So, yesterday, 1:05 Pacific, Vince
McMahon tweeted this:
Three weeks beforehand, he had told
everyone who would listen: “Fuck them.” “I'm going to be
here.”, etc.
So the entire discussion of the last,
probably, going on 36 hours now has been several-fold:
First, who else is going?
Long-maligned producer Kevin Dunn and fitness-model magazine
enthusiast John Laurinitis are the first two candidates. (The
latter, especially now with HHH/Paul Levesque returning as the head
of Talent Relations, announced earlier on Friday.)
Second, what for the future of the
company?
I'm afraid that might tie in to the
question everyone has been asking most, however:
What has whom uncovered that the other
parties in the WWE Board of Directors (the real group, not the
“kayfabe” (storyline) group) have found out to force McMahon out
so quickly and precipitously?
Let's go over, both in this present
sexual-harassment situation and in the past, a not-exhaustive list of
what we KNOW Vince McMahon has done in his 40-year reign of terror to
either reshape professional wrestling into sports entertainment or
kill it trying...
Before Hulkamania and the national
expansion, Vince McMahon's #1 babyface (good guy, crowd is supposed
to cheer) was a recently-turned Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. On May
10, 1983 – about eight months before Vince Jr. used Hogan as his
centerpiece to break the territory system – Snuka is understood to
have rammed the head of Nancy Argentino, a mistress, to the point
where she murdered by the “Superfly”. Almost no one had ever
heard of this murder until the podcast era – Vince McMahon openly
accessoried after the fact to cover up Argentino's death and
continue to “push” (spotlight) Snuka. So much so, Snuka was not
finally indicted by a grand jury for the murder until just before
his death in 2015. There is even a belief that Vince Jr. brought
the proverbial “suitcase of cash” to try to end the
investigation – Vince denies this.
About the same time, Vince McMahon
Sr. sold his wrestling company to his son and the Titan Sports
conglomerate Jr. was building. The deal was apparently begun in
June of 1983. There was significant concern within the halls of the
National Wrestling Alliance (though, contrary to the initial story
many in the NWA have purported for decades, until the podcast era,
it appears that at least two major promoters (Ole Anderson in
Georgia, Verne Gagne in Minnesota) were also in the process of doing
this) that McMahon would set out to dismantle the territories. Such
was the concern that Vince Sr. aided in consummating the deal by
handshakes with all of the other NWA promoters this would not
happen. Vince Jr. admits, by 1991, that had he not lied openly to
his father about his aims, Sr. never would've sold the company.
The boom of the WWE soon followed,
with an eight-year period where the steroids flowed freely and the
WWE slayed all in their path, ending the territory system, as Vince
wanted. This culminated in the 1992 trial of Dr. George Zahorian.
Dr. Zahorian was convicted. Vince and the WWE were largely
exonerated – as the general public largely understood the massive
behemoths (and the men who you might not expect having taken
steroids to handle the road and physical demands!) in the day of
300-350 nights a year...
A 1993 series of sexual harassment
charges followed.
After a boom period and the
infamous Monday Night Wars no-holds-barred brawls with Ted Turner
and WCW, a capacity crowd in Kansas City, MO screams in horror as
Owen Hart was killed due to negligence in a rappelling stunt from
the top of Kemper Arena on May 23, 1999.
Not only did it appear that Vince
had little remorse to the event, the show went on that night – to
much criticism from all sane parties.
A 2014 concussion lawsuit exposing
the WWE (and pro wrestling in general) with vicious blunt-object
shots to the head for many years was ignored by the courts in 2021.
Perhaps the biggest recent issue
is the WWE and Vince Jr. being in the forefront of the Saudi Arabia
“sportswashing” angle, including at least one incident where it
appears a money dispute between McMahon and the Saudis caused a
touch-and-go kidnapping of nearly Vince's entire relevant roster,
which could've ended with every one of them being executed, had MbS
had the whim to do so!
The undisputed nature that the WWF
(renamed the WWE after, somehow, they lost a lawsuit on confusion
grounds to the World Wildlife Fund) held as the top (if not ONLY)
relevant company in the 2000's and much of the 2010's smoothed some
of this...
… though the podcast era, where
former wrestlers of the boom periods now hawk their wares and their
stories on the Internet, has brought new and fresh problems.
The largest of these is not the
current sexual harassment admissions, but the discussion of The
Plane Ride From Hell. It was a trans-Atlantic flight WWF (just
before the loss of the lawsuit that week in 2002) talent took,
coming home from a European tour and pay-per-view. Alcohol flowed
freely. Sexual assaults of several female plane staff led to large
settlement payouts to the women – one of them basically literally
“exposed the business” of decades-long legend Ric Flair as a
complete sex pest pig. Several brawls almost crashed the plane.
