Vince McMahon’s reign over WWE appears to finally be over. And not a moment too soon, according to longtime fight game follower and sports radio host Dan Le Batard.
A lawsuit filed last week alleges McMahon was involved in sex trafficking as well as grotesque sexual assault. He stepped down from his role at the WWE and resigned from the board of its parent corporation, TKO Group Holdings.
“I’ve got to be honest, I was surprised that he was gone,” Le Batard explained on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on Monday morning. “Only because I’ve thought he was going to be gone five or six other times, and he just stays there. And somehow, because he built the whole thing. Somehow, because it’s scripted, and it’s not really sports, and he’s just running a business. But now, when you’ve got something that’s publicly owned, there are stockholders, and there are consequences. And I was relieved to finally see that there were consequences, that this man is being punished for what has been a vile, vile run of terror.”
Despite his relief, Le Batard drew attention to just how extreme the accusations must be for a powerful person in society to be held accountable.
“We have finally found, evidently, where it is that the powerful, rich, white man in America can actually lose something that he cares about,” Le Batard added. “And the line, evidently, is it being alleged in a lawsuit that you s*** on a woman during a threesome.”
McMahon, “a truly despicable human being,” according to Le Batard, initially stepped down from the WWE in the summer of 2022 over separate sexual misconduct allegations. He returned six months later.
Le Batard is not surprised by McMahon’s unparalleled reign over such a shady business led here.
“If you follow professional wrestling at all, you know that it is littered with partying and abuse of substances and that the lifestyle is several realms beyond gluttonous and decadent and dangerous,” he added. “Professional wrestlers die early, there is a lot of physical pain involved, there is a lot of medicating in order to kind of numb the physical pain.”
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“But to live in that world for so long, to oversee and have the power in that world for so long, that it distorts you so much as a human being that the only way that you can keep chasing the highs of the highs is to dehumanize people more and more because you’ve been doing it for so many years and so many decades when you’re in charge of overseeing this thing, and there are never consequences. To get to the point where you are somebody who can behave this way and not think it’s going to become something that … comes with consequences.”
Still, the always sensitive (and occasionally naive) Le Batard was surprised that McMahon’s soul became so broken to defecate on another human being or traffic them for coerced sexual encounters.
“I don’t understand how you reach a level of that kind of evil without realizing that you have become evil,” Le Batard said.
Beneath the surface of Le Batard ripping into McMahon, he is also holding a microscope to the business that insulated him. While McMahon led the WWE to massive success, nobody around him was willing to strip him of power to protect those he abused during his reign.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.