CNN —
Federal prosecutors have ended their criminal investigation into whether former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO and chairman Vince McMahon tried to cover up allegations of sexual misconduct with multiple former employees, his lawyer said Tuesday.
“We have been in consistent communication with the government … and understand, with no ambiguity, that the investigation has definitively concluded and will not result in charges,” McMahon’s attorney Robert W. Allen said in a statement.
The New York Post first reported the news on Wednesday.
The investigation’s apparent termination comes less than a week after a grand jury and a federal appeals court examined whether WWE founder McMahon committed a crime by hiding allegations of sexual misconduct from two former female employees — whom he allegedly paid more than $10 million in exchange for signing nondisclosure agreements.
McMahon and his former lawyer allegedly hid the allegations and payments from the company, including sharing “the executed agreement via text instead of email for the express purpose of avoiding the Company gaining knowledge of it,” according to the court ruling last Friday.
While neither McMahon nor the attorney are explicitly named in the ruling, the description matches him and a source confirmed to CNN that McMahon is indeed the chief executive in question.
Despite the new court documents, Allen said the matter is now closed and the new filing is “simply the result of an appeal of a procedural matter that was argued five months ago.”
Legal battle
In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported McMahon had paid more than $12 million to four women formerly employed by WWE over 16 years to silence claims of sexual misconduct. This included one former WWE wrestler who claimed McMahon had coerced her into performing oral sex, only to demote and eventually opt to not renew her contract after she declined subsequent sexual advances.
The news story followed a separate Journal report that WWE’s board was looking into McMahon for quietly agreeing to pay a $3 million settlement to a former staffer — eventually one of the four mentioned in the Journal’s story — with whom he allegedly had an affair. At the time, McMahon pledged he would cooperate with the investigation and “accept the findings and outcome of the investigation, whatever they are.”
In January 2023, the Journal reported McMahon had inked a multimillion-dollar settlement with the first woman to referee the World Wrestling Federation — which became WWE in 2002 — after the former staffer accused him of rape in a letter. An attorney for McMahon asserted that he “denies and always has denied” the sexual assault, specifying that he had “settled the case solely to avoid the cost of litigation.”
Yet another ex-WWE employee who had worked at the company’s headquarters sued McMahon in January 2024, accusing him of sexual assault, trafficking, and physical abuse. A spokesperson for McMahon at the time described the lawsuit as “replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and a vindictive distortion of the truth.”
The former staffer from the January 2024 lawsuit is not named in the new ruling, but a description of the second victim’s agreement matches reports of her account.
McMahon resigned from his dual WWE roles in 2022, only to return in January 2023 as executive chairman of the board. In September of that year, the company became TKO after WWE’s merger with rival network UFC. In January 2024, following the sexual misconduct allegations — which McMahon denied — he quickly resigned his executive chairman and board director roles at TKO.
In June 2024, a federal judge ruled that the government had established “probable cause to believe” that McMahon and one of his former lawyers had broken the law when they “circumvented (the company’s) internal controls and created false books and records.” The appellate court’s new filing Tuesday affirmed the lower court’s ruling.
In October, McMahon and his wife Linda — President Trump’s choice for Education Secretary — were sued by five former WWE “Ring Boys” for allegedly allowing a former ringside announcer to use his position to sexually exploit children as young as 12 starting in the 1980s. Vince and Linda McMahon have denied the allegations.
In separate legal troubles, just last month McMahon paid $1.7 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission related to his alleged failure to properly disclose $19.6 million in unrecorded expenses to the company’s board.
McMahon touted the SEC settlement as vindication of his maintained innocence following years of allegations and reports.
“There was never anything more to this than minor accounting errors with regard to some personal payments that I made several years ago while I was CEO of WWE,” McMahon said in a January statement. “I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”
WWE and TKO did not respond to requests for comment.