Linda McMahon is much worse than you thinkIn a sane world, her past would be disqualifying.
💭 🤔 💥 With corporate outlets obeying in advance, supporting independent political media is more important right now than ever. Public Notice is possible thanks to paid subscribers. If you aren’t one already, please click the button below and become one to support our work. 💭 🤔 💥 Today, the Senate is holding a confirmation hearing for President Trump’s Education Secretary nominee, Linda McMahon. Though she served in Trump’s first cabinet as SBA Administrator, McMahon is best known for her private professional career, co-founding what’s now World Wrestling Entertainment with now-estranged husband Vince McMahon. She left her executive role in the company in 2009 to embark on a career in politics, dumping $100 million on a pair of failed Senate campaigns en route to becoming a bigwig in Republican donor circles. As we sit right now, it seems likely that Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of of Education will be central to Democrats’ questions during McMahon’s confirmation hearing. And given the state of things, that’s probably the right choice. There is, however, another reason that she shouldn’t be anywhere near the cabinet, least of all running the DoE. That would be her role in an ugly scandal that’s reared its head again in recent months thanks to a new lawsuit: The sexual abuse of tween boys who were paid to work as gophers for WWE (then Titan Sports doing business as the World Wrestling Federation) and the claims that the McMahons covered it up.
I’ve covered this story extensively for several years for multiple news outlets. It’s reporting that was necessary because, despite the story first emerging in March 1992, it was under-reported to a pretty extreme degree, especially by national media. It was mainly local newspapers, daytime TV tabloid and talk shows, and the wrestling fan media that covered the abuse of the “ring boys,” with legacy national outlets running from the story. The Los Angeles Times was more interested in Hulk Hogan’s drug use for its syndicated WWF expose as the child molestation story was breaking, and nobody else on a national level seemed willing to pick up the baton. Eventually, in late 1993, NBC News attempted to take a crack at it, only to drop the story after WWF interference that was later reported by the Village Voice. In time, details faded. Barely anything about it was easy to find online, leaving a vague narrative about Mel Phillips, a WWF ring announcer who also headed up the wrestling ring assembly crew, rubbing the feet of young boys who he paid to assist said ring crew. (Phillips died in 2012.) That’s still a very bad thing, of course, but it’s a bad thing that’s a lot easier for the average person to write off than more overt sexual abuse would be. In reality, the details were much, much worse: A series of allegations presented a similar M.O. where Phillips would rub the boys’ feet on his own crotch. Even in 1992, there was ample reason to believe that the McMahons knew about it and let it go on. And not just because announcer Robert “Gorilla Monsoon” Marella joked about Phillips’s foot fetish on national television. It’s because Vince McMahon, in so many words, said as much. On the record. To two different reporters. "[T]wo weeks ago, during pour-his-heart-out phone calls, [Vince McMahon] told West Coast-based journalist Dave Meltzer, then me, that he had let Phillips go four years ago because Phillips's relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural,” reported New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick in March 1992. “McMahon said he re-hired Phillips with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids." Meltzer’s contemporaneous reporting about his conversation with McMahon was more vague, but he confirmed to me during the reporting of my 2020 Business Insider feature about the ring boy abuse scandal that Mushnick’s account was accurate. A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like David takes resources. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, please sign up to support our work. Though neither Mushnick nor Meltzer recorded their conversations with McMahon, it must be noted that McMahon has never, ever disputed the accuracy of their descriptions of what he said. Even when McMahon sued Mushnick and the Post a year later for defamation, that complaint never disputed Mushnick’s account of their conversations. The same goes for when McMahon/WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt sent myself and Business Insider a legal threat when we requested comment in advance of publishing the 2020 article: He took issue with the characterization of the McMahons as having known about what Phillips was up to, but never said a word about the accuracy of the reporting about Vince’s specific admissions to Meltzer and Mushnick. The same also goes for Vince’s current lawyer, Jessica Rosenberg, who refused to answer very specific questions about those March 1992 conversations when I covered the filing of a new lawsuit by five former ring boys for Rolling Stone in October 2024. There’s even more where that came from, though. During the reporting of what became the Business Insider article, I visited Mushnick’s home in New Jersey to go through three boxes of what he said was everything wrestling-related that he had saved. This included a copy of the transcript of his sworn deposition testimony from the defamation lawsuit, where he got into more detail about what Vince told him, which was ever more damning than his March 1992 column had indicated, and also pointed to direct knowledge on Linda’s part. "Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the organization with the caveat that Mel steer clear of underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids,” Mushnick testified. He added that Vince told him that he brought Phillips back in part because Phillips missed being around wrestling in the weeks that he was gone. Also in the deposition, Mushnick recalled bringing up a specific ring boy to Vince, one who had been given the nickname “Mrs. Mel Phillips,” to which McMahon responded "that's his guy, but he has his parents' permission.”
