Vince McMahon’s Most Disturbing Secrets Revealed in Netflix Docuseries

Vince McMahon is the most important figure in the history of professional wrestling, having transformed a regional business into a multi-billion-dollar World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) goliath. He’s also currently the subject of an ongoing federal investigation into allegations that, since 2006, he paid four women a total of $14.6 million to cover up his sexual misconduct– one of whom, former employee Janel Grant, filed her own lawsuit accusing the mogul of heinous crimes including rape, sharing nude photos of her with WWE headliner Brock Lesner (in order to entice him to re-sign with the company, which he did), and defecating on her during a threesome.

Mr. McMahon, director Chris Smith’s six-part Netflix docuseries (Sept. 25), is a comprehensive portrait of a man and an industry defined by the ever-blurry line between fact and fiction. Featuring the participation of numerous wrestling luminaries (including Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, and Bret Hart), it’s the tale of an ambitious and cutthroat individual who built an empire by creating violent and over-the-top athletic theater from contemporary reality, be it during the politically rah-rah ‘80s or the art-imitating-life ‘90s and 2000s. Even his 2007 “feud” with Donald Trump, culminating in a hair-shaving contest at WrestleMania 23, was an expression of its time–and, as it turned out, of the future, since it presaged the no-holds-barred persona that would ultimately help the real-estate magnate win the presidency.

McMahon was always at the center of the WWE, both as a businessman and as a performer, first as an announcer and then as an on-camera villain (i.e., “heel”) known as “Mr. McMahon,” whom the impresario claims is nothing like him. This alternately celebratory and damning affair, though, suggests otherwise. It posits Mr. McMahon as the all-time greatest wrestling character not only because of the bigwig’s talent, but because his core qualities–narcissistic, egomaniacal, cutthroat, sexually ravenous, and altogether perverted and immoral–were, as with all the best wrestling characters, merely extensions of the person who played him.

Most of Mr. McMahon’s candid interviews were conducted before the sexual allegations against McMahon were made public. Nonetheless, Smith’s 2021-2022 conversations with his subject as well as stars, colleagues, and reporters aren’t outdated, largely because they paint a picture of McMahon as someone who never backed down from a fight, always laced his fantasies with hints of the truth, and forever saw himself as the patriarch whose word, deed, and desire were final.

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In presenting a thorough recap of his career’s trajectory from abused and poor child, to desperate-for-approval scion working at the feet of his promoter father Vince Sr., to ruthless entrepreneur, to marquee in-ring presence who made himself and his family fodder for storylines, Smith finds various parallels between the genuine and the phony. He reveals McMahon to be a man of myriad contradictions which echo those inherent to the modern wrestling world he pioneered.

Mr. McMahon is, in many ways, the story of the WWE, and those who’ve enjoyed any of its eras will get a kick out of its fond look backwards, bolstered as it is by an array of amazing archival footage. Still, though Smith provides the nostalgic goods, his aim is larger. Without fail, his docuseries connects the dots between McMahon’s creative and strategic M.O.’s and his product’s serialized narratives, whether the latter were mining conflicts between the United States (represented by Hogan) and its adversaries (embodied by the likes of The Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff), or his own inter-familial tensions with wife Linda, son Shane, and daughter Stephanie, all of whom were roped into stepping into the spotlight alongside their dad in plots that dovetailed closely with their authentic dynamics.

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McMahon admits in a late passage that his brain functions like multiple separate computers, and that while his primary attention is on the conversation at hand, one of his other cerebral machines is thinking about sex.

That’s not particularly surprising considering the accusations leveled against him, nor given the fact that, once the CEO became the lynchpin of WWE sagas during the 1990s “Attitude” era–an everything-goes phase that helped the company thwart its Ted Turner-backed competitor World Championship Wrestling (WCW)–female objectification went through the roof. Smith’s series illustrates that the more McMahon became the literal (villainous) face of his own franchise, the more it became a reflection of him, replete with excessive crassness, brutality, and titillation.

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Mr. McMahon bears out McMahon’s assertion that the WWE’s success came from cleverly following cultural trends. Yet it also underscores how much of the company’s outrageousness was a manifestation of its chief architect, who eagerly sought to confuse audiences as to what was legitimate and what was pretend until delineating between the two became half the fun.

“I’m wondering myself now, which is the character and which is me? I guess maybe it’s a blend. And I would suggest that one is exaggerated a little bit. But I’m not sure which one,” says McMahon, who thinks that “people don’t really know me at all.” Hogan, Michaels and Austin, however, state that the McMahon persona was very much like their employer. And in light of clips of Mr. McMahon acting like an uninhibited horndog creep, that perspective lends some credence to the charges leveled against him.

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Mr. McMahon traces the WWE’s several evolutions and boasts a raft of amusing anecdotes from its biggest names, touching upon famous incidents like the record-setting WrestleMania III main event between Hogan and Andre the Giant (apparently, Hogan didn’t know if Andre was going to let him win) and the “Montreal Screwjob,” in which McMahon, knowing that champion Hart was about to defect to the WCW, covertly made sure that he lost the title in his final match against hated rival Michaels. In all these stories, McMahon is the puppet master, pulling the strings and not caring whose feelings he hurts, because as he (and everyone who knows him) makes clear, what he cares about above all other things is making money in order to protect, and grow, his business.

Mr. McMahon contends that McMahon was many things to many people: a father figure, a genius, a tyrant, a fighter, a cheater, and (per Phil Mushnick, who held his feet to the fire in his New York Post columns), “a dirtbag.” In the wake of his latest scandals, McMahon departed the WWE, returned to oversee its sale to TKO Group Holdings Company, and then retired when his new superiors decided they’d had enough. It may be a shameful end, but to promoter and WWE executive Paul Heyman, it’s a fitting fate for a tycoon who believed that “we live by the law of the jungle. And the lion who still rules this kingdom wouldn’t have it any other way.”