In Her Own Words: An Exclusive interview with Janel Grant

John Pollock contributed to this report and participated in conducting the recorded interview. Video and audio of the interview will be published as a special edition of Pollock & Thurston.

Note: This article contains references to suicidal ideation and to alleged sexual abuse, including of a minor, which may disturb some readers. If you or someone you know is having a mental health crisis, you can find confidential support services in your country through Find A Helpline.

“It’s like watching your life turn into a movie and happen around you,” Janel Grant said. “In terms of what it feels like, it would be the equivalent of being spun up into a hurricane that I’m in the center of, in the eye of a storm.”

She alleged in harrowing detail, in her lawsuit, that Vince McMahon sexually abused her, which he denies. But what can hardly be disputed is that she abruptly went from having a private life to becoming a key figure in a high-stakes corporate scandal that made headlines worldwide. And it’s clear that’s a significant part of what occupies the former WWE employee today.

Grant spoke with POST Wrestling and Wrestlenomics last week for a wide-ranging interview. Her specific allegations against McMahon and WWE have been detailed in court filings and widely reported on previously. Our conversation touches on that story and uncovers who she was before WWE and what her life has been like since.

Near the end of our conversation, we asked what she feels now toward McMahon. She didn’t describe anger, hatred, or fear. “Forgiveness,” she answered.

For the last four years, Grant has been known mainly as a turning point. Through the first two of those years, she was known only as “a former WWE paralegal”—a label she says is inaccurate and understates her role at the company. Later, her name became recognizable almost exclusively through news articles and a lawsuit that revealed graphic claims of sexual abuse, allegations that led to the removal of the most powerful figure in wrestling history, Vince McMahon.

WWE’s board of directors was tipped off about Grant’s relationship with McMahon, and his alleged treatment of her, by a series of anonymous emails sent in the spring of 2022. Grant has denied any involvement in sending the messages. The board investigated and found multiple nondisclosure agreements, including one with Grant, which she has since argued is unenforceable. More than $14 million in NDAs and related sexual misconduct allegations against the WWE chairman are what pushed him out of the company the first time in July 2022. Then it was Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit that immediately led to his second, more permanent resignation in January 2024.

McMahon has called Grant’s accusations in particular “fictitious” and “salacious, false, and defamatory.” In a statement from 2024, through a spokesperson, McMahon said her lawsuit was “replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and a vindictive distortion of the truth.”

Grant agreed this past July to move her lawsuit against McMahon and WWE out of public court and into private arbitration.

Separate representatives for WWE and McMahon were contacted to provide comments for this story, but those requests were not returned. We also renewed a previous request for McMahon himself to join us for an interview, which has yet to be accepted.

“I want to give people the escape that I seek”

Grant grew up in Mount Kisco, a suburb north of New York City. She was the only child of a municipal attorney and a mother who, she says, later became housebound by illness. 

Her small family bonded over things like Broadway.

Photos courtesy of Janel Grant.

“Broadway musicals and old movies that are musicals were like the soundtrack of my life, basically, growing up. And in going to the theater with my family, particularly my dad, there was something in the fabric of me that found an escape in theater, in storytelling.”

Explaining her sense of herself as a person well-attuned to other people’s emotions, she points to a song from a show she saw at ten years old, The Will Rogers Follies.

“I used to sit and cry when I was a kid trying to understand why I felt so strongly about these lyrics.” 

She recited: “Try the shoes on that are his / Feel what makes him what he is / What it’s like inside his skin / Living in the skin he’s in / Just like me, a lump of sod / There but for the grace of God / That is the philosophy.”

“I used to sit with those lyrics and wonder why they spoke so profoundly to me,” she said. “And I just find myself able to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. It’s like empathy is a superpower basically that I was born with, and I just didn’t have a word for it.”

A high school panel on entertainment law led her toward the idea of becoming a Broadway producer, and from there, to law school, following her father’s career.

“I want[ed] to give people the escape that I seek, especially in my hardest moments, because it has not been easy [for me] growing up either.”

