WWE Thread (Spoilers)

[Dr. Zoidberg]

It's the distraction from the Vince saga that WWE were after.

[Ocelot]

Rick Martel might jut say THIS IS A WIZZORK?!?!?!?!!?

Cody is added in a little bit later and everyone is happy as hell and forgives the WWE and they draw five gajillion dollars.

I'm not sure but given it's the WWE one can't help but be a bit paranoid.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Hold on a minute, playa! You've got a tag team match, with Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis!

Holla holla, playa!

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Ocelot]

This thing is quite the torpedo to the side of the WWE ship.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Bandit]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Bandit]

Damn, she's right. 10x more if you count the money he paid for the internal "investigation"

[Dr. Zoidberg]

That makes me madder than the whole pooping on the head stuff!

Someone that was going to keep WCW alive should have been able to buy WCW, even if they were just going to run it on a much smaller scale.

Send him to jail for 5 years for sexual assault, and another 10 years for screwing up the invasion angle.

[Bandit]

He pooped on the head of WCW.

[Bandit]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Wow, WWE just created a new style of show. The Kickoff was Raw without the matches. It was even more like a pantomime than usual being on a stage, but it was good. It's not something they could do every week, but before the major PPVs it's something they should do.

[Bandit]

Bret finally gives his view of the Vince situation in a new interview

"I’m going to speak my truth,” Hart told me over the phone from his home in Calgary. “I’m not worried about Vince’s feelings. He’s never cared about mine.”

“I don’t have any problem with everybody kicking his head around the parking lot,” Hart said. “I’m OK with the truth coming out.”

Hart had been warned by fellow wrestling insiders a few months ago that McMahon “was in big trouble that he wasn’t going to be able to sweep under the rug,” as he put it to me.

On Jan. 25, Hart learned the specifics of that trouble when the Wall Street Journal reported on Grant’s lawsuit. The 67-page suit came with alleged dates, details and—most damning of all—screenshots of text messages.

Within 48 hours, something remarkable happened: McMahon resigned from WWE and its corporate parent, TKO Holdings.

The company said in a brief statement that it had cut ties with him. He retains a minority share of TKO stock, but is effectively powerless. This was unprecedented: There has not been a world where Vince McMahon isn’t the driving force in American pro wrestling since the mid-1980s. Jaws dropped across the industry, and they’ve remained on the floor.

Part of McMahon’s problem this time is structural: Last year, he sold WWE to Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Holdings, which meant McMahon had a boss to answer to for the first time since he bought the WWF from his father in 1983.

But that, alone, doesn’t explain why virtually no one in the world of wrestling has leaped to defend the man they’ve so often gone to bat for. What made the difference this time, Hart told me, were the details of one alleged incident described in Grant’s suit.

On one hand, the alleged events in that encounter were extreme, even bizarre to Hart. (A warning to readers that the following paragraph is a graphic description of the alleged assault.)

According to the filing, McMahon coerced Grant into a three-way sexual encounter, during which McMahon allegedly defecated on Grant’s head and back while she was being raped by another man, then forced her to continue being assaulted for an hour and a half before letting her shower.

It was too much for Hart. “When you get that vision in your head, you go, ‘That’s messed up,’ ” Hart said. “It’s too sick and disgusting to really imagine.”

But at the same time, the lewd text messages included in the suit, allegedly sent by McMahon after the incident, have a convincingly familiar ring, Hart said.

“They sound like Vince,” he told me.

Wrestling has long tolerated sadistic alpha males who exploit women. Indeed, Hart spoke at length of all the sexual abuse he heard whispered about during his time in the industry. It was commonplace: “I don’t think this is the only incident of this kind of predatory behavior,” Hart said. “I think you’ll find that it’s everywhere in [WWE].”

But he never spoke up about it. McMahon was too fearsome at the time.

“It’s kind of like The Godfather: You never know when a guy like Vince will be your enemy again over something you say or do.”

Plus, it seemed like nothing could stop him, anyway. “He’s the Teflon guy,” Hart said of McMahon. “You just can’t seem to get anything on him. He’s just too powerful, got too much money.”

But more important was the love and respect Hart still held for so long. Without McMahon, he had told me, “I wouldn’t be the same man I am today.” McMahon made many of the best things in his adult life possible. It was an exploitative power McMahon held over everyone he built up in the world he built.

Now, Hart sees McMahon facing the greatest threat that a man who has built a profitable reputation for sadism can face.

“It’s like Jeffrey Dahmer, Harvey Weinstein, or Jeffrey Epstein: Vince will be a joke,” Hart said. “He’ll be used for humor, and you’ll shake your head at the shock value of some joke about, ‘What did Vince McMahon do?’ He’ll always be associated with this story, especially as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”

With a federal probe into McMahon’s sexual misconduct reportedly expanding to include the trafficking allegations, Hart may well be right.

What’s more, Hart has come to think that McMahon’s desires weren’t worth the price everyone has paid for them.

He used to be able to say that, whatever evils McMahon did, he did for the public, in service of wrestling as an art form and industry.

Now, having heard and believed the accusations about what McMahon did in private—to someone whose alleged degradation, horrible in its own right, also had no bearing on business—Hart wonders if he had it all wrong.

“I always had a respect for him,” Hart said. “Now it’s tainted. I’m embarrassed that I thought so highly of him.”

Perhaps that’s what sticks to a Teflon man: not accusations that he’s harmful and dangerous, but rather ones that say he’s pathetic and gross.

Hart has already tried to make amends for his past belief in McMahon.

Throughout his time at the WWF and for decades later, he’d heard the rumors and accusations of sexual impropriety against McMahon, and he generally dismissed them. For example, when the WWF’s first female referee, Rita Chatterton, came forward in 1992 to accuse McMahon of raping her, Hart looked for holes in her story and wrote it off, even going so far as to discredit her accusations in interviews.

“I just didn’t believe it,” Hart told me. “I figured Vince had too much at stake to ever do something like that.”

Even after the 2022 revelations of alleged hush money payments from McMahon to former employees became public and he briefly resigned, Hart had kept his mouth shut. Same when McMahon forced his way back into the boardroom in 2023, despite the unresolved accusations.

But a few months ago, after hearing the advance rumblings of these latest accusations, Hart ran into Chatterton at a convention.

“I apologized from the bottom of my heart,” Hart recalled, “and I said, ‘I believe that what happened to you, happened to you. And I apologize. I was wrong.’ ”

Hart sounds genuinely remorseful when he tells me these things. He already lost his father, a legendary wrestling promoter in his own right, 20 years ago. Now, it is as though he has lost another.

“I think, despite all of the issues I ever had with Vince, I know, deep down, I always respected him; but now, knowing what kind of a weirdo he became, I have absolutely zero respect for him,” Hart wrote to me in a text message after our conversation. “I do not think I could ever shake his hand if he extended it. Too creepy.”

[Dr. Zoidberg]