Hush Money Probe Against Ex-WWE Boss Vince McMahon Dropped by Federal Prosecutors: Report

Federal prosecutors dropped a criminal probe involving allegations that ex-WWE boss Vince McMahon paid female employees to keep quiet about sexual misconduct.

Last January, a former employee filed a lawsuit against McMahon accusing him of trafficking her to other higher-ups and even wrestlers. The employee — identified as Janel Grant — claimed she signed an NDA in 2022 when McMahon promised to pay her $3 million. McMahon, she alleged, stopped making payments after just the first installment of $1 million.

That lawsuit came two years after McMahon was originally accused of paying more than $12 million to cover up misconduct and affairs.

McMahon has maintained his innocence throughout this saga, but his role at the WWE gradually diminished. He retired as CEO of the company in July 2022, then stepped down from his role as executive chairman of TKO Holdings — the WWE’s parent company — following Grant’s lawsuit.

According to a Tuesday morning report from the New York Post, McMahon’s lawyer revealed to the outlet that the federal probe has been dropped. The

ruling, the report continued, did not directly refer to McMahon by name. Instead, it referenced a “subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation concerning whether, as CEO, he engaged in a criminal scheme to circumvent the company’s internal accounting controls and mislead company auditors in order to conceal multiple allegations of sexual misconduct raised against him by two former company employees.”

Sources told the New York Post that this unnamed subject was indeed McMahon.

The decision to drop the probe came despite a judge ruling in 2024 that the government established “probable cause to believe” that McMahon had broken the law and “circumvented [the WWE’s] internal controls and created false books and records.”