The wild, almost true story of wrestling godfather Vince McMahon

Shocking rumours about the exploits of the WWE mogul have long circulated. Now, a Netflix series promises to reveal the truth – but does it?

As a fan of professional wrestling for 35 years, I have often joked that if you’re a historian writing a biography on the likes of Hitler, Napoleon or Mussolini, forget it. You’re wasting your time. The most darkly fascinating man who ever lived is Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the former owner of global wrestling powerhouse, WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).
McMahon is the most successful promoter in the history of wrestling – a billionaire and a pal of Donald Trump – with a toxically alpha ego of immense proportions.
My joke seems less funny following a 2022 Wall Street Journal report that McMahon had paid $12 million in hush money to four women over allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity. 
Then, in January 2024, former WWE employee Janel Grant filed a lawsuit accusing McMahon of abuse, sexual assault, and trafficking. The specific allegations of the lawsuit are, quite frankly, disgusting. (McMahon denied all the claims.) 
The reports emerged during the production of a six-part docuseries about his life and career – Mr. McMahon, on Netflix now – from Tiger King director Chris Smith.
The docuseries perpetuates some myths that Vince and WWE have spun over the years. In wrestling, where fakery is all part of the promotional tactics, these myths are fair game and well known to fans. The final episode, however, looks at the accusations against McMahon, now 79.
McMahon resigned from WWE. His scandals and controversies have been numerous over the years – he repelled them all until now.
“The only time I thought it was over for Vince was when the Wall Street Journal articles started,” says Dave Meltzer, the preeminent wrestling reporter in the US. Meltzer has covered McMahon and his business for four decades in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
McMahon grew up in a trailer with his mother and stepfather and didn’t meet his real father, the New York wrestling promoter Vince McMahon Sr, until he was 12. He later revealed in a Playboy interview that his stepfather beat him (“It’s unfortunate that he died before I could kill him. I would have enjoyed that”) and insinuated that he was sexually abused by his mother. 
Along with his wife, Linda, McMahon bought his father’s wrestling company (then the WWF now WWE) in 1982 for $1 million. WWE is now valued at $6.8 billion.
McMahon then ran the company as an extension of that toxic alpha ego for 40 years. His love of huge, muscley men is seen in his top champion wrestlers – names such as Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and John Cena. His real-life grievances and his reactions to criticism have often become part of storylines. And his cutthroat ambition to be the kingpin of pro wrestling has erupted into a series of bitter wars with rival promoters.
For longtime fans of wrestling, backstage stories become just as interesting as what happens in the ring. And fans all know their share of “Vince stories”. McMahon detests sneezing. He only sleeps four hours a night. He doesn’t believe in getting sick. He’s so competitive that he refuses to grow a beard – because he can’t “let it win”. He loves toilet humour. He owns a 47ft yacht called “Sexy B–tch”. He’s wrestled matches against his son, his daughter, a one-legged man, and – yes, really – God. And there’s more.
He was obsessed with writing an incest storyline. He once pitched to his pregnant daughter that he should be revealed as the father of her baby on TV. 
Furthermore, he was accused of using real wrestlers’ deaths to help promote matches. He made wrestlers stick their faces in his backside on live TV as part of his “kiss my ass club”. He was rumoured to goad wrestlers into standing up to him as a test of their mettle (“I’m one of the few people in the world who enjoys confrontation,” he says in the Netflix series). He was also reported to tear up scripts literally hours before TV broadcasts and make everyone start over. He even banned the word “wrestling” from WWE television. For McMahon it was not professional wrestling, but “sports-entertainment”.
McMahon tried his hand at many other things but seemingly failed at most of them. He promoted a disastrous Evel Knievel jump across Snake River Canyon in 1974, which led to Vince and his wife Linda going bankrupt. He also set up a failed American football league (twice), produced dreadful movies, and started a campy bodybuilding federation. Especially costly was the $100 million he sank into Linda’s two failed attempts at running for the US Senate. (Linda, however, became a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet.)
