If you live under a rock, you probably don’t know about the recent allegations that have come to light. If you wanna sleep well during the night after reading this, don’t look them up. At this point, we should be used to hearing about these rich and powerful people taking advatage of people. After hearing this so often, you kind of become numb to it. I’ll be honest, I never looked into most of the high profile cases. I was always ignorant to them and kind of just understood that power corrupts absolutely and plants a seed of evil inside which blossoms as time goes on. This one however has been weighing on me. Heavily.
I was lucky enough to be a kid during the greatest 5 years in wrestling history called “The Attitude Era”. This was the time where Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, and Mankind (to name a few) were at the top of their game. Every Monday was as big as a pay-per-view and you just didn’t know what you were in for. The entire roster was built with true superstars and everything the company did was a grand slam creatively. It was simply an unbelievable time. Watching Austin feud with McMahon every week was as entertaining, if not more so, than most forms of contemporarty entertainment at the time. It drew millions of people in. As a kid, you couldn’t miss a Monday Night Raw. Doing so would ostracize yourself from everyone the following Tuesday as it would be all anyone would talk about. My Mom (god bless her soul) would watch every Monday night with me. She loved all the soap opera drama, but I’m sure she despised some of the more risque stuff. To her credit, she never once changed the channel. They were amazing times and its why I hold that era of WWE in such high esteem. I still go back and watch it very often because its just simply so fun to watch. You don’t have to think like you would during a normal sporting event. There are no batting averages, ERAs or anything that can make sports a chore to watch sometimes. There was simply two men in the ring; one good and one bad. You rooted for who you wanted to win and watched it all unfold.
All of this said, we wouldn’t have this without the man who brought WWF (don’t care, sue me) into the mainstream: Vince McMahon. I know, I know…rah rah: “But what about the nWo!? If it weren’t for them there wouldn’t have BEEN an attitude era! DX is a carbon copy of the nWo man! Without the nWo, Vince would be stuck in the past pushing the cartoon gimmicks!”. You’re right, I agree. Whole heartedly. However that is a entirely different topic which has been discussed to death and beyond the scope of this post. It doesn’t take away the influence that McMahon had. He was the one who filtered all of the ideas down to what we seen on the television. He was heavily responsible for every single night we sat there glued to the TV.
Throughout the years, I’ve read 16 wrestling related books. 14 of them being autobiographical. In each and every one, Vince is discussed fairly often. I loved seeing what these people were like behind the scenes. It’s fascinating to me, and I still look forward to these books when wrestlers release them. On screen, they are beating the hell out of each other and cooking each other on the microphone. Behind the scenes they are regular people dealing with the everyday issues we all do. Not only that, they wrestle 250+ times. A year! Again, rah rah “it’s FAKE!”. Nothing angers me more. Go fall onto 2″ thick wooden planks over and over as hard as you can and see how fast you call it quits. Anyway, the discussions of Vince were some of my favorite to read. I’ve always heard the stories of how he could treat his employees. Wrestlers, announcers and producers – none were safe. You’d hear stories of him chewing people out until they weren’t sure of who they were and on the next page read how someone standing up to him would get him to back down. Truly a strange dichotomy. It was hard to form an idea of who he was as a person. I eventually concluded that he is a good guy that needed to be that way to deal with that many egos and personalities.
I’ve read the rumors about him with women. Hell, his own Playboy interview back in the late 90s/early 2000s certainly didn’t do him any favors. There was the original allegation from a woman referree in the 80s that claimed he forced her to perform acts on him and locked her in his limo. There was stories of boys being abused by Pat Patterson being swept under the rug with Vince’s help. The Sable lawsuit. Rumors of Trish and Vince. Christ, there were even rumors of Macho Man sleeping with his daughter Stephanie! These rumors have been around for quite awhile, however they were rumors. In the past few years however, things got ugly.
There is allegedly upwards of $10+ million in hush money payouts for sexual abuse allegations. Yikes. The past week, a civil lawsuit against Vince McMahon was published online. My god is it horrible. Reading it made me feel sick. I’m not gonna bring up anything inside of the document, you can go find it if you want. All I can say is I am devestated. I get it, people have their kinks and I would never tell someone not to explore them. But good lord man, do it decently. He has all the money in the world. He could surely find someone willing to participate in these things with him consentually. This suggests it was darker than that. It wasn’t about exploring a kink, it was about power and control over someone. It was about trying to break someone to the point they lose their identity and lose the ability to know they are being abused anymore. It’s truly sickening stuff. At what point after paying that much hush money do you sit and ask yourself “maybe the things I’m doing are very, very wrong”. Watching old Attitude Era now feels tainted. Every time I see Vince I can’t shake the feelings.
I don’t think he survives this. He will never being in the limelight again, and that’s how it should be. He doesn’t deserve it. He deserves his legacy to be shit on (yea. I said it). His grandfather Jess and his father Vince would be ashamed. I hope the human side of him wakes up one day and realizes the monster he’s turned into. I don’t need a public apology, I just hope he realizes how many people he has let down and what a shame it truly is.