Theater was one form of escape for Grant. Riding horses was another, and it’s where she says she first learned that speaking up could cost her more than staying quiet.

“I realized if I say something, my life will feel worse”

Earlier, in her childhood, Grant rode horses through a 4-H club, and later as what’s called a catch rider: someone without the money to own a horse, but who rides, conditions, and improves them.

Photos courtesy of Janel Grant.

In one of those barns, she says she was sexually abused for the first time. She alleges she was cornered and inappropriately touched by a groom, a person at a barn who tends to horses. She was around age 11 or 12. He was an adult.

“That’s where I kind of experienced sexual abuse in the first place when I was a kid… When you’re backed into a corner by, let’s say, a groom when you’re a kid, and something inappropriate happens, and you speak up and say something because you’re so uncomfortable, you don’t know what to do. And when you speak up, when I spoke up, the groom, the first time it happened, he stayed in his role because they needed him… So basically, he kept his job despite what I said happened. Getting, you know, cornered into a stall and inappropriate touching, it just didn’t matter. He kept his job. I was told to stay away from him. So the place that was my heaven became my hell.”

She says she raised the incident to the owner of the barn, who told her to stay away from the man. Grant took a lesson from that experience that foreshadowed parts of her life a few decades later: “I realized if I say something, my life will feel worse.”

She says she told her parents about what happened at the time, but doesn’t remember much about how they responded.

“They listened to me. They listened enough to eventually react.”

She remembers more vividly that the groom was allowed to stay at the barn, and how the lack of consequences made her feel.

“And somehow, again, I’m a kid, valuing: ‘But I want to be here with this group of people with this barn, but this guy comes with that package, and they’re not going to let him go, but they’re going to let me stay if I just tolerate it and avoid him.’ And that’s a lot to put on the shoulders of, you know, a kid in middle school.”

“I was directionless, anchorless”

Around the time that Grant started law school at Pace University, her father’s health was already fragile from a 2003 diagnosis of a serious lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis. But then he began a decline she now recognizes as the early signs of dementia. Around the same time, her mother suffered the first of a series of heart attacks.

“My dad was like an anomaly, and he made it past my mother and her passing, because she had a ton of problems, and she also had her first heart attack right before I started my first semester of law school, and that was basically the beginning of the end right there, because I already felt I was a caretaker by that point in time. I’m an only child. I don’t have help.”

The family’s finances had quietly collapsed without her knowledge, she says, which she discovered when a debit card was declined at the grocery store.

“You can’t reverse engineer the financial decisions that you don’t know about. I know a lot of things that I didn’t know about until the day that Dad and I went to the supermarket in 2009… And we tried to buy—it’s pitiful—like milk and bread from the food emporium, and the card got declined… We don’t have money. We’re basically broke. How did this happen? I was so sheltered. I didn’t know it.”

By her account, both sets of grandparents had passed away by the time she was in kindergarten.

“I became the first kid in the class who, when you do something nice for your grandparents, broke down in tears because I didn’t have them anymore.”

And there was little extended family on either side of her parents to reach out to once her parents were sick. That left her managing simultaneous hospitalizations of her parents on her own.

“It would always be in two different [hospitals], because dad’s pulmonary fibrosis made him more fit for New York City’s big teaching hospitals, and my mom was in Westchester County local care… So if I had hospitalization juggling, I’d just be zipping in a Zipcar back and forth between the two of them.”

Asked whether caretaking and hospital volunteering made up most of her work history between finishing law school in 2009 and when she began working for WWE in 2019, Grant answered that WWE was her first corporate job.

“I mean, if I’m going back to the moment I was a hospital volunteer, I just was everybody’s helper, and that’s how I put together a resume. If there was an initiative that could be put together, like a food bank drive, or there was a party, like a holiday party here in the building, or there was some event that somebody needed help with, that made up [my] resume, and then that person introduces me to the next person, and it’s like this major networking cycle that you can maintain while, you know, also caring for a sick parent.”

After her mother passed in 2014, Grant’s father died in 2017. She describes the period after that as a time without direction, one she responded to by volunteering at a hospital emergency room.