Vince McMahon was made for wrestling, with the right kind of carny, lowbrow instincts.
“One of the fascinating things about Vince is that he really wanted to be Ted Turner,” says Dave Meltzer. “He wanted to be the guy that was more than a wrestling promoter. But in the end, he was just the greatest wrestler promoter there ever was.”
When McMahon first bought his father’s company, American wrestling was divided into “territories” – regionally run promotions with their own stars and fanbases. The WWF was the New York territory, with its homebase at Madison Square Garden. McMahon’s master plan was for a ruthless national expansion. He smashed through the territorial lines – breaking the gentlemanly agreements with other promoters that were long upheld by his father – and put on shows in other promoters’ backyards. He snapped up their regional TV slots and lured away their top wrestlers, most notably Hulk Hogan.
McMahon’s real genius has always been branding. And national television was key in convincing audiences that his brand of sports-entertainment was the big leagues. All other wrestling was second rate. And one by one, the territories folded.
“Vince McMahon transformed the wrestling industry,” says Keith Elliot Greenberg, a wrestling journalist and author of numerous wrestling books. “Vince understood modern media and used it to spread the word like a televangelist – and he gained converts.”
He promoted shows on the new-fangled, hip-and-cool music channel, MTV, which teamed wrestlers with Mr T, then the hottest name on American TV, and Cyndi Lauper, who was at the height of her fame. 
McMahon’s greatest success, though, was the creation of WrestleMania, an annual super card of matches with glamour, glitz, and celebrities. The first WrestleMania was held in 1985. Two years later, WrestleMania III drew a supposed 93,173 fans to see Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit. The true attendance figure is the subject of a long-running dispute. Regardless, WrestleMania III was a landmark event that became the blueprint for McMahon’s product: pomp, spectacle, and oversized characters.
Keith Elliot Greenberg has a book on the event – Bigger! Badder! Better! WrestleMania III and the Year It All Changed – published next March.
“WrestleMania III was the first major show in the modern era to sell out an NFL stadium,” Greenberg says. “It sent a clear message that this was a viable entertainment form – no longer regional but such a spectacle that it was worthy of travelling to.”
The flag-waving heroics of Hulk Hogan and “Hulkamania” had become a cultural phenomenon in the age of Reagan, amped-up consumerism, and Born in the USA. McMahon was ruthless but absolutely of-the-moment and on-the-pulse.
McMahon struck a cultural nerve again in the late 1990s with more profane stars, Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. In 2001 he obliterated Ted Turner’s rival league, WCW, and stood unopposed as the undisputed king of sports-entertainment for 20 years. But, increasingly insular in his creative vision, McMahon became a figure of hate for many wrestling fans for his poor, formulaic storylines and childish wrestlers – particularly John Cena. But it was impossible to imagine that McMahon would ever relinquish control.  
The unthinkable happened when – following reports of the $12 million hush money payments – McMahon retired in July 2022. The retirement, however, was brief. McMahon muscled his way back onto the board in early 2023 to facilitate a merger with the MMA league, UFC, to form a new conglomerate. “The merger was basically a way for him to not own the company but at the same time maintain running the company,” says Meltzer.
But McMahon resigned in January 2024 after Janel Grant filed a lawsuit against McMahon, former WWE executive John Laurinaitis, and WWE itself.
According to the lawsuit claims, McMahon pressured Grant into signing an NDA in exchange for payments totalling $3 million, but McMahon stopped making the payments. WWE was reported to have previously received an anonymous tipoff email about the situation, and the company launched its own investigation into McMahon’s alleged misconduct.
The lawsuit accuses McMahon of forcibly using sex toys that he’d named after wrestlers, using Grant sexually as part of contract negotiations with a wrestler, and defecating on her.
McMahon argues that he and Grant were having a consensual relationship and filed a motion to move to arbitration. McMahon is now under federal investigation. The lawsuit has been paused while the investigation is being conducted.
