Story Behind Friend Judy of Linda McMahon’s New Campaign Commercial

Even when Linda McMahon uses a character witness in one of her insipid Senate campaign TV commercials, the choice somehow reflects back on the atrocious occupational health and safety standards at her World Wrestling Entertainment.

Earlier her daughter, Stephanie McMahon Levesque, narrated a commercial with the punch line, “I just call her ‘Mom.'” Stephanie, wife of juicer wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque and herself a WWE executive, made seriously misleading statements in 2007 to the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. See “Did Linda McMahon’s Daughter Commit Perjury in Her Congressional Testimony?”, August 24, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/did-linda-mcmahons-daughter-commit-perjury-in-her-congressional-testimony/.

Now along comes Linda’s friend Judy Moorberg to assure the voters of Connecticut that the former CEO of WWE is a wonderful person. “She feels for people,” Judy says in the McMahon commercial, which is embedded in a post on the blog of Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green. See “Linda McMahon, WWE, Judy Moorberg and the U.S. Senate,” http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2010/08/linda-mcmahon-wwe-judy-moorber.html.

Green reports that Moorberg appears to be the ex-wife of a WWE employee; he links to a 2008 obituary of Robert DeBord, whom she divorced amicably in 1998. The obit notes that DeBord indeed worked for WWE.

Here’s the rest of the story.

On the November 19, 1983, edition of the then-World Wrestling Federation’s syndicated television show, Robert DeBord began a short and undistinguished run as the host of an interview segment called “Victory Corner.” DeBord was the editor of WWF’s Victory magazine, later renamed WWF Magazine.

“Victory Corner” replaced “Buddy Rogers Corner,” which was hosted by the wrestling legend of that name. The reason Buddy Rogers was dropped was that, in a comeback “angle” in a tag match with his protégé Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka (who, incidentally, earlier that year had killed his girlfriend in their Whitehall, Pennsylvania, motel room), the 62-year-old Rogers broke his hip. He was dropped by the McMahons and sued them – perhaps not in that order.

Irv Muchnick