A Summary Of All Known Allegations Against Vince McMahon

The following article includes allegations of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

By all rights — especially through a modern lens — 1992 should have marked the start of the downfall of Vince McMahon and the company that is now known as WWE. That year, on the back of the steroid abuse scandal that kicked off in 1991 thanks to the drug distribution conviction of Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission physician Dr. George Zahorian, the company was rocked by numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and other wrongdoing. McMahon was accused of rape and turning a blind eye to sexual harassment and abuse under his nose, and even admitted that he had previously suspected some of it. The grand jury investigation that led to his and WWE's indictment on conspiracy and drug distribution charges (he was acquitted in 1994) started that year, too. But none of it stuck.

It took 30 years, WWE becoming a publicly traded company, multiple allegations targeting McMahon directly, the right reporters at the right publication getting tipped off, and the revelation of undisclosed hush money payments to lead to his resignation in July 2022. With five new allegations trickling out throughout the second half of 2022 alone, it can be a lot to keep track of, so here's a primer that looks at all of the allegations of abuse or enabling the abuse of others that have been levied publicly against McMahon since 1992.

However, just as the scandal started breaking publicly in March 1992, McMahon conceded to New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick that he had previously fired Phillips over his suspicion that, in Mushnick's words, "Phillips' relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural," only to rehire him weeks later. Though McMahon sued Mushnick and the Post for defamation a year later, even citing other parts of the same article as defamatory, they never disputed his account of the conversation, nor a similar one with Wrestling Observer Newsletter editor Dave Meltzer. As recently as 2020, when contacted by Business Insider for a story about the ring boy abuse scandal, WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt ignored all questions about McMahon's calls with Mushnick and Meltzer.

A year after that, in 2021, a report from Babyface v. Heel unearthed a September 1993 FBI memo revealing that the Bureau had a videotape of Phillips not just molesting a boy in the ring before a WWF show, but doing so the exact way accusers had described. (WWE had previously obtained a copy of the video in the first half of 1992.) The FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, though, in a separate memo from December 1993, disregarded the videotape because it happening in a public setting provided, in their view, too many alternate explanations. Aside from a brief, forgotten stint as an independent promoter in 1997, Phillips disappeared from public life after his WWF career ended.

In June 2022, coming off of the initial Wall Street Journal article about McMahon settling sexual misconduct claims, Chatterton broke her silence in a New York Magazine article, giving additional context while pointing to the "Geraldo" episode for the details of her allegations. More newsworthy, though, was that Chatterton was now supported by a contemporaneous outcry witness, Leonard "Mario Mancini" Inzitari, who went to wrestling school with her.

"Was she taken advantage of? Absolutely," said Inzitari. "Was she scared to death? Absolutely. Did she wanna do that? Probably not."

In December 2022, Jon "Greg Valentine" Wisniski Jr. told the Wall Street Journal that Chatterton had told him, as well, while they shared a joint in a parking lot in Albany, New York. Valentine did not believe the story, however, citing questionable reasoning (that he didn't believe she was attractive enough for McMahon), but he corroborated the contemporaneous outcry regardless.

On November 3, the same Journal article reported that a lawyer for Chatterton sent McMahon a demand letter for $11.75 million, with McMahon pledging not to pay her. The letter said that the damages were "hard to overstate," including "years of ongoing depression, substance abuse, disordered eating, lost income, and overall a decreased quality of life." In addition, later that month, Chatterton gained the ability to sue McMahon for damages stemming from the alleged assault. That's thanks to New York's Adult Survivors Act, signed in May 2022, which created a one-year window suspending the statute of limitations on civil sexual assault claims. (New York previously had a similar Child Victims Act that opened another "lookback window" for survivors who were minors at the time of the abuse.)

Despite the autopsy findings and Snuka never providing a story that could have accounted for someone else killing Argentino, the paper trail stopped cold after his second Whitehall Police interview. There, Snuka was joined by McMahon, and unlike every other interview in the case, the investigating officer's report did not recount anything that was said. (For Snuka's part, he claimed in his 2012 memoir that McMahon entered the meeting with a briefcase and left without it.) A year later, the prosecutor's office lied to the Argentino family lawyer and said Nancy's death had been ruled an accident.

