Vince McMahon and WWE have formally opposed former employee Janel Grant’s request to obtain any new evidence from them before the court considers whether her sex trafficking lawsuit will be sent to private arbitration.
In filings submitted on Monday evening, both defendants challenged Grant’s filings from last week. They argued that the plaintiff has failed to meet the legal standard for pre-arbitration discovery and accused her of seeking documents unrelated to the narrow question of whether she was coerced into agreeing to arbitration—the issue the case has been building toward resolving through more than a year of delays and restarts. The judge will eventually make a decision on that question, possibly later this year.
Grant alleges in the lawsuit, first filed in January 2024, that she was subjected to sex trafficking and sexual assault by McMahon, and that the company enabled his behavior. The former WWE Chairman and CEO denies those allegations. Upon her exit from WWE in early 2022, Grant and McMahon signed a nondisclosure agreement that promised to pay her $3 million for her silence. The contract also contained an arbitration clause, which states that disputes related to the agreement are to be handled in private, not in public court. Grant argues the clause shouldn’t be enforced.
McMahon’s legal team was expectedly dismissive of Grant’s efforts to obtain evidence from a period of more than six years, purportedly related to the arbitration question.
“The Court should refuse to indulge Plaintiff’s [Grant’s] improper fishing expedition and deny the Motion in full,” McMahon’s attorneys wrote.
Grant’s discovery request listed twenty different categories of evidence, including internal communications records and meeting minutes from WWE’s Board of Directors going back to 2019.
WWE’s legal team—which often strikes a somewhat milder tone than McMahon’s attorneys in this case—was forceful in rejecting the notion that the company should be required to produce any evidence.
“Grant is not entitled to motion-related discovery,” WWE’s attorneys from the Paul Weiss firm wrote. “She has entirely failed to allege sufficient facts calling into question the validity of the arbitration provision.”
Grant’s representatives said in a statement to POST Wrestling on Monday evening that McMahon and WWE are attempting block basic discovery requests “that go [to] the heart of whether the NDA and its arbitration clause are valid.”
“If they have nothing to hide, they should embrace this opportunity for transparency,” her representatives added.
WWE characterized Grant’s requests for evidence as a thinly veiled attempt to bypass the court’s earlier decision to hold off on broader discovery. Last month, the judge ruled to put a pause on discovery overall, but allowed Grant to request evidence related only to the arbitration question.
“Grant’s document requests are a transparent attempt to circumvent the Court’s stay order,” WWE’s counsel continued, “and initiate full merits discovery before the Court is able to decide Defendants’ motions to compel arbitration.”
McMahon’s attorneys say Grant’s discovery requests—which specify the kind of evidence the plaintiff is seeking—don’t even mention the arbitration clause once, which is true, though her supporting memorandum submitted simultaneously last week mentions some form of the word “arbitration” dozens of times.
Both WWE and McMahon cite case law and argue that to legally obtain discovery, Grant must show that there’s “reliable evidence” that she was coerced—not just into signing the NDA—but specifically that she was coerced into agreeing to the arbitration clause portion of the NDA.
To this point in the case, Grant’s attorneys have claimed she was “in an extreme state of duress and coercion at the hands of Vince McMahon” when she signed the NDA, so far alleging that she was coerced into executing the agreement, in general.
“Grant has failed to present any allegations, let alone ‘reliable evidence,'” WWE stated, “that she did not intend to be bound by the arbitration provision or that the agreement to arbitrate was induced by fraud or duress.”
Further, McMahon’s counsel says that if Grant actually was coerced in any sense, the evidence for that would already be in her possession, in the form of communications records—like text messages or emails—sent to her.
Both defendants argued that the evidence Grant seeks related to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s order against McMahon has no relevance to whether the arbitration clause is enforceable. Earlier this year, McMahon was ordered by the SEC to repay WWE $1.3 million as well as a $400,000 fine to the commission, because of NDA payments that were originally kept secret and not accounted for in the publicly-traded company’s financial disclosures. WWE was also a party to those agreements as McMahon signed both on behalf of himself personally and the company.
Judge Sarah F. Russell may rule soon on the discovery issue. She could allow or deny Grant’s discovery request in part or as a whole. The defendants already renewed their motions to compel arbitration earlier this month.
On Tuesday morning—after this article was originally published—Russell postponed the previous July 11 deadline for Grant to respond to the defendants’ motions to compel arbitration. New deadlines will be decided later after the judge makes a decision on the discovery issue. The defendants have both asked the judge for a hearing to argue the arbitration issue in court, which could happen sometime after an additional reply brief is filed by WWE and McMahon.
Grant is also seeking evidence in a separate state-level case in Connecticut Superior Court from Dr. Carlon Colker, a physician she says McMahon directed her to for treatment.
