Last Wednesday, the defendants in the ring boy lawsuit asked a federal judge in Maryland to dismiss the case that accuses them of negligence in the child sexual abuse case.
The defendants—TKO, WWE, and WWE’s former executive leaders, Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon—raise multiple legal arguments for why they say the case should be thrown out of court.
They argue that these allegations shouldn’t be litigated in Maryland—a state that recently removed all time limits for survivors of child sex abuse to file claims—and, secondly, that they never owed a legal duty to the eight plaintiffs, who say they were abused by former ring announcer Mel Phillips and, in one case, by former executive Pat Patterson. WWE’s attorneys contend that the plaintiffs haven’t laid the legal groundwork to show TKO actually bears responsibility for what happened around the 1980s.
Phillips and Patterson are not parties to the case. They died in 2012 and 2020, respectively. The former ring boys are suing under “John Doe” pseudonyms, though their identities have been disclosed to the defense at the court’s direction.
The plaintiffs allege that WWE and the McMahons were negligent, and that they knew or should have known that the ring boys were in an environment where they were likely to be abused, and that the defendants failed to take appropriate steps to prevent the abuse.
WWE, Vince and Linda McMahon—the latter of whom is the current U.S. Secretary of Education—are each represented by separate counsel. Their separate motions were filed in court on Wednesday. Attorneys for the ring boys will have until July 28 to file their arguments in response to the motions, according to Judge James K. Bredar’s earlier order. And after that, the defendants will have another chance to fortify their arguments, due by August 27.
The McMahons led WWE (then called the World Wrestling Federation) throughout the timeline of the allegations. Linda McMahon left the company as an executive in 2009. Vince McMahon stayed on until his latest resignation in early 2024, following the sex trafficking lawsuit against him and WWE brought by Janel Grant.
All three defendants requested a hearing in court to make their arguments, which isn’t unusual given the complex legal issues involved. If the judge allowed a hearing, it would likely happen sometime after the deadlines above. A hearing would give attorneys for both sides the opportunity to make their arguments in person and respond to questions from the judge.
Defendants say the lawsuit doesn’t belong in Maryland
Each of the defendants emphasizes that they don’t reside in Maryland and that none of the plaintiffs live in Maryland. Vince McMahon lives in Connecticut. Linda McMahon has homes in Connecticut. WWE is headquartered in Connecticut and incorporated in Delaware. The John Does are from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida, Mississippi, and Nevada. Linda McMahon admits she had an apartment in Maryland from 1970 to 1972, but that was years before the alleged abuse occurred.
Maryland’s jurisdictional role is important, mainly because of a recent law that lifted any time limits on filing child sexual abuse claims. Most other states have statutes of limitations that would make it difficult or impossible for these plaintiffs to bring their claims to court.
The plaintiffs allege that they were abused in Maryland, but also in other states. The defendants take issue with what they say is the lack of specific accounts of abuse within the state, pertaining to the allegations of John Does 3. WWE’s attorneys state, Doe 3 “does not plead abuse occurred in Maryland.”
In the complaint, however, Doe 3 alleges he was abused in a variety of states, including Maryland.
“John Doe 3 attended at least one dozen wrestling shows with Phillips from around 1983–1987, in at least the following states: Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other states,” the plaintiffs’ attorney stated in the lawsuit. “John Doe 3 performed Ring Boy duties for Phillips and the WWE ring crew for such shows and was paid cash for his services. John Doe 3 was sexually abused by Phillips in all those states multiple times.”
The defendants contend that even though some of the alleged abuse happened in Maryland, that alone isn’t enough to justify continuing the case in the state. WWE, Vince, and Linda McMahon say they didn’t take any actions in Maryland that caused the alleged abuse, and that just holding wrestling events in the state or having employees travel through it doesn’t establish the kind of legal connection that’s needed for this lawsuit to be properly litigated there.
However, Maryland’s “long-arm” law does allow the state to hear lawsuits against out-of-state defendants under certain conditions, like if the party regularly does business in the state or if harm was caused in the state through wrongdoing.
To add some context not raised yet by either side in this case, our review of Cagematch.net’s large but likely incomplete record of wrestling events from this time suggests that of the more than 5,000 events the WWF held worldwide in the 1980s, the company ran more than 230 events in Maryland throughout the decade when most of the alleged abuse is said to have occurred.
But the defendants argue that the long-arm law only works for the plaintiffs if there’s a direct link between the plaintiffs’ allegations and some specific act or omission by the defendants in Maryland. While the plaintiffs raise many allegations of child sexual abuse, the defendants say the former ring boys haven’t asserted that there was something WWE or the McMahons did (or failed to do) specifically in the state that’s tied to the alleged abuse.
Defendants say they didn’t owe the ring boys a legal “duty of care”
In addition to jurisdictional challenges, the defendants argue they had no legal obligation to protect the plaintiffs.
