The Dark Mind Of Vince McMahon
By: Zack Heydorn w/ Josie Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America
The mind of Vince McMahon isn’t a place I’d want to spend my time.
That was before the horrific sexual assault allegations that surfaced last week claiming McMahon groomed, degraded, trafficked, and mentally abused a WWE employee just because he could.
Vince McMahon’s mind is a dark place. It’s a sad place. He’s a one-note man obsessed with power, control, and dominance — all relationships be damned unless it benefits him and him alone. Scratching the itch of that obsession in the board room is one thing, but the recent claims made by former WWE employee, Janel Grant, allege he did so in unfathomable twisted and evil ways.
McMahon biographer Josie Riesman has braved the waters of the Vince McMahon mind and psyche. Her book, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, dives into McMahon’s journey from nobody to wrestling’s most successful promoter ever and the path of destruction left along the way. Her perspective on the new allegations against McMahon is fascinating.
It colors a lot of the past of wrestling
“You know, the way I describe reading the latest allegations is like, I was shocked, but not surprised if that makes any sense,” Riesman said in a recent interview. “I wasn't surprised that there were new allegations, but the details were so shocking that if they're true, and again, these are allegations, Vince has denied them. If they're true, if even a fraction of them are true, then Vince’s mind was perhaps even a darker place to be in than we previously thought. And it colors a lot of the past of wrestling, because he is the central figure of pro wrestling for the past 40 odd years.
“These were allegations that fall roughly in line, although they are turned up to 11. They roughly fall in line with the kinds of stories that have come forward and past allegations about Vince McMahon. Going all the way back to 1986 when Rita Chatterton, the first female referee in WWF alleges that she was raped by Vince McMahon. There's this long chain where you have a tanning salon employee in Boca Raton in 2006. And now you have this huge wave of accusers in 2022. And we don't even know the full extent of all the accusations. There's a federal probe. Once you put all of those dots together, they are allegations, but the allegations at least seem to line up to form a picture of a man who we can demonstrably say is very obsessed with power. He'd be the first person to tell you that. That's not libelous. That was, I think, the essence of Vince McMahon’s psyche — to be the top dog in every room he entered.”
Grant’s allegations against McMahon paint a terrible picture of a company that systemically protected it’s patriarch and Riesman says that culture stemmed from McMahon’s rule.
The image of total control
“Vince had a lot invested in the image of his total control over his company,” Riesman said. “And when you have somebody who has that level of control and also the image of such control, then you end up with a culture where a lot of people try to protect that person out of fear that they might suffer that person's wrath. You end up having this because the idea is that Vince has eyes on everybody all the time. And you always have to go through Vince at some point. You start living in this panopticon where Vince is watching you, or at least you suspect Vince is watching you. And you do what you think Vince would want you to do. That's the kind of culture that was built at WWF and in wrestling in general.
“You go back to the steroid trial, where you have Hulk Hogan, testifying in such a way that doesn't incriminate Vince McMahon, despite the fact that he had a huge grudge against Vince McMahon. His explanation years later was if I went after Vince McMahon, I would have killed the business. And that's sort of the key. He (Vince McMahon) had so much power and was so synonymous with the entire industry, that people felt they had to protect him, but those days are kind of over.”
Those days are over because McMahon has resigned from his roles inside WWE parent company, TKO Group, but they really ended when McMahon sold his company to Endeavor, a move that left him with a lot of money, but not the control he was used to.
What do dictators find?
“What dictators tend to find is when they're out of power, they're shocked to find that all the people who were kowtowing to them were doing so at knifepoint,” Riesman said. “I think that's the thing he's going to discover — that there are a lot of people who he thought of as loyal that you could count on, who really I think were just making the right bet for them, which was, don't bet against Vince. Now, Vince doesn't have all the cards, you can totally bet against Vince as a plausible future path.”
Check out the full interview with Josie Riesman on the Brass Ring Media YouTube channel.