“I was directionless, anchorless. I lost my thing. I lost my tribe… [The hospital] put me in prime hours, and I’ve been there when people have coded. You hold the hands of family, and you’re the first person that they’re telling out loud, my husband just died… Being at the hospital was my purpose. It would have been what I wanted to do. I applied for jobs there. I just didn’t happen to get a job there.”

“It felt so special until—”

It was against that backdrop—without employment and with a resume built on volunteer work—that Grant met WWE’s chief executive. McMahon kept a top-floor penthouse in the high-rise building. Grant also lived in the building with a man McMahon’s legal filings call her fiancé and who Grant today says is her “caretaker and support system.” She and McMahon were introduced to each other in March 2019.

According to her eventual lawsuit, the building’s resident manager — identified in the complaint only as “Resident Manager,” and described by Grant as her closest friend in the building — first raised the idea of McMahon speaking with Grant about finding a job. The complaint says the two women bonded “over stories of adversity as they coordinated community initiatives in the building together.”

The resident manager texted McMahon on Grant’s behalf to suggest they meet. According to a text message Grant provided to the court, McMahon replied at 3:30 am and proposed that Grant visit him directly at his penthouse home.

Text message allegedly sent by Vince McMahon in 2019 related to being introduced to Janel Grant. Image sourced from Grant’s amended complaint, filed May 7, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

In her legal filings, Grant says McMahon told her he didn’t just want to give her a job, but “a life.” 

She elaborated to us about what that promise actually meant to her.

“It was actually more than that… It’s a moment of feeling as though you’ve done everything right and you’ve done good, and all the things that you’ve done that are good lead to this moment that you get a job in a way that feels fated.”

In the lead-up to her hiring, Grant and the building manager were given VIP treatment by McMahon to attend WrestleMania that year at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

“I mean, I was sent to WrestleMania with my best friend. We were in front of the building taking pictures. We called them prom pictures. But we were taking pictures and people were taking pictures of us. And it was like this unified, go get ‘em. And it felt so special until… Things changed.”

Grant’s lawsuit says that was the beginning of a relationship with McMahon, in which he dangled a WWE job while pushing for physical intimacy. Once she was hired into an entry-level role in WWE’s legal department in June 2019, Grant claims, their relationship escalated into a pattern of coercion and sexual assault, including the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit images of her body, orchestrated actual sexual encounters with then-WWE executive John Laurinaitis, and proposed sexual encounters with star wrestler Brock Lesnar amid his talent contract renewal.

In a sworn affidavit filed in the Grant case in 2024, McMahon described his relationship with Grant as “an approximately three-year friendship and consensual, intimate relationship,” beginning in March 2019 and ending around January 2022. He said he helped arrange her interview with WWE’s human resources department after she told him she needed a job, and that when the relationship ended, the two negotiated a nondisclosure agreement. He says that Grant herself negotiated the related payment from $1 million to an even higher $3 million. In exchange, Grant agreed to resign from WWE, release both McMahon and his company from liability, and keep their relationship a secret. He paid the first $1 million days after the NDA was signed, then withheld the remaining $2 million after the scandal around him unraveled into an explosive news story in the months that followed.

Just over two months after the NDA was signed, an anonymous emailer, identified only with the handle “drosen77,” used an encrypted email address to send various members of WWE’s board of directors three emails on March 30, April 11, and April 14, 2022, alerting directors of the relationship between Grant and McMahon. To this day, we don’t know who was behind those emails, and as far as we know, none of the various investigations related to the scandal identified the sender. The writer described themselves as her friend, but Grant denies she had anything to do with the emails. 

Images sourced from unsealed exhibits in the WWE merger lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Identifying information, including that of Janel Grant, was redacted in these documents, consistent with the treatment in that case of identifying information for all counterparties to settlement agreements with Vince McMahon.

With poor spelling and typos, the emails say Grant was mistreated by McMahon and Laurinaitis, and that McMahon paid her off. The messages also contained certain inaccuracies. They got details like the ages of Grant and Laurinaitis wrong. But the messages did enough to trigger the board into action. The anonymous emailer urged WWE’s board to find settlements and to look at images on McMahon’s phone. Only after the third of the emails did the board open an investigation. And soon, The Wall Street Journal learned about the inquiry.

