Vince McMahon’s Greatest Desire Might Finally Be His Undoing

Vince McMahon dreamed of becoming a respectable businessman.

He had been quiet and unmemorable as a youth, had been a financial failure as a young man, and was viewed as a nepotism hire when he was coming up as an announcer at his father’s pro wrestling company. So when he finished buying that company in 1983, he stopped seeking the approval of the shady businessmen who ran his industry, and instead sought it from mainstream corporate America.

McMahon rebranded his dad’s World Wrestling Federation as a modern media conglomerate. He started referring to his product not as wrestling but rather as “sports entertainment.” He sought deregulation from state legislatures, admitting in public documents that wrestling was as fake as the circus or the Harlem Globetrotters. By the turn of the millennium, the WWF was trading on the New York Stock Exchange and beloved by its corporate partners for all the eyeballs it could bring.

In reality, the corporate sheen has always been an illusion. The WWF, now known as WWE, has long been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to have cleaned up its act as the industry’s long-standing culture of exploitation has never entirely gone away.

As long as the media establishment considered McMahon to be just another mogul, it allowed him to govern his fiefdom as he saw fit. Assuming the industry was as fun as the product, few people in power ever looked too closely at him.

Now it seems that his free ride is over.

Last Thursday, a new lawsuit from a former employee alleged years of sexual assault and, horrifyingly enough, sex trafficking. McMahon denied the allegations, saying the lawsuit was “replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred,” and was “a vindictive distortion of the truth.” Many wrestling fans and commentators assumed he would wriggle out of his problem, the way he had dozens of times before.

But within 24 hours, McMahon was out as executive chairman of TKO Holdings, WWE’s newly created parent company, and he and the firm have cut ties. And on Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that a previously reported federal probe was also investigating the sex-trafficking allegations. There is no clear path for him to regain any position at the company his father and grandfather built.

The news has shaken the wrestling ecosystem at a tectonic level. The industry has not known a world without McMahon as its driving force since the mid-1980s. No one knows exactly how the chips will fall. But one thing is certain: McMahon’s pursuit of respectability came to be the trigger of his undoing.

Historically, it has been unwise to bet against Vince McMahon. While in power, he was accused of covering up a murder, raping his first female referee, sexually assaulting a tanning-salon employee, and allowing the widespread sexual abuse of underage boys in his company, among other charges. That’s not even getting into the day-to-day exploitation of his wrestlers, who, despite exclusivity agreements, operate as “independent contractors” with no health insurance or union.

Time after time, when opponents went after McMahon and WWE, he’d slip loose from their grip. McMahon developed a reputation for legendary self-defense tactics: Victims were allegedly bullied into silence, prosecutors were allegedly undermined by witness tampering, and—most importantly—McMahon could always muddy the waters with the fact that he played an evil version of himself on television. People would get confused and forget all about what had been alleged.

Despite temporary setbacks, McMahon’s journey had been on an overall upward trajectory of wealth and success from the day he took over his father’s company. When WWE was bought by Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Holdings last spring, McMahon was already embroiled in a fresh scandal, having been accused of doling out millions of dollars in hush money payments to employees to silence allegations of sexual misconduct. The federal probe, which has also been investigating the payments, has been ongoing since 2022. And yet, the sale went through anyway. It seemed as if nothing could stop McMahon’s steamroller.

Then, last week, everything seemed to abruptly change.

Just days after TKO announced a $5 billion deal with Netflix to air WWE’s flagship show, Raw, the 78-year-old McMahon was slapped with a 67-page lawsuit. Filed by a former employee named Janel Grant, it outlined, in graphic detail, allegations that Vince not only sexually harassed and raped her—not the first time McMahon has faced such an allegation—but also used her body as a bargaining chip in negotiations, farmed her out to at least one WWE wrestler, and widely distributed explicit images and videos of her.

For a day, wrestling held its breath. Then, the hammer came down.

Last Friday night, Vince McMahon did the unthinkable: He resigned from his role at WWE/TKO.

It wasn’t the first time he’d resigned—he also did so in July 2022, when the alleged hush money was revealed. But back then, he’d retained financial control of the company through his stock holdings. A McMahon was still the ultimate power at WWE, as had been the case since the 1950s.

That changed when Vince McMahon clawed his way back from resignation a year ago and steered the company toward a sale to Endeavor. It was, in some ways, his ultimate triumph: He became wealthier than he’d ever been (which is saying something) and had been anointed as a person worthy of Ari Emanuel doing big business with. He was a true mogul.

His company, which he had done so much to shape and defend, would live on and thrive. His contract dictated that he would remain chairman of TKO until his death, no matter what. Perhaps the sale seemed like a path to stability in old age for McMahon.

But it was also the seed of his downfall.

Emanuel heartily endorsed McMahon in a joint CNBC interview just after the announcement of the sale. He said he had demanded that McMahon be in a place of prominence at the company. And yet, I suspect that Emanuel didn’t know exactly what he was buying into.

A wrestling promoter is not just another CEO. Pro wrestling is a uniquely dark industry whose internal ethical codes make a mockery of the word ethical.

Promoters dominate their companies with iron fists and mafia tactics, squeezing impoverished wrestlers and hangers-on to get their blood, sweat, and cash. They look the other way with hazing, or even encourage it. Wrestlers often die young and horribly. MAGA politics are common in the locker room. Accusations of sexual harassment and abuse have been rampant.

Meanwhile, the industry has lived by a three-word mantra: Protect the business. And for 40 years, McMahon was synonymous with that business, so he was untouchable.

But Ari Emanuel has no particular love for or loyalty to the wrestling trade. It’s just another budget item for him. He sees McMahon as just another businessman. And although he might tolerate sexual indiscretion, I can’t see him tolerating responses as comically insufficient as those of WWE chief content officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque (McMahon’s son-in-law, incidentally): When asked at a press conference Saturday if he’d even read the lawsuit, Levesque responded, “I did not,” explaining, “I don’t wanna get bogged down in the negatives.”

WWE is still staffed by McMahon’s hand-picked people. If he were still in total control of the company, he could potentially sweep this under the rug by enforcing total message discipline. But TKO has already cut McMahon loose. He retains a minority share in the stock, but he is functionally powerless. There would be complications if TKO chooses to completely rip Vince out of their branding (what would they do with the thousands of hours of his performances in old shows?), but no one has to be loyal to him now.

As the federal investigation deepens, and as the lawsuits progress, there will likely be more allegations and revelations. McMahon still has astounding wealth on his side, but that’s about it. He already embarrassed the Justice Department once, and unless McMahon’s friend Donald Trump wins and quashes the probe (a not-insignificant possibility), there could be very serious charges arrayed against an aging and isolated man. He has little protection.

Instead of an army of loyalists willing to lay down their lives and reputations for a beloved father figure, he has found silence and confusion among those who once professed to love him. Perhaps not coincidentally, for the first time since he finished buying out his dad in 1983, he no longer owns a controlling interest in WWE. He has little of his magic left. He’s not getting any younger. And he is now in the fight of his life. We’ll see how far his respectability can go.