Elsewhere in Mushnick’s archives, I found a summary of witness interviews conducted by Mushnick and the Post’s defense team. (I’m not linking it or the deposition transcript here because they’re replete with names and accounts of victims that haven’t otherwise gone public.) One such interview was with Jim Stuart, Vince’s former driver, who alleged that Vince told him that Phillips enjoyed “sucking the toes of young boys.” According to Stuart, it was at the urging of wrestling operations executive Pat Patterson, who would later be accused of sexual misconduct himself, that the McMahons brought Phillips back from his brief firing in 1988 as long as he “stayed away from kids.” A former high-level WWF employee I spoke to for the Insider article also made it very clear that the behavior of Phillips was not a secret among those who worked there. "It was a crazy time in the company," they said. "The boys that the company hired to put up the ring and so forth, were being … had by some of the folks who were in the wrestling ops side of things. And it was just generally known, by everybody, that it was going on." On the verge of tears, the source described the situation as “an absolute mess” and that those in charge "clearly knew what was going on, but really did nothing to stop it.,” concluding that “there was not a damn thing we could do about it." At various times, including the lawsuit against Mushnick and the Post as well as McDevitt’s threatening letter to myself and Business Insider, the official WWE position was presented as if the scandal was entirely Mushnick’s creation. That there was no overt sexual abuse, “just” Phillips playing with young boys’ feet. Linda herself even told the Charleston Post and Courier in June 1993 that she no longer believed that Cole was sexually abused. However, by the time they sued Mushnick and the Post, they knew that this was not true. That’s because, as reported in a 2021 article on my Substack, the WWF was sent a videotape in 1992 that shows Phillips putting a boy’s foot in his (Phillips’s) crotch — exactly what multiple boys had said he did. (The FBI got ahold of the videotape approximately a year later in 1993.)
As for Linda McMahon herself, she also ran point on handling the company’s dealings with Tom Cole, the most vocal of the ring boys and the first to attempt legal action. (Cole died by suicide in 2021.) According to an interview that he gave to the Wrestling Perspective newsletter in 1999, there were red flags even during settlement talks: His lawyer and McDevitt would routinely leave the room, putting him in there alone with Vince and Linda “for 15, 20 minutes at a time.” He ended up with a relatively small monetary settlement of $55,000, which was somehow less than the $64,000 to $65,000 that his lawyers got. Also as part of the settlement, Cole got a job as part of the actual adult ring crew, but before long, verbal abuse at work from coworkers and fans alike led to him wanting off the road. As an alternative, Linda pushed for a deal where he’d go to college on their dime while getting paid, but if he didn’t keep up his grades and attendance, he’d get fired. With Cole not up for the task mental health-wise, it ended with him being fired. And not just fired, but fired via an exceptionally cruel termination letter sent by Linda McMahon. "Vince and I believe that we have over the past year, demonstrated our willingness and our support not only financially but emotionally to helping you," she wrote. "But at this point we believe that we have done everything we can. Therefore, this letter is to advise you of your termination with Titan Sports, effective immediately, and that you will receive your last paycheck this week." Enjoy this post? Then please sign up to support our work and get Public Notice directly in your inbox five mornings a week. After explaining what he needed to do to wrap things up with the human resources department, she closed with a parting shot: "Again, Tom, I find this action truly regrettable. The opportunity of a lifetime is a terrible thing to waste." Attempting to twist the knife even more, the company fought Cole’s attempts to collect unemployment benefits, appealing the decisions in Cole’s favor “like five to six separate times” over the course of almost two years per his description to Wrestling Perspective in 1999. Linda even showed up at the next to last hearing herself, where, according to Cole, he got her to admit that it was the first time she had ever personally appeared at a former employee’s unemployment hearing. According to Cole, the rulings went in his favor every time. “One person I was very disappointed with was Linda McMahon because she had said to me once that she had a son my age and she wanted to do the right thing by me,” Cole explained in 1999. “She gave me a hug one time. She had told me everything would be all right. My most important thing was I wanted them to believe what I was saying. I used to say that to them. I was like, ‘You believe what I’m saying. That’s the most important thing. I want you to know that.’ She’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, I absolutely believe you. That’s why I want to see you do good. I want to see you go to college. I’ll be there when you go to college. I’ll be there when you get married. Someday when you get married, I want to be there. You’re my son’s age. I consider you in a sense like a son. I want to look at it that way. I want you to come to me with your problems and stuff and things like that.’ They really gave it to me. I didn't know which way was up.” What Linda McMahon is prepared to do to dismantle the Department of Education is bad enough. But even if none of that was in play, she’d still be horrendously unfit — at least by any pre-Trump standard. That’s it for todayWe’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s newsletter, please support our work by signing up. Paid subscribers make PN possible. Thanks for reading. |
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