When The Journal broke the news of the NDA between Grant and McMahon in June 2022, WWE told the outlet the relationship had been consensual and that the company was cooperating with its own board of directors’ investigation.

“My life was instantly not mine anymore”

Grant says The Journal began calling people close to her in May 2022. She eventually learned that a story was imminent on the afternoon of June 15.

“I’m a private person. To have everything ripped out from underneath you, and just the ground swallowed me, like my bones gave out. I collapsed to the ground when I got the call that there was going to be, at any moment… a story in The Wall Street Journal.”

She says she was also told, through her attorney at the time, “that Vince feels badly about this. So it’s like being instantly the loneliest person on the planet.”

Representatives for McMahon didn’t return a request to confirm whether this accurately describes how he felt at the time.

With the story about to break, her first instinct, she says, was to ask about McMahon.

“I asked the attorney a question that I don’t know I ever got an answer [to]. I said, ‘Is he okay?’ Because I thought, if I instantly felt like I might want to not be here anymore, if this was something that maybe my light goes out in life, why wouldn’t he feel the same way, if something’s about to be outed.”

We asked her about that instinct. Considering what she alleges McMahon did to her, how does she explain her concern for him despite her allegations that he sexually abused and exerted coercive control over her?

“It’s actually, to be in my body and see the world through my eyes, it’s pretty easy,” she said. “He’s the only person who can tell me if I’m going to be okay. And what’s going on, like, what just happened? How did this happen? He’s the only person who would know that. That’s how I felt.”

The story was published at 3:52 pm that day. Since leaving WWE a few months earlier, she’d started a new job working for the condo complex. In her new role, she was due to attend a residents’ board meeting that evening. 

In her home before the meeting, she came close to taking her own life that evening, she says, “because my life was instantly not mine anymore. There was a narrative that rewrote my life, like my life is not mine. So what is life?”

It was her former fiancé, who she still lived with at the time, who stopped her from hurting herself, she says.

“It was like someone, like zapping me almost, like pushing me, like go, get out, go, go, like move, just like snapping my brain… And it was only because of that, that I somehow, with no memory of how, put on a dress and went downstairs for this meeting.”

So she attended and ran the board meeting. People there could tell something was wrong, she says. The article didn’t name her, and it wasn’t until the outlet’s follow-up on July 8, 2022, that it reported McMahon and Grant were neighbors. But Grant believes many people who lived in the building could easily deduce it was Grant who was referred to as the departing WWE employee “with whom [McMahon] allegedly had an affair.”

“Everyone’s looking. One person during the meeting slipped me some paper: ‘Are you okay?’ Another [person said], ‘Call me.’ Another one texted me The Wall Street Journal article. They knew.”

Among her other claims, Grant’s lawsuit says she suffers from anxiety and depression and that she’s unable to leave home for weeks at a time out of fear and PTSD. Because of that, the suit says, she lost the job working for the condo building in January 2023.

“Forgiveness”

Considering her experiences over the last several years and her allegations against him, we asked, what does she feel toward McMahon today?

“Forgiveness,” she answered. “I don’t know how else to describe it, other than there’s something that does not take up space in my brain. I feel even empathy, because in a weird way, and this is extreme polar opposites, the thing that might… the series of events that caused The Journal story to happen—whatever it was—it equally impacted him… There are so many people involved in [the] decision-making that I can’t sit still and process.” 

“Instead,” she says, “what occupies my brain is whatever series of events and decision-makers caused the anonymous emails to happen or The Wall Street Journal story to happen, and the events that have played out since, however they have played out. That is what occupies my brain.”

WWE has largely avoided speaking publicly about Grant, limiting its statements almost entirely to legal filings. In 2024, a WWE spokesperson provided a rare comment, saying the company “takes Ms. Grant’s allegations very seriously and has no tolerance for any physical abuse or unwanted physical contact.”

