Pro wrestling is scripted, but the stunts can be physically taxing and many wrestlers are on the road 300 days a year. But the Stone Cold brand was still hot, so McMahon invited Austin to serve as celebrity referee.
The entire show was designed to feed the crowd’s carefully orchestrated desire to see “Mr. McMahon” get what was coming to him. Trump was even allowed to body slam McMahon onto the concrete floor outside the ring and to pummel him with faux punches. With McMahon’s surrogate defeated, Trump beamed lasciviously as he wielded the clippers and razor.
Trump played his role to the hilt, even agreeing to allow Stone Cold to deck him with his patented “stunner” as the event’s coup de grace. The event made so much money for McMahon that he made a $5 million contribution to Trump’s fraudulent foundation a year later (more on that in a minute).
Fortunately for Trump’s political ambitions, evangelical preachers are keen students of popular culture, and that definitely includes pro wrestling. Dozens of aging wrestlers have come to Jesus in their golden years, and megachurches will pay good money to hear their testimonies. Jake the Snake did the preaching circuit before he relapsed.
A few years ago, Ed Young, pastor of the multi-campus Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, interviewed four famous wrestlers on successive Sundays. Young even built a faux wrestling ring at the front of the church. The story was always the same: fame, temptation, drunken debauchery, infidelity, drug addiction, rock bottom, Jesus, salvation, praise the Lord. Young introduced 6-foot-10, 300-pound Mark William Calaway, better known as “The Undertaker,” to the crowd in a very convincing WWE announcer’s voice.
Megachurch preachers culled important lessons from pro wrestling. The folks showing up for worship on Sunday morning weren’t that different from the audience at WrestleMania. Stone Cold Steve Austin fans had no beef with John 3:16, per se; but Austin 3:16 got their blood pumping. The cheek-turning Jesus was out; the ass-whipping Jesus was in. Which is why Ed Young was so excited to have The Undertaker sitting across from him. He confessed he could hardly contain himself.
If wrestling is fake violence; porn is fake sex. Megachurch preachers are free to profess their love for WWE wrestling; but any form of non-marital sex is a non-starter within the evangelical community. Porn is viewed as a virulent form of cancer spreading rapidly through the body of Christ. For a politician with Trump’s reputation, this posed a problem.
Trump’s association with pornography is as well-established as his ties to pro wrestling. He once appeared on the cover of Playboy and was a regular at Hugh Hefner’s famous mansion. He had an affair with Playboy Bunny, Karen McDougal, and everybody knows about both his evening with Stormy Daniels and his attempt to keep it from the public. Trump has even been dubbed “The Porn President.” How do Christians who claim to love marriage and hate porn vote for such a man?
Trump’s followers don’t reason their way to a justification of his salacious past. Given their core commitments, neither Trump’s behavior nor his stated opinions can be justified. But Trump’s long association with pro wrestling taught him an important lesson: If you can tap into the deepest, darkest desires of your audience, you don’t have to make sense. Give the people what they want, and they will suspend disbelief just enough to enjoy the show. If you are giving an audience something it can’t find anywhere else, people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Wrestling taught Trump a second lesson: If everything is fake, there are no heroes. Deep down, everybody is motivated by a lust for violence, revenge, sleazy sex, personal advancement and power. Those things are real. Some may claim to be motivated by higher aspirations: humility, love, compassion, forgiveness, and a thirst for justice and reconciliation. That’s all fake. Trump doesn’t buy it.
In Trump’s world, when prosecutors hand down indictments, they are out to punish and humiliate their enemies. Fifty years of constant litigation have taught the ex-president to distrust the words inscribed on the façade of the Supreme Court building. There is no equal justice under law. Those with the deepest pockets and a willingness to play the long game prevail. Those with lots of moral integrity but little money will lose. No one really cares about abstract ideas like “justice” or “the rule of law.” The courts are simply one more way to screw your opponents.
Trump doesn’t just think this way; he encourages his followers to agree with him. It’s working.