WWE, meanwhile, has made very public efforts to distance itself from the former chairman. The company is also in the thick of a mega-successful boom period. “Now things are doing so much better without him,” says Meltzer.
Controversy is nothing new for McMahon, though some events went under the radar. In May 1983, Nancy Argentino – the girlfriend of wrestler Jimmy Snuka – died from complications from a fractured skull. Snuka – a top-drawing name in McMahon’s national expansion plans – changed his story about what happened, while the coroner believed the case should be treated as a homicide. But in 2019, wrestling reporter David Bixenspan discovered a police report from a previous incident between Snuka and Argentino. It stated that McMahon had tried to talk Argentino out of making a complaint against Snuka at that time.
In 1991, Dr George Zahorian – a ringside physician for the WWF – was convicted for supplying anabolic steroids. His customers included both McMahon’s wrestlers and McMahon himself. McMahon was later indicted on a charge relating to steroids – including conspiracy to distribute steroids to his wrestlers – but was acquitted. There was a subsequent investigation into witness tampering but no further charges.
Another scandal hit in 1992: accusations that WWF personnel had harassed and molested “ring boys” – teenagers who helped construct the ring before wrestling shows. Mel Phillips, the ring crew supervisor and ring announcer, was accused of fondling boys’ feet.
New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick – a longtime nemesis of McMahon’s – wrote that McMahon had admitted to him that he’d previously fired Phillips for his “peculiar and unnatural” relationship with children but had still rehired Phillips. Mushnick is interviewed in the Netflix series and explains his decades-long dislike of McMahon: “Cause he’s a dirtbag.”
Tom Cole, one of the ring boys at the centre of the scandal, died by suicide in 2021.
At the same time, the WWF’s first female referee, Rita Chatterton, came forward and accused McMahon of rape – an incident she said happened back in McMahon’s limo in 1986. Chatterton’s allegations resurfaced in 2022, at which time McMahon – while denying the incident – agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement.
There have been further deaths, too. In 1999, wrestler Owen Hart plummeted 80ft into the ring in a wire stunt gone wrong. McMahon controversially continued with the rest of the show. WWE settled a wrongful death lawsuit for a reported $18 million. In the 2000s, there was a spate of wrestlers dropping dead from years of steroid and drug abuse. In a 2003 interview, journalist Armen Keteyian asked McMahon if he took any responsibility for these premature deaths. McMahon reacted by slapping Keteyian’s notes out of his hands – an embarrassing display from the bullish-but-thin-skinned McMahon. The character he played on TV seemed to emerge from within the real man.
In 2007, wrestler Chris Benoit murdered his wife and son and died by suicide, which brought fresh scrutiny over steroid use in wrestling. Benoit’s actions are now linked to the effects of CTE – a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head traumas.
Particularly sickening is the story of former WWE wrestler Ashley Massaro. She wrote a 2017 affidavit that described how she’d been drugged and raped by someone posing as a US military doctor on 2006 tour of the Middle East. Massaro alleged that McMahon had discouraged her from going public because it was “not in the best interests” of his company. In further details from the affidavit, only revealed this year, Massaro also accused McMahon of sexually preying on female wrestlers and claimed that when she rejected McMahon’s advances, he wrote scripts designed to sabotage her career. Massaro also died by suicide in 2019.
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This week McMahon posted on X to say that he doesn’t regret taking part in the Netflix docuseries, but the producers have conflated his TV character, Mr McMahon, with the real man, and used editing tricks to support a “deceptive narrative” about who he is.
For fans, McMahon leaves a complicated legacy in wrestling. The company was so centred on him, such an extension of his ego, that it’s near impossible to cancel him from its history. As Dave Meltzer says, McMahon remains “the single most influential person there’s ever been in wrestling.” 
In the docuseries, McMahon says that he always expects to win and – a statement that says so much about the man – “I don’t fight fair.”
Mr. McMahon is on Netflix now