This article has been updated with comments from Sean Oliver, the co-host of the ‘Kliq This’ podcast.
Recently, former owner and chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, Vince McMahon resigned from the company that he built after accusations were levied against him by former WWE employee, Janel Grant. Grant accused McMahon of sexual abuse and of trafficking her to other men in WWE’s employ.
This is according to a blockbuster report from The Wall Street Journal, which stated that Grant filed the lawsuit on January 25, 2024. This was just prior to one of WWE’s biggest Premium Live Events of the year, the Royal Rumble. It also came after the news that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson had been appointed to the Board of Directors of TKO (the now-parent company of WWE and UFC), and that WWE had signed a 10-year deal with streaming giant Netflix to air their weekly television show, Raw.
The lawsuit, published by Variety, details the alleged relationship between Grant and Vince McMahon, 77.
“Plaintiff Janel Grant is a former employee of WWE who was the victim of physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault and trafficking at WWE,” the complaint read. “Ms. Grant is filing this lawsuit not just to address her own suffering, but also to act for those who are afraid to speak out.”
One of the reasons that women who are the victims of sexual abuse don’t speak out, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, is out of “Fear of being judged or not being believed.”
Kevin Nash is a former WWE and WCW Champion who has long held a friendship with McMahon, as well as the current Chief Content Officer of WWE (and McMahon’s son-in-law), Triple H (Paul Levesque).
Nash recently delved into the accusations levied against his friend and the company of which he served as champion, on his podcast with Sean Oliver, Kliq This.
“My whole thing is this,” Nash stated. “What if Vince McMahon decides that this thing goes a completely different way?…If these things were done to me by a 77-year-old man, I wouldn’t be looking for payoff. I would be looking for him to die in prison on criminal charges. Because once you get the criminal charges, you can still go back and get civil [charges].”
Nash and his co-host, Sean Oliver, referenced the OJ Simpson case, in which Simpson was acquitted of murder charges but was still ordered to pay the family of Nicole Brown, his alleged victim.
“The thing is, ‘without a reasonable doubt’ is what the criminal standard is,” Nash said.
Oliver said that there hasn’t been a criminal investigation (despite the fact that federal law enforcement agents executed a search warrant on McMahon and served him with a federal grand jury subpoena.
Nash referenced the three-part Jeffrey Epstein documentary that is on Netflix, and compared Epstein’s case to Vince McMahon.
“This wasn’t a 14-year-old girl that was giving a man a hand job for $200 and brought back to her trailer house,” Nash said. “Like, that was not the situation. So it’s like, when they started using ‘She was being groomed,’ and she was this and she was that, and I’m just like ‘Jesus, like, how did like, she not get out of this?'”
Oliver wondered, out loud, why Grant’s issues were not made public a year-and-a-half ago when allegations of Vince McMahon making employees sign NDA’s first came out. Grant, herself, has gone on record saying that she offered to be interviewed by those who were investigating McMahon, but that they never interviewed her.
“If it was [made public], did the authorities dismiss it?” Oliver asked. “Or was it just ignored? Or did she not mention these details. Was it just proposed? Was it just posited as an affair that ended and she accepted hush money and then never talked about this until now? Because this is a year-and-a-half later. So I would imagine, just based on this document, that a district attorney somewhere is obligated to investigate this and either pursue criminal charges or not.”
Oliver then stated that McMahon recently cashed out much of his stock in WWE/TKO, which “maybe that made him a target too, for some, because this is a lawsuit seeking compensatory damages.”
Nash then defended Paul Levesque, who was maligned in the Internet Wrestling Community, and mainstream outlets, for telling members of the press that he hadn’t read the lawsuit that Grant filed.
“My friend got harassed because he didn’t, in the middle of Royal Rumble weekend, [he] didn’t, while he was trying to book two — a woman’s Rumble and a men’s Rumble — and the rest of the show, and moving forward, along with the fact that one of their stars, uh, two of their stars out of their top 10 are now out injured. He didn’t take the time to read the 63 pages that his father-in-law had already backed out of the company and said ‘I’m done.'”
Oliver argued that Levesque probably wasn’t allowed to comment on an active suit.
Nash stated that McMahon will “have his day in court.”
“I don’t know [this woman],” Nash said. “She could have very easily have been…this could have been a consensual relationship. It appears to me that, through reading what I’ve read, that at some point Vince’s wife found out about it, said ‘Cut this off,’ which he immediately did. And the situation from there was, they worked out an agreement. There would be no…this relationship would not go forward. And this was what you would get. You would sign the non-disclosure, much like the other four women had. It wasn’t like there wasn’t some kind of pattern here. You know, if somebody is such a predator, and so deadly, you lock that person up.”
In a perfect world, that would be true. But this is not a perfect world. According to RAINN, only three out of every 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in prison.
Oliver than posited that Janel Grant’s attorney should have called the police upon hearing of the allegations.
