Linda McMahon’s Lawyer: She Didn’t Know WWE Steroid Doc Was Dealing Right at the Arenas

Ted Mann of The Day in New London today breaks down Linda McMahon’s December 2007 interview by staff investigators and attorneys for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee, then chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman, was investigating World Wrestling Entertainment’s Wellness Policy in the wake of the sensational June 2007 double murder/suicide of WWE star Chris Benoit.

With his earlier exclusive on McMahon’s 1989 memo ordering another wrestling executive to tip Dr. George Zahorian that he was under federal investigation for dealing steroids, Mann was already in front of fellow Connecticut journalists in exposing the important elements of this Senate candidate’s business past. Today’s story extends Mann’s lead. Go read “Deposition details McMahon steroid testimony,” http://www.theday.com/article/20100609/NWS12/306099933/1019&town=.

Where I can add to the public’s understanding is with respect to this passage of the Mann piece:

In an interview Tuesday, Jerry McDevitt, the lead attorney for the WWE who sat in on the deposition in 2007, said Linda McMahon meant to underscore that company officials had been unaware of Zahorian’s steroid sales when they occurred in the arenas where live wrestling performances were held in the late 1980s.

“She was talking about what was going on at the arenas,” he said, not suggesting that all of Zahorian’s activities were unknown to Vince and Linda McMahon.

Bullfeathers.

Yeah, Vince and Linda didn’t know “all” of Zahorian’s activities; for example, they probably didn’t know whether the good doctor golfed in his free time or invested his steroid-dealing profits in mutual funds. But the idea that the McMahons had no idea that Zahorian was pushing drugs at arenas in Pennsylvania, just before shows at which he was the state athletic commission-appointed ringside doctor, is laughable.

There is overwhelming evidence that, in addition to FedExing steroids and other pharmaceuticals to wrestlers (and to Vince McMahon himself) more or less on demand, Zahorian handed out what the McMahons’ chief aide, Pat Patterson, called “the boys’ candy” backstage prior to syndicated television tapings at the Lehigh County Agricultural Hall in Allentown in the early 1980s. The wrestlers lined up for their required blood-pressure tests. At their turns, they handed Dr. Z cash and he handed them their bags of goodies.

If Linda McMahon gets elected to the Senate, let’s hope she remembers details of nuclear test-ban treaties better than she seems to recall the steroid farm that she and her husband fertilized.

Irv Muchnick