Several parties were disciplined, no one was rightly fired.
The complete disregard of the
talent (both in- and outside-ring) in the name of Vince and The Show
being the centerpiece. Examples are innumerable, but include a
couple of “screwjobs” against champions who would not play
along, the denigration of longtime WWE voice Jim Ross and his bouts
with Bell's Palsy (including a tasteless surgery angle which “heel”
(bad guy, crowd boos) Vince acts as if he's extracting a bust of
Ross' head from his posterior, telling all that if they are like
him, they have their head up their ass...).
Perhaps culminating, in that
regard, in the double-murder/suicide by wrestling talent Chris
Benoit in 2007. Benoit, known to push himself beyond all sane
limits for the perfection of his craft, was encouraged by WWE to
continually leap from the top rope (if not from an extra height of
15 feet in a cage match!) to headbutt opponents – creating massive
CTE. Any sane person would now understand that Benoit was so out
of his mind with the brain disease, there were three victims that
night...
And I could go on and on about just that stuff.
Here's some of the stuff we already know about which has felled Vince
out of the company, at least as of right now:
On June 15, 2022, the Wall
Street Journal reported a
$3,000,000 hush payment to a mistress paralegal, hired by the
company in 2019, for a consensual sexual relationship with the CEO
in his 70's.
Three
days later, Vince tried to make a play at “stepping back” as the
WWE Board of Directors (actual) was investigating.
Within
two more weeks, WSJ
reported that, in fact, at least four women had received such
payments, going back to at least 2006.
From
what is being reported, it appears this extended to talent, as
former “diva” Ashley Massaro has been reported as a victim of
Vince's attentions. Which makes you openly wonder if the
entire point of the “Diva's Division” and what I called “The
Striptease Championship” was to get in Vince's (or the
aforementioned talent head Laurinitis') pants!!
Massaro,
we later found out, was passed around like a joint for sexual
pleasure of men in a 2016 Middle Eastern tour. She committed
suicide in 2019.
And
that's just a completely non-exhaustive list of what we KNOW. Now
dig a bit deeper:
Owen
Hart's mother still believes that Vince deliberately killed Owen.
After hearing what Owen believed may happen to him in Kansas City
(he had that “bad feeling”) and the Dark Side of the
Ring episode on Owen's death, I
agree – and believe Owen was killed for the ultimate crime in
Vince Jr.'s eyes: Wanting to leave WWE and have a life of his own.
It
is almost a certainty that any woman of any degree of attractiveness
within the WWE company was being groped, assaulted, harassed, and
more by SOMEBODY within the company – as an expectation of
employment.
A
long-standing coverup of Pat Patterson and his relationship with
some of the ring crew flared up briefly.
And
the big question...
What
has been found out in the last 3-4 weeks which has forced Vince
McMahon to publicly declare (you can make your jokes, etc. about
whether it's actually happening) retirement as the head of the
company?
It is
clear that there is more sexual harassment, and a LOT MORE sexual
harassment. I think it is clear that a condition of being employed
by Vince that someone was going to have you sexually, consensual or
not.
I have
one suspicion, and it involves what I believe to be the darkest
“rumor secret” in the annals of WWE.
That
rumor (and I must stress – everything here is rumor and innuendo
and NOTHING IS PROVEN) involves new CEO and Vince Jr.'s daughter
Stephanie.
One of
the darkest urban legends in all of professional wrestling involves
Stephanie McMahon and a purported underage sexual relationship with
the late “Macho Man” Randy Savage.
It is
believed that Vince McMahon fired Savage for having sex with
Stephanie in 1994 or 1995, when Stephanie was 14 years old.
I am
going to go out on a limb. Everyone knows that Vince McMahon is a
misogynistic Trumpian pig. So that, of it's own merit, does not, in
any way, explain Friday's action (or why didn't this happen ten years
ago?).
But
what if one of the following scenarios occurred:
McMahon
actually pimped his daughter to Stephanie, and Savage refused? We
know that there was a boob job done for Stephanie during her
Attitude Era/Alliance run in WWE, both babyface and heel.
What
if, regardless of other Vince involvement, he's been covering up
such an act for the last almost 30 years, and it's finally been
found out?
And
then the real dark one: What if Vince has been doing it to his
daughter himself, like a good Trumpian bitch?
