Janel Grant, the former WWE employee who sued WWE and Vince McMahon, posted two multi-image posts to her Instagram account on Wednesday revisiting the 2022 Wall Street Journal reporting on McMahon’s NDA payments. The posts were interspersed with her comments and materials made public through the lawsuit over the TKO merger: parts of deposition transcripts from WWE executives and board members and a 2023 subpoena sent to WWE.
The parties in Grant’s own lawsuit against McMahon and WWE are in “active discussions” to move her sex trafficking case into private arbitration, according to a joint filing submitted in Connecticut federal court last week.
Grant’s first Instagram post centers on the Journal story that broke the scandal around McMahon on June 15, 2022. The article reported that WWE’s Board of Directors was investigating a $3 million nondisclosure agreement involving McMahon and Grant, although Grant was not named at the time. In her post, she disputes several details. Grant was referred to as a paralegal in the report, but she denies that was her correct role. While she worked in WWE’s legal department, which included paralegal staff, her own role was a coordinator position, she wrote.
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The Journal’s description of her having “fallen on hard times” and needing “extra money,” she reframes as having no job, no salary, no savings, and student debt before she began working for WWE. A reference in the article that she was caring for one sick parent omits that she cared for both of her parents, who had died, she wrote on Instagram.
Citing a WWE spokesperson, the Journal relayed the company’s claim that Grant’s relationship with McMahon was “consensual.” Grant calls that description a “storyline,” and her later sex trafficking lawsuit alleges the relationship with McMahon was coercive and that she was sexually abused by him, as well as trafficked to other men within WWE. McMahon has denied the allegations.
Separate representatives for WWE and McMahon did not immediately respond to requests from POST Wrestling to provide comments for this article.
Grant includes in her post an excerpt of a deposition transcript with former WWE board member Jeffrey Speed, who was in charge of the special committee within the board that investigated allegations of misconduct in 2022. As part of the shareholder lawsuit related to WWE’s merger with UFC, Speed testified that the board learned during the investigation of the relationship and separately received a readout describing graphic text messages and images McMahon sent to Brock Lesnar. Speed said that the board did not see the images directly but that they were described to the committee, and that they received those descriptions the day after McMahon’s July 2022 resignation.
Grant’s first post closes with a section of the shareholder plaintiffs’ pretrial brief, which was publicly filed earlier this month, just before the case reached a settlement in principle that prevented the case from going to trial. The brief frames McMahon’s resignation as forced by “salacious evidence,” specifically a single graphic text message his counsel was compelled to produce to the special committee on July 22, 2022, the same day McMahon announced what he labeled as retirement. The brief also quotes a text that Endeavor executive and now-TKO President Mark Shapiro sent the same day, predicting McMahon would be back within months and would pursue a company transaction, possibly with Endeavor — messages POST Wrestling reported on previously.
The second of Grant’s posts, published on Wednesday, addresses the Journal’s July 8, 2022, follow-up, which reported McMahon had not just one NDA but had paid $12 million to women across four NDAs, spanning many years. Each of the women had formerly worked for WWE. Grant wrote that this follow-up in July sent her into hiding, after a Twitter post at the time named her directly, and she found a message board thread that attempted to physically identify her but mistakenly used an image of a different person with an identical name.
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Grant alludes to how the report mentioned that she met McMahon at the condo complex they both lived in at the time. She said this exposed both her address and the location of the new job she took within the complex, after leaving WWE.
“My name had already been leaked but this served to eliminate any doubt to the entirety of my world — from neighbors to new employers — that I am a central figure in this scandal and here’s where I can be found.” Grant added: “I felt like I had been doxxed.”
Grant goes on to reference a timeline from the pretrial brief, detailing the timing of law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s communication with the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm was the board’s outside counsel for the investigation, which the directors had retained in mid-April 2022 to look into the anonymous emails they had recently received which raised allegations of misconduct against McMahon.
Grant disputes other details in the report from the Journal, while distinguishing that her criticism is aimed at their anonymized sources, not the Journal reporters.
“I am not frustrated with the WSJ reporters,” Grant wrote. “But I’m sick over ‘people’ who’d take a private person and launch me into the world.”
She says calling her a “legal assistant” reflects an internal placeholder title, not her actual one, and argues that detail reveals the source had access to personnel systems. She says depicting her as someone who “never applied for the job” skips over a meeting for advice that preceded her actual hiring. On salary, she says reporting was accurate about a later jump from $100,000 to $200,000, but wrong about her actual starting pay of $75,000. She also pushes back on an unnamed source’s claim that she talked enough to make coworkers uncomfortable, calling it spin.