McMahon’s short-lived return to the company in 2023 lasted long enough for him to make the deal that merged WWE with UFC into TKO Group Holdings. That transaction, which saw him part with controlling ownership of WWE, was harder to imagine McMahon agreeing to before the scandal of NDAs and misconduct allegations emerged.

For Grant, that’s turned her into a permanent presence at WWE, despite leaving when she signed an NDA four years ago. Addressing TKO’s board of directors at a news conference last February, she contended that her story is forever linked to the company’s history.

“If you didn’t know this part of your origin story. Now you know,” she said.

In her interview with us, she added: “Because of this series of events that got kicked into gear that have nothing to do with me originating it in terms of some active thing, it’s like I’m just a presence that has never left. Basically, they’re a presence in my life. I’m a presence in their lives. We’re all basically a presence in each other’s lives.”

So far this year, Grant has turned her focus to changing what happens in the future to people who might be bound by nondisclosure agreements like hers.

“I’m very lucky to have a pulse right now.”

A few days before speaking with us, Grant stood in front of a room of supporters in Hartford and accepted an award from an advocacy group, the Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence. The award recognized her efforts earlier in the year pushing an NDA-reform law that made it through two legislative committees but ultimately stalled this spring, never coming to a vote. 

Grant was among those honored at the annual fundraising event held by the Alliance, just six weeks after a health crisis that she says she nearly didn’t survive. She posted images to social media in August, showing what appears to be her recent hospital visit.

“I tripped on a carpet runner,” Grant explained at the event on Sept. 11. “A hard one, and I went face forward into a wooden bed frame and wall unit with floating cabinets. Everything that happened after is a blackout. And my next memory is basically cutting in when I’m being driven to the hospital out of concern for my well-being. I’m currently healing from a concussion, broken ribs, a busted-up face. I bit through my lip.”

It’s unclear what precipitated the fall, but Grant says that “based on what’s been pieced together, I took a series of substances of unknown proportions each day, and I’m very lucky to have a pulse right now.”

The incident followed the dismissal of her federal lawsuit against McMahon and WWE. She and the defendants agreed to move the case into private arbitration in late July, bringing an end to more than two years of public litigation.

After having no previously known social media presence, Grant started a public Instagram account in April. She credits people she’s connected with recently online as among those who got her through her recent struggles.

“They weren’t in the same room as me,” Grant said at the Alliance event. “They weren’t there to witness me being injured, but they sensed, just [through] communication, that I was off, that I needed help, that I needed to get to a hospital. And they made calls, and they cast a net, and they did things I can’t remember because I [was] concussed. I was wandering around for maybe ten days, just aimlessly, behind a locked door [at home], but in a blackout.”

Speaking with us, she said the ceremony in Hartford marked an ending to a period defined by multiple investigations and lawsuits connected to her allegations.

“So when that ended, the rest began, and to be at the Alliance event on Friday was like a chapter closing,” she told us. “It really was a pencils-down moment. I suddenly realized I am speaking in front of a crowd, healing from a concussion and all these recent injuries I had around six weeks ago, supported, being taken seriously and seeing this evolution even of the upcoming [Connecticut legislative] session ahead, the potential reintroduction of a bill I advocated for.”

“I’m still breathing”

Earlier this year, Grant spoke twice at the state capitol in Connecticut, pushing for a bill that would have limited how NDAs can be used to cover up workplace misconduct. At the Alliance ceremony earlier this month, though, Grant said advocates and lawmakers were discussing reviving the bill that wasn’t voted on last session.

Meanwhile, the legal storm surrounding McMahon has been winding down. One of his attorneys said in 2025 that the federal government’s investigation into his conduct had ended with no charges filed and only a penalty levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since then, Grant says she feels more free to be a public advocate, now that there’s no confidential inquiry to protect.

Grant closed out her remarks at the Alliance event, saying:

“Everything from my bones to my bank account is still broken. Any problem I had yesterday is still going to be there tomorrow. But I’m standing in gratitude, and it feels like this joyous, hard-won, defiant-against-the-odds, honest celebration of life and of the power of the Alliance because I’m still here. I’m still breathing.”