Five former “ring boys” who worked with the WWE filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the organization, along with company founder Vince McMahon, his wife Linda McMahon and TKO Group Holdings, alleging negligence for allowing “systemic and pervasive abuse” of underage children.
The complaint for the plaintiffs, who are listed as John Does, was filed in Maryland’s Baltimore County Circuit Court.
The plaintiffs asserted that the McMahons knew or should have known that former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr., who died in 2012, hired underage boys as young as 12 and then groomed and sexually abused them, according to USA Today.
The alleged misconduct took place from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
Linda McMahon was a member of former President Donald Trump’s cabinet from 2017 to 2019, serving as administrator for the Small Business Administration.
“Phillips’s real motivation in luring the Ring Boys with the promise of gaining access to the popular WWE events was to sexually abuse them,” the suit said. “And Vince McMahon knew it, admitting that he was aware, at least as early as the 1980s, that Phillips had a ‘peculiar and unnatural interest’ in young boys.”
“Mr. McMahon has never denied making that admission, despite countless instances over the last four decades where, if it were untrue, he would have stridently denied it,” the complaint continued.
The suit alleged that Phillips would abuse the ring boys “even in plain sight of wrestlers and executives in the locker room area,” as well as videotape his sexual encounters with the children in his private dressing room.
Negligence lawsuit filed against WWE, Vince McMahon by ‘ring boys’ who allege sexual abuse https://t.co/h3Wuq1Gjg8
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) October 24, 2024
The plaintiffs cited the Netflix docuseries “Mr. McMahon,” in which New York Post reporter Phil Mushnick charged that McMahon and other WWE executives “were part of a pedophile ring.”
Jessica Rosenberg, an attorney for McMahon, told USA Today that the allegations are “false” and stem from Mushnick’s reporting of the abuse 32 years ago.
“The negligence claims against Mr. McMahon that were asserted today rely on these same absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless statements by Mr. Mushnick. We will vigorously defend Mr. McMahon and are confident the court will find that these claims are untrue and unfounded,” Rosenberg said.
USA Today reported, “In 1992, Phillips and the then-WWF were under federal investigation for inappropriate sexual relations with underage boys after a former ring boy publicly spoke about the alleged abuse. Phillips was fired by McMahon years prior, but was later re-hired and ordered to stay away from children.”
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs told the news outlet that there are likely countless other victims.
Their clients had recently come forward, they said, after learning “of the depth of knowledge that the McMahons and the WWE had about what happened to them.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our clients, we finally have a chance to hold accountable those who allowed and enabled the open, rampant sexual abuse of these young boys,” attorney Greg Gutzler of DiCello Levitt, which is leading the litigation, said in a statement to USA Today.
“That so many were aware of the sexual abuse of the Ring Boys and did nothing to prevent or stop it is simply unconscionable.”
The Associated Press reported that McMahon resigned from WWE’s parent company TKO Holdings Group in January after a woman who had worked for WWE alleged he offered her to a star wrestler for sex and distributed pornographic pictures and videos of her.
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