Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for education secretary, has been accused in a recent lawsuit of failing to stop a ringside announcer for World Wrestling Entertainment from grooming and sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ms. McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, ran the wrestling empire beginning in the early 1980s, with Ms. McMahon working as its president and chief executive officer until 2009. Over those years, their company grew into a cultural force, filling arenas and elevating characters like Hulk Hogan and the Rock into household names.
Allegations that underage boys were abused by employees have dogged the organization for decades. The recent lawsuit was filed in October by five former “ring boys” who ran errands and helped set up before matches for W.W.E. in the 1980s.
The lawsuit claims that the five boys were sexually abused by the organization’s ringside announcer and ring crew chief, Melvin Phillips Jr., who died in 2012. It was filed in Maryland against Mr. McMahon, Ms. McMahon, W.W.E. and TKO Group Holdings. The suit accuses the McMahons and the other defendants of criminal negligence by allowing Mr. Phillips to remain at the company for years. The plaintiffs are not named.
The suit says the McMahons were aware of credible abuse accusations against Mr. Phillips and other employees, and tolerated them anyway. It does not accuse Ms. McMahon of sexual misconduct.
“We finally have a chance to hold accountable those who allowed and enabled the open, rampant sexual abuse of these young boys,” Greg Gutzler, a lawyer at DiCello Levitt who is leading the litigation, said in a statement. “That so many were aware of the sexual abuse of the ring boys and did nothing to prevent or stop it is simply unconscionable.”
Ms. McMahon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit and its claims.
Laura Brevetti, an attorney for Ms. McMahon, told CNN that the allegations were false. “This civil lawsuit based upon 30-plus-year-old allegations is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations and misrepresentations regarding Linda McMahon,” she said.
Mr. Phillips, the complaint says, was himself a ring boy who began working with the company when it was still owned by Mr. McMahon’s father in the 1970s. As Mr. Phillips moved up the ranks, he began supervising other ring boys, staying with them in hotels and traveling with them from state to state, the lawsuit says.
Ring boys often came from communities where the organization was holding a show, the lawsuit says. They were able to watch the shows and were recruited with promises of meeting famous wrestlers, according to the complaint.
The five former ring boys who brought the suit each met Mr. Phillips in the early to mid-1980s, when they were between 13 and 15 years old, the lawsuit says. Mr. Phillips met the boys outside the arenas as they waited for shows to begin, and would then invite them in, giving them free seats, according to the lawsuit. Eventually, he would bring them back to his hotel or dressing room, lie on top of them, massage their legs and feet, and abuse them sexually, the complaint says.
He gave the boys money after the encounters, which he would sometimes videotape, the complaint says.
According to the complaint, in 1988 the McMahons fired Mr. Phillips after a slew of allegations about him came to light. But it says the McMahons rehired the announcer six weeks later and protected him legally, including by filing a defamation suit in 1992 against a New York Post columnist who wrote about the abuse allegations when two ring boys went public with their stories.
The lawsuit cites a raft of other complaints of sexual harassment and abuse around W.W.E. over the years. Among them are hush money payments of more than $12 million that Mr. McMahon was accused of making to four women to suppress allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Mr. McMahon has denied those allegations.
In 2009, Ms. McMahon stepped down as chief executive of W.W.E. to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut as a Republican. She spent heavily to fund her own campaign, winning her party’s nomination, but she lost to Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and Chris Murphy in 2012, both Democrats.
During her bids for the Senate, Ms. McMahon and her husband were subject to scrutiny over W.W.E.’s treatment of wrestlers, who are classified as independent contractors and do not receive health insurance or Social Security and Medicare contributions.
As the professional wrestling empire she oversaw grew into a billion-dollar operation, critics said the pair routinely prioritized growth and profits over the health and safety of their workers. Ms. McMahon deflected those criticisms at the time by making the unusual admission that most elements of the dramatized combat were largely stagecraft and choreographed fighting.
In 2010, a leaked company memo suggested that she had tried to tip off a doctor who had been charged with distributing steroids to wrestlers about a possible federal investigation. At the time, Ms. McMahon denied having done anything wrong.
The allegations in the recent lawsuit and the long history of questions about the work environment at W.W.E. have raised concerns about Ms. McMahon’s potential nomination. In her role as education secretary, she would oversee the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces laws such as Title IX that protect students from sex discrimination and sexual harassment.
In announcing Ms. McMahon as his education secretary pick, Mr. Trump praised her business experience. “As secretary of education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘choice’ to every state in America, and empower parents to make the best education decisions for their families,” Mr. Trump said.
A number of student advocacy groups have reacted to Ms. McMahon’s nomination with dismay, citing the department’s traditional regulatory role over campus safety.
“All students deserve to go to school and have the right to learn and grow without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Gaylynn Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement after the announcement. “The Department of Education’s sole purpose is to protect equal learning opportunities for all students, and the head of it must be focused on that.”
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