“If you’re Ms. Grant’s attorney, drawing these papers to get the, let’s say it was the $3 million or whatever it was in the NDA and you hear this story, don’t you have some responsibility as her lawyer to say, ‘Hold on, call the goddamn police right now, because you’ve been…”
Nash didn’t let Oliver finish, instead choosing to comment on the appearance of Ms. Grant’s attorney.
Have you seen her attorney?” Nash asked. “I’ve seen her actually speak. She’s a short, blonde-haired woman that looks like she went to University of Phoenix and got her law degree.”
Nash, presumably attempting to undermine the credibility of Ms. Grant’s attorney, said that “When she went into the psychology of the, uh, grooming, and she really didn’t know any of the terminology, but she went ahead and made sure that this is nothing…that she was…was a specialist in, nor had any real expertise in…just some books that she’d read. Like, wow. A guy with $4 million probably is not gonna be able to put much of a cross on this, on this girl, on the stand with this one defending her.”
Nash then said that the lawsuit that was filed didn’t “seem like it was prepared by somebody that knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
Nash later stated that the accusations levied against McMahon were “horrific.”
“But at the same time,” Nash said, “There’s so many things that if you know Vince and you read into them, it’s a fantasy. It’s a power thing. There’s no three black guys that are…it was a fantasy. It was fantasy play. And the girl comes back and says ‘I can’t do a Wednesday, I can do a Friday.’ I’m sorry man, it’s hard for me to fuckin’ just take all this shit and just throw a motherfucker under the bus when they’re trying to… because they’re not going criminally…when they’re trying to get what they can, pay-wise. Because, you know, $3 million settlement…that blonde girl’s getting a million of it. So, you know, who’s pulling whose strings here?”
Nash said that since McMahon had resigned, he didn’t believe Endeavor would remove any other executives. He stated that the company was in good shape, and then he referenced the whacky history of pro wrestling.
“There’s always been something somewhere,” Nash said. “Whether it’s some guy that’s a promoter in Memphis that’s got a liking for young ladies (or young boys) and wants to have them come up to the room and give ’em the Bundy Splash for the five-count. There’s been all kinds of crazy shit that’s been going on, and it’s just…it is what it is…One man’s kink, one man’s perversion, is another man’s horrific…”
Nash then reiterated that if rape, sexual assault, and human trafficking took place, then those things need to be treated and addressed as criminal charges.
“If they’re just fucking being used to push more money into this situation for somebody to get a payday, then that’s wrong. And the system’s being used the wrong way. And I don’t think that people should be in any way rewarded in deviancy, either way.”
Nash then pontificated further.
“I just think it’s very strange that this girl whose parents must have passed pretty close to each other, and she’s their caregiver, and the next thing you know, somebody comes to Vince and says, ‘Hey, you know, help this girl out.’ And then Vince gives her a job. And then she’s saying, ‘Well, you know, I’d stop by his apartment. He hugged me in his underwear.’ Well, that seems to me like when my wife comes home and I’m in my underwear and, you know, she’s in the kitchen and I walk by and give her a hug…”
In Nash’s hypothetical scenario, his wife is not his boss, however.
Nash’s point was that if the two, McMahon and Grant, were in a relationship, it would be common for him to greet her in his underwear. But, as Oliver alluded to, McMahon opened his door while in his underwear before it became a “relationship.”
Oliver then wondered who “Vince would’ve booked for the three; would it have been contemporary black dongs?”
He was referencing a portion of the lawsuit that alleged that McMahon had raped Ms. Grant with a collection of “black dildos” that were, for some reason, named after black WWE Superstars.
“Maybe, like, a legend did a run-in like Tony Atlas,” Oliver laughed. “Would that have gotten a pop, as opposed to, like going with R-Truth?”
“You gotta go with the top guys,” Nash retorted.
A previous version of this article included a paragraph about the ‘nDa 4 life’ shirt that is being sold on Boxofgimmicks.com. Sean Oliver reached out to Bodyslam to clarify that the shirts were created and released in regards to a back-and-forth Twitter exchange between Chris Jericho and the attorney of CM Punk regarding a Non-Disclosure Agreement that Jericho may or may not have signed regarding the ‘Brawl Out’ incident.
Oliver also offered his perspective on the federal warrant that had been issued to search Vince McMahon’s home.
“I’m of course aware of the search warrant executed on VKAM last year, but that was not for sexual abuse of Ms. Grant.” Oliver wrote. “This was the investigation into the funds paid to the women with whom he had affairs — federal authorities have to confirm that company funds were not misappropriated and used to pay the women for their silence. It’s not relevant to my saying criminal charges have not yet been filed.”
Speaking of criminal charges, Oliver also offered clarity as to potential criminal charges that could be filed against McMahon.
“For the record, when this [podcast] was recorded, (week prior to Monday release), there hadn’t yet been mention of any inquiry into criminal charges related to Grant’s civil suit. Those rumblings came after the recording.”
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