About Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon
November 21, 2024PREVIOUSLY: “About Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon,” November 21, https://concussioninc.net/?p=15948
by Irvin Muchnick
My hot take three days ago on the Linda McMahon nomination to be secretary of education was just jaundiced enough to be slightly off the mark.
No sooner had I finished it than the news broke of McMahon – co-founder, with her husband Vince, and former CEO of WWE (originally Titan Sports / World Wrestling Federation) – being named as one of the cover-up conspirators in the lawsuit against the company by the former wrestling tour gophers and construction crew members, called “ring boys,” who were sexually abused by other WWE employees decades ago. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/us/linda-mcmahon-sexual-abuse-lawsuit-trump-education-secretary.html.
Well, of course this history bears on her qualifications to run the Department of Education. Linda McMahon will, inevitably, have her place in line in the congressional vetting of Donald Trump’s absurdly defiant slate of would-be cabinet misfits.
With this in mind, I now run down the history of the ring boy scandal and attach it to McMahon’s portfolio and skill set in navigating her sleazy company through multiple public image challenges. Yes, she might be the perfect candidate to send the Department of Education to the dustbin aspired to by President-elect Trump. But until such time as Trump achieves his fondest dreams, is a figure so embroiled in credible corporate abuse litigation disqualified from the task of faithfully executing the department’s statutory mission?
The ring boy story broke in the early 1990s, and full credit goes to New York Post sports-media columnist Phil Mushnick. (Phil is a friend but not a relation – he wrote the foreword of my book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, first published in 2009 and now in its third and “Ultimate Historical Edition.”)
Lee Cole, brother of ring boy victim Tom Cole, was the source who first approached Mushnick. Tom Cole corroborated everything, in fits and starts, across many years. In a recent shout-a-thon on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, Mushnick observed that he would have won a Pulitzer Prize but for the fact that he was reporting for a tabloid. I think Phil has that about right.
In 1992, Tom Cole was set to tell all on a live-to-tape shoot of Phil Donahue’s old show. Just before they went on the air, WWE came to a financial settlement with Cole, who wound up sitting in the audience instead. Cole later said that the terms included $150,000 – $100,000 of which went directly into the pocket of his lawyer Alan Fuchsberg.
Cole went back to work for WWE, which was supposedly going to mentor him through college credits and the establishment of a career. Linda McMahon became a maternal figure. She also took Cole out for a shopping spree. Through the same period, the obsessive inside-wrestling cult grapevine passed along anecdotes of other ring boy victims seen driving around in snazzy cars.
The three company employees implicated in preying on underage victims got fired. They were Mel Phillips, a ring announcer and head of the ring crew; Terry Garvin, a booking assistant; and Garvin’s superior Pat Patterson, a retired wrestling great who was Vince McMahon’s most trusted consigliere for crafting storylines. In Cole’s account, Garvin had propositioned him after luring him to his house and popping a porn video into the VCR – which prompted young Tom to flee the house and spend the night outside in a van. Phillips, who had a foot fetish, had a practice of pivoting from foot massages of the ring boys to horseplay-groping.
Patterson, who was openly gay, likely had more of a direct hand in sexually harassing adult male wrestling talent (though Cole made it clear that Patterson, too, treated the ring boys like salacious property). In what passed for knee-slapping humor in locker rooms, a star wrestler, Shawn Michaels, dropped an inside joke in TV hype interviews about how he’d mastered an intricate move he called “the Pat Patterson go-behind.”
Within months, Patterson was reinstated.
The Cole-WWE relationship collapsed when he was asked to provide information for an investigation of Vince McMahon and his company by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Cole lost his job. The ultimate indictment of McMahon abandoned the sex trafficking allegations for charges of conspiracy to distribute steroids to the wrestlers. On its surface, the sex stuff had far stronger evidence. McMahon was acquitted at trial in 1994.
The more recent heinous allegations of abuse and sex trafficking against McMahon, which led to his exile by the new corporate ownership, are not the same as the old ring boy allegations. They are, however, an indication of how wrestling history, if not recent American history, might have been different had prosecutors in the 90s chosen a smarter course.
In 2010, the ring boy story resurfaced when Linda ran the first of her two times for a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut. Cole, by then married with a family and a small business, was hounded to weigh in. He decided to support Linda’s candidacy. Across time, he would go back and forth and forth and back in interviews. But it should be noted that he never deviated from his essential narrative, that he had survived systematic and disgusting abuse at WWE.
Only wrestling “marks” are in serious denial that WWE culture was toxic from the top while Linda McMahon was CEO. For her, some of it was personal. There was not just the ring boy scandal and not just Vince’s alleged rape in his limousine of female referee Rita Chatterton, which was probed on a Geraldo Rivera TV show of the time. There was also – according to company sources I consider reliable – the tale of Linda catching Vince in flagrante delicto with his secretary, a former Playboy model named Emily Feinberg.
In current news coverage, Linda’s lawyer Laura Brevetti is quoted as saying Linda and Vince are now separated. What should be added is that Brevetti was defense counsel at Vince’s 1994 trial. And her boyfriend, soon to be husband, lowlife fixer Marty Bergman – brother of famed journalist Lowell Bergman, portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the movie about the 60 Minutes investigation of the tobacco industry – was investigated by federal agents after the trial for what was almost certainly his suborning of Emily Feinberg’s testimony. (Brevetti and Marty Bergman were married at New York’s City Hall in a ceremony officiated by Mayor Rudy Giuliani.)
In CHRIS & NANCY, I document just how far Linda McMahon would go in protecting her company. Chris Benoit went nuts, from some combination of cumulative brain trauma and his massive intake of prescription drugs – not just steroids but also painkillers, sleep aids, and antidepressants – despite, or with the blessing of, WWE’s specious talent “wellness policy.” At the time of one of the most sensational murder stories of 2007, it was important for the company to promote a narrative that the star wrestler had gone independently “postal.”
One of the threads was that Chris and Nancy had had conflict over their 7-year-old son Daniel (whom Chris also murdered on that weekend in their Georgia mansion, after killing Nancy and before taking his own life). There was a flurry of reports, later renounced, that Daniel had a rare genetic syndrome, Fragile X, which stunted his physical development, learning, and behavior.
A full re-litigation of that angle isn’t necessary for this article. For reasons presented in the book, I came to believe that the Fragile X explanation actually had validity, even though various public players quickly walked it back.
For purposes here, what’s important is how ferociously Linda McMahon jumped on the Fragile X coverage boomlet, in her role as a WWE plumber. She went on Good Morning America for an interview with host Robin Roberts.
There were, the tabloid-drunk Roberts dutifully said in her introduction, “new clues surfacing that could take the case in a whole new direction — clues about a Benoit family secret: their seven-year-old son’s rare genetic disorder, known as Fragile X . . . a point of tension between Benoit and his wife, apparently.”
McMahon knocked this softball out of the park for her message du jour: “The focus is turning more to the tension that must have been happening between the husband and wife over the management, the schooling, and the rearing of the child who had the mental retardation.” The base term “retardation” was conveniently exaggerated and provocative.
So this is the person now nominated by Donald Trump to oversee the U.S. Department of Education.
In 2008, Marty Bergman died.
In 2022, Tom Cole committed suicide.
