Smackdown meets Succession as Vince McMahon gets back in the game

Even by the tawdry standards of WWE plot lines, this one is a doozy.

The most famous name in the wrestling game gets exposed for secretly using corporate funds to pay hush money to a slew of women. Then, it emerges there was much more sexual misconduct than initially reported and even more cash diverted to buy a whole lot more silence.

Finally forced to step away from the outfit in disgrace, he returns after just six months, launching a boardroom coup that causes his own daughter to resign as CEO, amid rumours he’s about to sell the whole thing to Saudi Arabia for $8 billion. Smackdown meets Succession.

Vince McMahon has driven so many perverse and nauseating storylines during 40 years at the helm of this putrid corner of the sports entertainment universe that social media was soon ablaze with clips from his WWE antics befitting the madness of the moment.

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Like footage of him accusing Terrance “Sabu” Brunk, a pro wrestler from Staten Island who wore a keffiyeh in the ring, of being “a member of the Taliban”. At the height of America fighting a war in Afghanistan. Perhaps only to be expected from a charlatan who also merrily dropped the “n” word on camera and routinely had grapplers wear blackface.

All part of his grotesque shtick, building a toxic brand now on the radar of Mohammed bin Salman as the sheikh’s Public Investment Fund, with over $600 billion to throw around, shops for more gaudy baubles with which to sportswash the latter’s own nefarious regime.

Wrestling certainly makes sense as an investment, boasting the same cultural reach and social impact across America as football in England or golf among the influential demographic LIV forlornly hopes it may yet resonate with. Even if the type of gullible rubes around these parts who typically splurge on scripted McMahon pay-per-view dross tend to pronounce Arab as A-rab. And not in a positive way.

There is no word on whether the potentially lucrative intervention of the House of Saud spurred McMahon to come out of retirement so fast. He now claims his departure last summer was the result of “bad advice”, and his return is merely about benefiting shareholders in the publicly traded company.

That he regained control with relatively little fuss, aside from shafting daughter Stephanie, is a tad astonishing given the extent of the lurid stories about him. Indeed, even while he was away, Rita Chatterton, the first woman referee in the company’s history, filed a new lawsuit against him seeking $11m in damages for allegedly raping her in 1986.

Chatterton did not feature in the litany of women paid $20 million in non-disclosure agreements after levying various charges of assault, sexual harassment, and inappropriate behaviour against him over the past two decades.

A sample of those cases is enough to illustrate the sordid nature of the character involved. One former wrestler said McMahon forced her to perform oral sex on him and subsequently fired her from the company when it became apparent she was going to reject further sexual advances.

Another employee said “the genetic jackhammer” (one of his many ring nicknames) harassed her repeatedly, showing her unsolicited nude photographs of himself. A similar allegation was made by a worker at a tanning salon in Boca Raton, Florida.

The husband of a spa manager in California tried to attack McMahon with a baseball bat after she reported he had sexually assaulted her. Then there’s the WWE paralegal who got a job without interviewing for the position, had her wages doubled after she slept with him, and was later given $3 million to keep schtum.

Some payments to women coincided with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and the New York Times starting to probe rumours regarding McMahon’s proclivities.

That investigation came to naught, and it was the Wall Street Journal that finally exposed him last year with reporting that seemed enough to end the career of a 77-year-old mogul who appeared to groom his chosen successors in Stephanie and her husband, Triple H. Everybody involved mistakenly assumed he could be shamed into leaving for good. As if.

Almost from the moment McMahon inherited the business from his father, it has been engulfed in scandals and he rode out them all. He fired Mel Phillips, the paedophile ring announcer, in the 1980s then rehired him as long as he “stopped chasing after kids”. No biggie.

Generations of wrestlers abused steroids to get jacked up, became addicted to painkillers trying to stay fit to fulfil punishing performing schedules, and died ridiculously young. So what.

“McMahon is our cheerful tour guide to the dark side of the American soul,” wrote Irvin Muchnick in Wrestling Babylon, his forensic takedown of the WWE.

Chris Benoit killed his wife and son before committing suicide. Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka was charged with murdering his girlfriend but deemed unfit to stand trial. Not even Owen Hart plunging 78 feet to his death doing an elaborate ring entrance dented the business model, and Linda McMahon, Vince’s wife of 56 years, used her involvement in the organisation to gain a position in Donald Trump’s cabinet. Shameless.

The 45th president is such a good friend of the outfit he’s in the WWE’s Hall of Fame, and, having seen Trump trouser untold millions for allowing the Saudis use his golf courses for ersatz LIV tournaments, McMahon may personally clear $3 billion if they buy him out. Hush. Money to be made.