Vince McMahon Forced WWE Star Into Racist Promo
Vince McMahon was behind plenty of distasteful decisions in WWE and now one former star has revealed McMahon forced them to cut a racist promo.
Back in 2017, Jinder Mahal was on top of the wrestling business as one of the most unlikely WWE Champions of all time. After beating Randy Orton for the WWE Title and retaining it in several big matches against The Viper, Mahal was set for another big defence at SummerSlam against Shinsuke Nakamura.
However, before that match got in the ring, Jinder Mahal cut an overtly racist promo towards Nakamura referencing the star’s ethnicity. A backlash quickly followed with many people less than thrilled about Mahal’s comments.
Jinder Mahal Blames Vince McMahon For Racist Promo
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Jinder Mahal has opened up about the infamous moment and admitted he was dead against cutting the promo but Vince McMahon wanted it to happen:
There was one promo in particular. Recently, I actually just saw Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career it was a promo with Yoshi Tatsu. Same thing, kind of like a racial promo. So that day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer ‘This is from Vince, he wants you to say this.’ I was like, Oh man, I don’t want to say [this], is there anything else we can do? He said ‘No, it’s come from Vince.’
So I even asked Vince [and said] ‘This is gonna get negative backlash.’ He said ‘No, no, no, no, don’t worry. Who cares? It’s not you, it’s a character, just entertainment.’ So I did the promo, was not happy with it and not proud of myself for doing it. I really wish that I could take that moment back but unfortunately, I can’t.
Right when we came back it got a lot of negative backlash, like I remember coming back from Gorilla. I was still hanging out by Gorilla and one of the social media managers came up to me and said ‘Hey, this is getting a lot of bad PR and Vince wants you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ He came up with something, maybe the PR team wrote it, someone came up with a statement. And as we were about to tweet it, he said ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind, he said no.’
So it was just one of those things where it is what it is, not proud of doing it. But on the plus side I don’t think something like that, a promo like that will ever happen again in WWE. Things changed, the regime changed, everything is much much different now. That was a different era, different time. Under Vince his style was different. Sometimes he was stuck in his ways.
Vince McMahon was forced to retire as TKO Executive Chairman following a lawsuit accusing McMahon of serious sexual assault and sex trafficking by a former WWE employee.
That lawsuit is currently on hold as the US Government has launched its own investigation into Vince McMahon.