A “duty of care” is a legal standard that means one party has a responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent another party from being hurt. The defendants argue that WWE and the McMahons had no such responsibility to the plaintiffs.
If the ring boys were WWF employees, that could have established a duty of care. But WWE and the McMahons contend the plaintiffs were not employees and were not paid by the company. The plaintiffs say they were sometimes paid in cash and, in other cases, received things like food, merchandise, and lodging in exchange for their work on the ring crew.
WWE’s attorneys from the Paul Weiss firm argue that even if there was a duty of care, any abuse by Phillips was outside of his job duties and therefore wouldn’t make the company liable.
“[A]ny alleged sexual abuse by Phillips in Maryland was plainly outside the scope of his employment, which means he was not acting as an agent of WWF (or TKO or WWE) at the time of the events,” the company wrote.
WWE also disputes that Phillips was even an employee, stating in a footnote that the plaintiffs “incorrectly” assert as much, suggesting he may have been a contractor. Phillips was regularly on WWF television at the time as a ring announcer, essentially showing he had a long-standing working relationship with the company.
The question of duty of care in part depends on what WWE’s leadership knew about Phillips, and when, and whether they failed to act on that knowledge.
In 1992, Phil Mushnick reported in the New York Post that Vince McMahon told both Mushnick and reporter Dave Meltzer that Phillips was fired four years prior—referring to his 1988 temporary separation from the WWF—because his “relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural,” but brought Phillips back on “with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.”
Linda McMahon’s attorneys distanced her from this account, noting that her name isn’t mentioned in the Post article, which is true. However, the ring boys’ lawsuit cites not only Mushnick’s news story—which Linda McMahon’s team refers to as a “tabloid article published four years after the fact”—but the plaintiffs also reference sworn testimony by Mushnick in a 1993 deposition, in which Mushnick affirmed his 1992 reporting. In the deposition, he attributed knowledge of Phillips’ alleged misconduct to both Vince and Linda McMahon.
Meltzer also confirmed to Business Insider in 2020 that this was an accurate account of his own call with McMahon at the time.
The plaintiffs say the following about Mushnick’s deposition.
“Mushnick described what he said were detailed conversations with Vince McMahon where Vince acknowledged that he and Linda McMahon ‘had known for some time that Mel [Phillips] had a peculiar and unnatural interest and attachment to children, and as we saw him going around and—with kids, that Linda and I decided that this was wrong’ and had fired him [in 1988] for it, only to let Phillips return [weeks later] to WWE out of pity.”
Attorneys for Vince McMahon noted, on that subject, that only one of the ring boy plaintiff, John Doe 6, alleges abuse occurred after 1988. Doe 6 claims he was abused in Maine in July 1992, after Phillips was reportedly fired from the WWF for the last time.
Not directly related to the duty of care issue but possibly challenging the credibility of at least part of the lawsuit, Linda McMahon contradicted the claim in the complaint that her son Shane McMahon injured his arm while wrestling with a John Doe 6. In a sworn declaration, Linda McMahon said that “at no point in Shane’s childhood did he injure his arm in the manner described.” She also noted that, according to the complaint, John Doe 6 would be about six years younger than Shane, despite the complaint describing Shane as “a boy close in age to John Doe 6”.
TKO says the plaintiffs haven’t shown that the parent company is liable for the WWF
TKO is a named defendant along with WWE and the McMahons. The same attorneys represent TKO and WWE. Even though TKO Group Holdings Inc. is WWE’s parent company and WWE is the continuation of the old WWF, the plaintiffs may still need to spell that out in specific legal terms for TKO to be held liable for abuse that allegedly occurred decades ago when the WWF was held under entities like Titan Sports, Inc. Attorneys for WWE and TKO argue that the complaint hasn’t done that. Therefore, TKO should be dismissed from the case at this stage. They don’t say subsidiary WWE should be dropped from the case for the same reason; instead, WWE should be dismissed for the reasons discussed above.
The lawsuit refers to WWE and TKO as “successor entities,” but the defendants say the plaintiffs haven’t identified a legal explanation that supports the notion that TKO should be held responsible for actions by the old WWF.
Even though company merger transactions often do result in the assumption of liabilities, the TKO and WWE lawyers say the plaintiffs haven’t explained why the TKO merger did. They say the lawsuit “does not allege that… TKO expressly or impliedly agreed to assume the liabilities of its predecessor (or that its predecessor(s) did the same),” seeming to cast doubt on whether WWE—not just TKO—inherited the liabilities of the WWF, or at least whether the complaint has properly alleged that.
TKO and WWE’s lawyers don’t confirm or deny whether TKO carries liability. Instead, they focus on the complaint’s purported failure to state the necessary facts or legal theory to support that claim. In other words, this point could be an argument that the ring boys’ attorneys haven’t yet stated the right “magic words”.
