Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, TKO CEO Ari Emanuel, TKO Executive Chairman Vince McMahon and other members of the WWE board.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Vince McMahon, the longtime chair and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, resigned from the board of WWE’s parent company Friday, one day after a former employee accused him of sexual assault and sex trafficking in a lawsuit.
McMahon, 78, was the executive chair of TKO Group, the parent company of WWE, where he no longer held a formal position. WWE employees were informed of the changes in an email sent by Nick Khan, the company’s president.
“He will no longer have a role with TKO Group Holdings or WWE,” Khan wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in US District Court in Connecticut, accuses McMahon of trafficking the employee, Janel Grant, as well as physically and emotionally abusing her. The graphic complaint, which also named John Laurinaitis, a former WWE executive, and the company itself as defendants, says that McMahon and Laurinaitis had once taken turns raping Grant, among numerous other allegations.
McMahon eventually pressured Grant to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for $3 million, according to the complaint, but paid her only $1 million. The lawsuit also alleges that a number of high-ranking WWE employees and board members, who were not named in the complaint, were aware of McMahon’s behavior, raising questions about who knew what, and when.
In a statement released after his resignation, McMahon called Grant’s lawsuit a “vindictive distortion of the truth” and said he looked forward to clearing his name. But he said he had decided to resign “out of respect” for TKO, WWE and their employees and wrestlers.
McMahon and his wife, Linda, founded the company that would become WWE in 1980 and expanded it from a regional business into a national and eventually an international one. They made wrestlers like Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Undertaker famous, and after a lull in the 2000s, the company’s wrestlers have become more popular than they had been in years.
But repeated accusations of sexual misconduct against McMahon have clouded the company’s fortunes. In 2022, a special committee of WWE’s board conducted an investigation into McMahon’s conduct and found that over 16 years he had spent $14.6 million in payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. One was a former wrestler who said McMahon had coerced her into giving him oral sex and then later decided not to renew her contract, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A further company investigation found that he had made an additional $5 million in payments to two women.
McMahon temporarily resigned from WWE during the investigation. But he remained the company’s largest shareholder, and in early 2023, after the WWE board completed its investigation of his behavior, McMahon used his voting shares to replace three board members with two allies and himself, as chair. His daughter, Stephanie McMahon, who had served as chair of the board and WWE’s co-CEO, resigned from the company.
Soon after his return, McMahon initiated a sale process that resulted in the sports and entertainment conglomerate Endeavor’s buying WWE. Endeavor then combined WWE and another one of its holdings, Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts promotional company, into a new public company, TKO Group.
Since then, WWE has signed long-term media rights contracts that position it well for the future. In September, NBCUniversal paid a reported $1.4 billion to buy the rights to show WWE’s “Friday Night SmackDown” for five years, starting later in 2024.
On Tuesday, TKO Group announced that it had sold the rights to WWE’s flagship weekly show, “Raw,” to Netflix in a deal worth $5 billion over 10 years. The deal is by far Netflix’s biggest foray into live programming, as it seeks to attract more revenue through advertising, which in media is primarily spent on live entertainment.
But in a possible sign of difficulties to come for WWE, the meat snack company Slim Jim, a longtime sponsor of professional wrestling, said Friday that it was pausing its sponsorship of WWE in light of the “disturbing allegations against Vince McMahon.”