The Vince McMahon allegations are wrestling’s #MeToo moment

The Netflix documentary series released this week could bring to the mainstream allegations that wrestling fans have known about for decades, writes Ryan Coogan

The former WWE boss has been accused of rape and human trafficking (Netflix)

It’s hard being a fan, sometimes. You get really invested in something, sometimes for years, pouring your hard-earned money and hours of your life into it, hoping every day that the person who made it doesn’t suddenly start saying weird stuff on Twitter, or isn’t accused of being an abusive monster.

Luckily, wrestling fans don’t have that problem. We know exactly how bad the thing we love is, and have made a silent pact with one another to not let it ruin our good time. Is that callous, bordering on sociopathic? I don’t know man, how’s that Harry Potter reboot working out for you? That’s what I thought.

While the horrors of wrestling are vast and uncountable – so much so that a documentary series about the subject, Dark Side of the Ring, recently completed its fifth season – many of them centre on former WWE owner and chairman Vince McMahon, whose controversial behaviour has been the bane of grap-heads since the days of Andre the Giant.

Netflix, in the spirit of former WCW owner and McMahon’s nemesis during the nineties, Eric Bischoff, recognised rightly that “controversy creates cash” and has released a six-part documentary miniseries on the subject.

McMahon was originally involved directly in the series, even filming some preliminary content for it, but ultimately distanced himself following allegations of sexual exploitation and and sex trafficking from former employee Janel Grant (allegations which he denies, calling then “replete with lies”, and a “vindictive distortion of the truth”).

Wrestling fans have been waiting a long time for something like this to come out – a fully itemised list of Vince McMahon’s alleged sins on a mainstream platform – because none of the things the documentary alleges are news to us. It’s honestly kind of a miracle (or, I suppose, the opposite of a miracle) that it’s taken this long. Some of this stuff goes back to the eighties.

If you haven’t seen the documentary yet and want to know just how scandalous some of the content is, this is all you need to know: McMahon allegedly tried to buy it from Netflix before it aired. The day it went live, he released a statement on Twitter/X saying that the series leaves out and misrepresents certain events, and uses “typical editing tricks with out of context footage and dated soundbites” to “support a deceptive narrative” and leave viewers “intentionally confused”.

There’s a real sense that this documentary could signal the start of a long overdue MeToo moment in professional wrestling – something the industry has been crying out for for a long, long time.

Wrestling actually already had its own mini-MeToo movement during Covid, when several high-profile names – including some in WWE – were alleged to be abusers and sexual predators by brave women stepping forward and speaking out against them. Many rightly lost their jobs, but disturbingly many more continue to wrestle – some in unscrupulous promotions that will happily hire anybody with a famous name, and some in mainstream, televised companies.

Why? Well, because there’s a 90 per cent chance that this is the first time you’re hearing of the Speaking Out movement. It didn’t get the same attention that MeToo did – its hashtag wasn’t quite as popular – so many abusers were emboldened to continue operating under cover of general public ignorance.

That’s the value of something like this documentary bringing these stories and allegations to mainstream attention. Wrestling occupies a strange bubble, wherein it is simultaneously a niche product and a multi-billion-dollar empire. As such, there is infinite scope for abuse, and not enough mainstream scrutiny to punish it.

The avoidable death of Owen Hart, the allegations of murder against Jimmy Snuka, the tragic rape and suicide of Ashley Massaro – these are not new stories for us. They are well documented, and have been publicly available for years – but as with any terrible story, there isn’t really a will to action until it makes its way into the public consciousness.

The same happened with Harvey Weinstein (and others). People who were “in the know” – not celebrities, but fans like you or me – joked about all of them, and it wasn’t until Joe Average started paying attention that they finally started being taken seriously and, God willing, punished.

It makes you wonder – and worry – about how many other monsters are out there, hiding in plain sight. How many do you know about – and what is it going to take for us to finally do something about it?