She includes two more deposition excerpts, one from WWE President Nick Khan and another from former executive and board member Frank Riddick. Khan testified that by July 22, 2022, at the latest, he knew of “a handful” of graphic text messages, and that he later learned the DOJ was examining potential sex trafficking conduct in addition to the accounting issues already under investigation.
In Riddick’s deposition, the transcript shows attorneys playing audio for him of a September 2022 voicemail left by current TKO CEO Ari Emanuel — the lead executive at Endeavor at the time — telling McMahon that “everybody at the DOJ is former Latham lawyers” and Endeavor “can indemnify you and we will” on matters outside of the DOJ inquiry. Emanuel called the situation “not criminal.” Endeavor, the owner of UFC, went on to merge the MMA company with WWE in 2023. Emanuel denied in his own deposition that McMahon was ever indemnified by Endeavor or Emanuel personally. However, the Delaware judge overseeing the merger lawsuit ruled that he would presume at the trial — which has since been canceled due to the settlement — that the indemnification offer nonetheless influenced McMahon’s thinking about who to make a deal with.
Grant’s post ends with a page from a grand jury subpoena the DOJ served on WWE on July 21, 2023, requiring testimony and documents ahead of an August 15, 2023, appearance date.
The subpoena lists potential violations in two areas of federal law: financial statutes and sex trafficking and related offenses. Neither McMahon nor anyone else was ever charged with any crimes related to the investigation.
Because of millions of dollars in previously unreported expenses related to NDA payments, WWE had to correct its prior financial reporting filed with the SEC. McMahon personally, as well as WWE, obtained releases from liability and other protections from the NDAs.
The statute codes that are named in the DOJ subpoena are identified below by POST Wrestling, based on the laws to which those statute codes refer. The subpoena does not specify which individuals were under investigation related to which statutes and does not expand on the details of any related allegations under these statutes.
- 15 U.S.C. § 7202: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SEC rules and enforcement)
- 15 U.S.C. § 7242: Prohibits improper influence on conduct of audits
- 15 U.S.C. § 78ff: Prohibits willful violations for false and misleading statements, failure to file information
- 15 U.S.C. § 78j(b): Prohibits manipulative and deceptive devices in purchase or sale of securities
- 15 U.S.C. § 78m(a): Requires filing of periodic reports (annual and quarterly reports)
- 15 U.S.C. § 78n(a): Prohibits solicitation of proxies in violation of rules and regulations
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5: Prohibits employment of manipulative and deceptive devices
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.13b2-2: Representations and conduct in connection with the preparation of required reports and documents
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.12b-20: Requires disclosures of any additional material information needed to make them not misleading
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.13a-1: Requires annual reports
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.13a-11: Requires current reports (8-Ks)
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.13a-13: Requires quarterly reports (10-Qs)
- 17 C.F.R. § 240.14a-9: Prohibits false or misleading statements in proxy materials
- 18 U.S.C. § 2: Aiding and abetting
- 18 U.S.C. § 371: Conspiracy to commit an offense against, or defraud, the United States
- 18 U.S.C. § 1343: Fraud by wire, radio, or television
- 18 U.S.C. § 1348: Securities and commodities fraud
- 18 U.S.C. § 1349: Attempt and conspiracy to commit the fraud offenses in that chapter, including wire and securities fraud
- 18 U.S.C. § 1513: Retaliating against a witness, victim, or an informant
- 18 U.S.C. § 1519: Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
- 18 U.S.C. § 1591: Sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion
- 18 U.S.C. § 1594: The general attempt, conspiracy, and asset forfeiture provision tied to the trafficking chapter
- 18 U.S.C. § 1962: Prohibits racketeering activities (RICO Act)
- 18 U.S.C. § 2421: Mann Act, transportation of a person for illegal sexual activity
- 18 U.S.C. § 2422: Mann Act, coercion or enticement of a person to travel for illegal sexual activity
The SEC in January 2025 required McMahon to pay a $400,000 penalty and to repay WWE $1.3 million related to stock trades he made during the period in which the company’s financial reporting was incorrect due to secret NDA payments.
McMahon did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the SEC settlement. Coinciding with the SEC announcing his penalty, McMahon issued a public statement, saying this signaled the end of “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,” McMahon’s statement 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.”
His comments were made before the DOJ subpoena, and Khan’s testimony was later made available to the public through the merger lawsuit, confirming sex trafficking was among the statutes the government was investigating.
