In 1992, Rita Chatterton, the first female referee for the World Wrestling Federation, went on the talk show “Geraldo” to say she was sexually assaulted in 1986 by Vince McMahon, a founder of the W.W.F. and its chief executive at the time. More than just a successful leader, he helped create the figure of larger-than-life ringside hype man — the executive as protagonist — that would become a part of popular culture well beyond the world of wrestling.
Through tears, Chatterton described the quid pro quo episode:
I was forced into oral sex with Vince McMahon. When I couldn’t complete his desires, he got really angry, started ripping off my jeans, pulled me on top of him and told me again, if I wanted a half-a-million-dollar-a-year contract, I had to satisfy him. And if I didn’t satisfy him, I was blackballed. I was scared. My wrist was all black and blue. He just didn’t stop.
In “Mr. McMahon,” a new six-part Netflix documentary, McMahon, who turned professional wrestling into a billion-dollar business, rejects Chatterton’s allegations, calling them “crap.” He filed a lawsuit against her and Geraldo Rivera, among others, which he later withdrew. McMahon tells the offscreen interviewer, “Once you’re accused of rape, you’re a rapist, but it was consensual. And actually, had it been a rape, um, the statute of limitations had run out.”
That’s not the only allegation of sexual abuse that has swirled around the W.W.F. (which is now known as World Wrestling Entertainment, or W.W.E.). In the ’90s, there was also what’s referred to as the ring boy scandal, in which high-ranking wrestling officials were accused of sexually assaulting young men who performed menial tasks for the organization. Phil Mushnick, who covered the scandal for The New York Post, says in “Mr. McMahon,” “It was a pedophile ring. Three of these guys were all in on it. These were real kids being sexually abused on McMahon’s watch.”
Anthony White, the wrestler known as Tony Atlas, says that one of the men accused in the ring boy scandal touched his privates in the locker room. When the interviewer asks why he didn’t complain to McMahon, White chuckles long and ruefully and says, “You know nothing about the wrestling business, don’t you? There’s nobody to go to, son. You either take it or you’re going home. Who are you going to complain to?”
The sexual assault allegations in “Mr. McMahon” against people in the organization go on and on and on. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal in 2022, “Vince McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.’s longtime leader, agreed to pay more than $12 million over the past 16 years to suppress allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity, an amount far larger than previously known.”
I started watching “Mr. McMahon” with almost no context about professional wrestling or McMahon’s past. For me, what was particularly shocking about the documentary’s litany of sexual abuse allegations is that none of it was a secret. These accusations were publicized in real time — on national talk shows, in tabloids, in wrestling trade publications and via lawsuits — over decades.
McMahon was able to skate away from accusations against him and his organization for two reasons: He was making boatloads of money for a lot of people, and wrestling is seen as sordid in the first place, something existing outside mainstream, respectable mores. As Mushnick says in the documentary, “This was the biggest guy on cable TV. Nobody wanted to look a little deeper.”
As the series points out repeatedly, McMahon was not just the chief executive; he played a heightened version of himself onscreen, and wrestling pioneered a blurring of the line between reality and fantasy. Writing for The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham describes the character of Mr. McMahon as “perhaps the most well-developed heel (wrestling-speak for ‘villain’) in history.”
What the filmmakers strongly imply is that when audiences know you to be a heel — even if it’s kayfabe — they don’t particularly mind if that’s a reflection of your real-life behavior. As the longtime wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer says in the last episode of the documentary, “People will support entertainment product and not care about the moral fiber of the guy running the product. They want entertainment.”
As Cunningham points out, it’s impossible to watch “Mr. McMahon” without thinking about Donald Trump, who is in the W.W.E. Hall of Fame. “The association is obvious: Trump, like McMahon, is obsessed with generating attention-grabbing heat, has a habit of dismissively denying lawsuits — especially the sort that allege sexual assault — and continues to erect money and its pursuit as a kind of gilded god.”
And Trump’s blurring of fantasy and reality for his audience of voters takes a page from McMahon’s. “The Trump Voters Who Don’t Believe Trump,” is a headline that ran this week in The Times. “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” one Trump supporter told The Times’s Shawn McCreesh, “But then he turns around, and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.” Trump also appeared as a foil to McMahon on W.W.E. broadcasts, including a WrestleMania “battle of the billionaires.”
After decades of accusations of misbehavior, McMahon finally seems to be paying a small price for his transgressions. He was briefly pushed out of W.W.E. in 2022 after The Wall Street Journal’s exposé of his multiple settlements, and his daughter, Stephanie McMahon, was installed as executive chairwoman and co-chief executive. Vince McMahon had a majority of the voting power and so was able to return to his perch as executive chairman by 2023, and Stephanie McMahon resigned. He then sold the company to Endeavor, the entertainment company run by Ari Emanuel, who combined W.W.E. with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to create a company called TKO.
After a new round of sexual abuse and trafficking allegations from a former employee that sparked a federal investigation, Vince McMahon “resigned as executive chairman of TKO Group,” The Wall Street Journal reported in January. He denies the accusations. But on top of his resignation, he sold back his stock in the company. Since it is no longer a family-run business that he controls, his exit seems final this time.
Chatterton filed a lawsuit against McMahon in New York in 2022, because of the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year window in which the statute of limitations on sexual assault cases could be lifted. He settled with her without admitting to guilt.
While he may no longer run W.W.E., he still is exceedingly wealthy and seems able to live as he pleases. In April, CNBC reported: “It’s as if he’s unfazed by his legal fights, two sources said. For instance, on an afternoon in late March, McMahon returned on a private plane to the United States from the sunny Turks and Caicos Islands.” CNBC also reported that he was regularly in touch with Trump, though a representative for McMahon denied it.
It is hard to absorb all of these details without feeling as if a shocking percentage of Americans simply do not care about sexual assault, especially when the perpetrator is rich and powerful and allows them to feel vicariously powerful.
As Trump himself famously said, “They let you do it. You can do anything.”
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The post Sex, Power, Money and ‘Mr. McMahon’ appeared first on New York Times.