Outside of a one year anniversary blurb in the local Allentown Morning Call newspaper, the case wasn't reported on again until Penthouse and The Village Voice commissioned features on the 1992 scandals that also revisited the case. It was the Morning Call's 2013 discovery of the autopsy report and a transcript of an incriminating Snuka interview in the case file for a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Argentino family that got the ball rolling on Snuka being indicted. The case was dismissed days before his 2017 death, though, stemming from him being ruled incompetent to stand trial a year earlier.

2022's biggest wrestling news story kicked off on June 15, when the Wall Street Journal reported that WWE's board of directors was using an independent law firm to investigate a $3 million settlement that Vince McMahon paid a former subordinate months earlier. The investigation started in April after the board got "a series of anonymous emails" from someone claiming to be a friend of the woman in question, who had worked for WWE as a paralegal, and it had turned up additional settlements with other women. The paralegal had, according to the emails, gotten a 100% raise after beginning a sexual relationship with McMahon, from $100,000 annually to $200,000. The emails further alleged that Vince "gave her like a toy" to then-talent relations head John Laurinaitis, becoming his assistant in the process, with the situation further deteriorating from there.

"My friend was so scared so she quit after Vince McMahon and lawyer Jerry [McDevitt] paid her millions of dollars to shut up," the friend was quoted as writing. McDevitt formally commented in a letter to the Journal, saying that "WWE did not pay any monies" to the paralegal "on her departure," and that she hadn't alleged sexual harassment. Based on what the paralegal's friend alleged, though, nobody had alleged that she was paid the settlement "on her departure," as the friend had said the paralegal quit her WWE job after being paid the settlement money. A WWE spokesperson, meanwhile, said that the relationship was consensual — it doesn't appear that anyone was arguing the relationship was not consensual in the criminal sense, though in recent years, the collective mindset has shifted as to whether or not someone can fully consent to sex with their boss in the first place.

The aforementioned second Wall Street Journal article, which came out on July 8, 2022, painted a significantly more bleak picture of McMahon's alleged behavior. It revealed that three more of his settlements with former subordinates found by the board's investigation took the total amount over $12 million, with one, a $7.5 million settlement, accounting for the majority of that figure.

That settlement went to a woman who the Journal described as "a former wrestler who alleged that Mr. McMahon coerced her into giving him oral sex and then demoted her and, ultimately, declined to renew her contract in 2005 after she resisted further sexual encounters." Of the settlements that were reportedly uncovered in the board's investigation, it's the only one where the allegation of sexual contact is framed as "coerced," with the women in question apparently suggesting that she did not fully consent.

The settlement didn't come back in 2005 when the wrestler was fired, though. It came in 2018, after the wrestler and her lawyer reached out to McMahon and negotiated the $7.5 million settlement in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. That would place it just after the #MeToo movement blew up in the wake of the reporting about Harvey Weinstein's misconduct in the New York Times and the New Yorker. It's also the same general time frame where, according to an August 2022 FanByte article, the Times began work on investigating McMahon, only to stop when the women who had been contacted stopped cooperating, feeling that the reporter didn't know wrestling well enough for the necessary trust to develop.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

WWE Diva Search winner Ashley Massaro, who died by suicide in 2019, also had her name come up as part of the summer Vince McMahon news cycle. Specifically, her ex-boyfriend, Paul London, accused McMahon of obsessively pursuing her while she worked under him in WWE.

"I do remember, specifically, many times when she would be crying to me because Vince was propositioning her to fly on the jet with them," London told Rene Dupree on his Cafe de Rene podcast in July 2022. "Kevin Dunn, Bucktooth Bucky, would be telling her that she has to fly on the jet with them ... Every now and then, they'd always put the Divas up at like the TV hotel or whatever, he'd be knocking on her door and trying to get her to answer."

"I'm shocked this Vince stuff is just now coming out," London added. "I haven't looked up on a lot of it ... but I'm surprised it hasn't come out within the last 10 years. But that just goes to show how afraid people are of the power dynamic where they're so fearful of losing their job. What does that say about you, if you're protecting this 90-year-old f***ing corpse with a thong tan line, just because he's a billionaire?"

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.