An update on the sexual abuse lawsuit against McMahon.
There’s a story from Dave Collins and Eric Tucker of AP News which reads that on Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that a former lawyer for Vince McMahon was wrong to withhold documents from a federal grand jury as they were investigating McMahon. The investigation had to do with the multimillion dollar settlement agreements with two female employees that accused the former WWE CEO of sexual abuse.
Three judges on the second U.S. Court of Appeals in New York backed a lower court ruling that said the documents were not protected by attorney-client privilege because of an exception for ‘crime and fraud.’
A lower court judge discovered that prosecutors had reasonable grounds to believe McMahon and his lawyer found a way around the WWE’s internal controls and created false records when they hid employees’ claims and settlement agreements from WWE. They made false and misleading statements to the company auditors, although McMahon paid the settlements with non-company funds.
A group of judges said McMahon’s lawyer submitted a lot of material in response to the grand jury subpoena, but they also submitted 208 documents that were being withheld under the assertions of attorney-client privilege.
The status of the grand jury investigation was not immediately clear and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment when asked about it.
McMahon’s representatives denied wrongdoings and had no immediate comment about the court ruling on Monday.
When the lawyer withheld some of the documents via attorney-client privilege, prosecutors asked the lower courts to legally force the documents to be made available and that’s what led to Monday’s appeal. The judges wrote the following:
Because the settlement agreements resolving the Victims’ claims were ‘structured and negotiated … to keep them hidden from (the Company),’ the district court found that ’all communications about the claims and settlement agreements were made in furtherance of the criminal scheme to keep (the Company) and its auditors unaware of the allegations.
The latest on former WWE employee Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit against McMahon, John Laurinaitis and WWE can be read here.
