Vince McMahon Settles $1.7 Million SEC Hush Money Case

Vince McMahon has settled his hush money case with the SEC. The Securities and Exchange Commission says the executive owes around $1.7 million. McMahon case come after he failed to disclose payments related to sexual assault allegations. The SEC argues that the former WWE figurehead circumvented the company’s internal accounting. His actions led to misstatement on WWE’s books in 2018 and 2021.

McMahon is paying a $400,000 civil penalty and owes WWE somewhere around $1,331,000. This is all after he agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying the SEC findings. New York’s regional office for the SEC issued a statement. Associate Regional Director Thomas P. Smith Jr. wrote, “Company executives cannot enter into material agreements on behalf of the company they serve and withhold that information from the company’s control functions and auditor.”

Vince McMahon Issues Statement

The WWE co-founder issued a statement Friday. “The case is closed. Today ends nearly three years of investigation by different governmental agencies. There has been a great deal of speculation about what exactly the government was investigating and what the outcome would be. As today’s resolution shows, much of that speculation was misguided and misleading. 

He continued, “In the end, there was never anything more to this than minor accounting errors with regard to some personal payments that I made several years ago while I was CEO of WWE. I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”

Some Details From The Original Vince McMahon Sexual Abuse Allegations

The WWE staffer suit involved McMahon and John Laurinaitis. The case involves sexual assault and trafficking “both for their own pleasure and as a pawn to secure talent deals with prospective wrestlers they were recruiting.” The text of the case says Mr. McMahon “repeatedly used sex toys after other WWE employees, wrestlers and performers to sexually groom Ms. Grant for trafficking to those same people.”

Other details include that the former WWE executive “would shower Ms. Grant with gifts and empty work promotions, while at the same time threatening her livelihood and her reputation if she wouldn’t succumb to his increasingly depraved sexual demands, including disseminating pornography of Ms. Grant to ‘thousands’ of individuals and engaging in sex acts with other WWE employees–some of whom were complete strangers.”

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