The Lawsuit Vince McMahon Knew WWE Couldn’t Win
Vince McMahon is no stranger to lawsuits, but there was one of them that he knew WWE couldn’t win.
The highly anticipated six-part Netflix docuseries about the life of former WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon debuted last week.
Throughout the documentary, they made mention of former WWE employee Janel Grant’s January 2024 lawsuit against McMahon that claims he sexually assaulted her while also accusing him of using her for sex trafficking. The lawsuit also included former WWE executive John Laurinaitis. Vince McMahon has denied the claims made by Grant and has said he will fight the allegations made against him.
That lawsuit filed by Grant in late January has been on hold since May since the end of May to allow a federal investigation into Vince McMahon to take place.
Other lawsuits were mentioned in the documentary including McMahon paying off former WWE referee Rita Chatterton, who accused him of sexual assault. McMahon claimed it was consensual, yet still paid Chatterton off in January 2023.
When former WWE superstar Sable’s (Rena Lesnar) lawsuit against WWE was mentioned, McMahon acted like he didn’t recall much about it while bragging about how she came back to work a few years later (Sable left WWE in 1999 and returned in 2003).
Many other lawsuits have been fought and won by Vince McMahon as well as WWE, but there was one that he couldn’t win.
Vince McMahon Knew WWE Could Fight The World Wildlife Fund
For many of us, the company known as World Wrestling Entertainment was called the World Wrestling Federation from 1979 until early 2002. The company’s name changed in May 2002 after a lawsuit was filed by the World Wildlife Fund, which claimed that the WWF initials belonged to them.
After losing the World Wrestling Federation as a name, WWE came up with a clever “Get the F Out” campaign that replaced the WWF name with WWE for World Wrestling Entertainment.
While talking about the name change in the “Mr. McMahon” documentary, Vince McMahon admitted that they couldn’t win this lawsuit, so they needed to move on.
“When this lawsuit was filed, we tried to fight it, as we do most lawsuits. It looked like, ‘Wait. We’re not gonna win this thing.’ They had, in fact, used the initials WWF long before we did. So it changed from WWF to WWE because we were entertainment.”
“It wasn’t necessarily a good thing that we had to change our name. I didn’t want to change, but you can’t do anything about it. Once something is closed, you have to move on.”
“Whenever there is a failure, and there’ve been a lot of failures in my life, if you allow it to fester like, ‘I wish that would have worked. If I’d have done this, that would’ve worked.’ It’ll drive you nuts. Let it freaking go and think about something positive and work at something positive, not anything that’s negative.”
Elsewhere in the documentary, Vince McMahon explained why the “Mr. McMahon” heel boss character was easy for him based on his life experiences.