Vince McMahon, longtime chairman and former chief executive officer of World Wrestling Entertainment, resigned from the board of directors of WWE’s parent company on Friday, a day after a former employee accused him of sexual assault and of sex trafficking in a trial.
Mr. McMahon, 78, was executive chairman of TKO Group, WWE’s parent company, where he no longer held an official 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,” Mr. Khan wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
The suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, accuses Mr. McMahon of trafficking with the employee, Janel Grant, as well as physical and emotional abuse. The graphic complaint, which also names John Laurinaitis, a former WWE executive, and the company itself as defendants, says Mr. McMahon and Mr. Laurinaitis took turns hitting Ms. Grant, among many other allegations.
Mr. McMahon ultimately pressured Ms. Grant to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for $3 million, according to the complaint, but only paid her $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 Mr. McMahon’s behavior, raising concerns questions about who knew what and when.
In a statement released after his resignation, Mr McMahon called Ms Grant’s trial a “vindictive distortion of the truth” and said he looked forward to clearing his name. But he said he decided to resign “out of respect” for TKO, WWE and their employees and wrestlers.
Mr. McMahon and his wife, Linda, founded the company that would become WWE in 1980 and grew it from a regional company to a national and then international company. They made wrestlers like Stone Cold Steve Austin and Undertaker famous, and after a lull in the 2000s, the company’s wrestlers became more popular than they had in years.
But repeated accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. McMahon have darkened the company’s fortunes. In 2022, a special committee of the WWE Board of Directors conducted an investigation into Mr. McMahon’s conduct and found that for 16 years he had spent $14.6 million on payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. One was a former wrestler who said Mr. McMahon forced her to perform oral sex on him and then decided not to renew her contract, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Further investigation by the company revealed that he made an additional $5 million in payments to two women.
Mr. McMahon temporarily resigned from WWE during the investigation. But he remained the company’s largest shareholder, and in early 2023, after the WWE board of directors completed its investigation into his behavior, Mr. McMahon used his voting shares to replace three members of the board. board of directors by two allies and himself as president. His daughter, Stephanie McMahon, who had served as chairman and co-CEO of WWE, resigned from the company.
Shortly after his return, Mr. McMahon initiated a sales process that resulted in the purchase of WWE Endeavor by the sports and entertainment conglomerate Endeavor, and then the merger of WWE and another of its holdings, Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts promotion company, into a new public company, TKO Group.
Since then, WWE has signed long-term media rights deals that position it well for the future. In September, NBCUniversal paid a reported $1.4 billion to purchase the broadcast rights to WWE’s “Friday Night SmackDown” for five years, starting in 2024.
On Tuesday, TKO Group announced 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 aims to attract more revenue through advertising, which in media is primarily devoted to live entertainment.
But in a possible sign of trouble ahead for WWE, meat snack company Slim Jim, a longtime sponsor of professional wrestling, said Friday that it was suspend sponsorship from WWE in light of “disruption allegations against Vince McMahon.”
