Stunning Allegations Have Rocked the Wrestling World. A Superstar Is Blunt: “It’s Too Sick and Disgusting to Really Imagine.”

Like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or any number of other seemingly unsinkable men in contemporary public life, it appeared that reality bent to Vince McMahon’s will.

No matter how much he violated the rules that the rest of us have to play by, the longtime chief of World Wrestling Entertainment kept aiming higher and getting richer. Indeed, McMahon pioneered the strategy that Trump and Musk now embrace: never apologize, never explain, never clarify. People are so baffled by bizarre, ambitious, shameless men that such men can get away with a lot before anyone even figures out what they’re talking about.

Of all the people who 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 when Hart and I spoke last week, that had all changed.

“I’m going to speak my truth,” Hart told me over the phone from his home in Calgary. “I’m not worried about Vince’s feelings. He’s never cared about mine.”

“I don’t have any problem with everybody kicking his head around the parking lot,” Hart said. “I’m OK with the truth coming out.”

Now, with Trump facing an $83 million penalty for defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll and Musk staring at a $56 billion pay cut due to a Delaware court ruling, McMahon’s downfall comes into sharper focus when seen through Hart’s eyes. It’s a story about what it takes for people to finally realize they’ve been screwed—and the consequences that can come for those doing the screwing.

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].”

But he never spoke up about it. McMahon was too fearsome at the time.

“It’s kind of like The Godfather: You never know when a guy like Vince will be your enemy again over something you say or do.”

Plus, it seemed like nothing could stop him, anyway. “He’s the Teflon guy,” Hart said of McMahon. “You just can’t seem to get anything on him. He’s just too powerful, got too much money.”

But more important was the love and respect Hart still held for so long. Without McMahon, he had told me, “I wouldn’t be the same man I am today.” McMahon made many of the best things in his adult life possible. It was an exploitative power McMahon held over everyone he built up in the world he built.

Now, Hart sees McMahon facing the greatest threat that a man who has built a profitable reputation for sadism can face.

“It’s like Jeffrey Dahmer, Harvey Weinstein, or Jeffrey Epstein: Vince will be a joke,” Hart said. “He’ll be used for humor, and you’ll shake your head at the shock value of some joke about, ‘What did Vince McMahon do?’ He’ll always be associated with this story, especially as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”

With a federal probe into McMahon’s sexual misconduct reportedly expanding to include the trafficking allegations, Hart may well be right.

What’s more, Hart has come to think that McMahon’s desires weren’t worth the price everyone has paid for them.

He used to be able to say that, whatever evils McMahon did, he did for the public, in service of wrestling as an art form and industry.

Now, having heard and believed the accusations about what McMahon did in private—to someone whose alleged degradation, horrible in its own right, also had no bearing on business—Hart wonders if he had it all wrong.

“I always had a respect for him,” Hart said. “Now it’s tainted. I’m embarrassed that I thought so highly of him.”

Perhaps that’s what sticks to a Teflon man: not accusations that he’s harmful and dangerous, but rather ones that say he’s pathetic and gross.

Carroll’s case against Trump was built on the foundation of testimony first given in a New York magazine cover story that masterfully mocked her alleged rapist even in the moment she described him penetrating her (“halfway—or completely, I’m not certain”). Musk was sterling in the public eye until he made posting on Twitter his full-time job and revealed his petty proclivities and passions to increasing numbers of people. The tide feels like it’s turning against the McMahon playbook.

Hart has already tried to make amends for his past belief in McMahon.

Throughout his time at the WWF and for decades later, he’d heard the rumors and accusations of sexual impropriety against McMahon, and he generally dismissed them. For example, when the WWF’s first female referee, Rita Chatterton, came forward in 1992 to accuse McMahon of raping her, Hart looked for holes in her story and wrote it off, even going so far as to discredit her accusations in interviews.

“I just didn’t believe it,” Hart told me. “I figured Vince had too much at stake to ever do something like that.”

Even after the 2022 revelations of alleged hush money payments from McMahon to former employees became public and he briefly resigned, Hart had kept his mouth shut. Same when McMahon forced his way back into the boardroom in 2023, despite the unresolved accusations.

But a few months ago, after hearing the advance rumblings of these latest accusations, Hart ran into Chatterton at a convention.

“I apologized from the bottom of my heart,” Hart recalled, “and I said, ‘I believe that what happened to you, happened to you. And I apologize. I was wrong.’ ”

Hart sounds genuinely remorseful when he tells me these things. He already lost his father, a legendary wrestling promoter in his own right, 20 years ago. Now, it is as though he has lost another.

“I think, despite all of the issues I ever had with Vince, I know, deep down, I always respected him; but now, knowing what kind of a weirdo he became, I have absolutely zero respect for him,” Hart wrote to me in a text message after our conversation. “I do not think I could ever shake his hand if he extended it. Too creepy.”