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-Earlier tonight,
my father,
Vince McMahon...
retired from WWE.
-With those nine words, Stephanie McMahon
stunned the world of professional wrestling.
-I don't think anybody would have ever said
that Vince McMahon would have ever stepped down.
-Everybody figured that he was gonna do this until he died.
-Welcome to "SmackDown"!
[ Cheering ]
-Over decades, Vince McMahon faced financial ruin...
-Vince mortgaged every dime that he had.
- battled ruthless competition...
-And now WCW is about to dominate the globe
in professional wrestling.
- and confronted career-ending scandals.
-Speculation is running wild.
Did steroids play a role, or is there another explanation?
-He can be a tyrant.
-The whole thing was an abortive kind of a screwjob.
-So many scandals.
-I-I don't even know if there would be a wrestling business
by the time all the investigations were complete.
-Often close to being pinned...
-He was down many times.
- Vince always kicks out.
-In every case, he bounced back.
-That's... I've never seen anything like that.
-These are the nine lives of Vince McMahon.
-First of all, I-I resent your tone.
♪♪
-The origin story of the rich and powerful wrestling mogul
Vincent McMahon Jr. begins in a poor, rundown
North Carolina trailer park,
where a tough, mouthy, dyslexic kid
named Vinnie Lupton is living with his mom.
-There was some kind of a falling out in the marriage,
and then he and his brother Rod
were left to be raised by their mother, Vicki.
He kind of had a chip on his shoulder from the beginning.
-All most people know from this period of Vince's life
comes from his 2001 interview with Playboy magazine.
-He alludes to his mother sexually assaulting him.
He alludes to being molested when he was six
by other teenage kids.
-There's stories of his mother
bringing various different men into their lives.
There was, in particular, Leo Lupton,
who was officially Vince's stepfather.
He apparently was a very abusive man.
-And despite that abuse, or perhaps because of it,
Vince develops a ruthlessness that will come to define him.
-Vince said that he was upset that Leo Lupton died
before he had a chance to kill him
and that he would have really enjoyed being able to do that.
-At 12, Vince finally meets his biological father,
who happens to be one of wrestling's
most successful promoters,
Vincent James McMahon, or Vince Sr.
-Vincent James McMahon was the most important person
in professional wrestling in the northeastern United States.
-Here's promoter Vince McMahon's wrestling lineup
for this arena next week.
-Vince becomes like that storybook teenager
who runs away from an evil stepfather to join the circus.
-You know, there's stories of Vince hanging out
with Dr. Jerry Graham, who is this very flamboyant
kind of over-the-top figure in pro wrestling,
where Vince would ride down the street
in his convertible with him while he was lighting cigars,
you know, with $100 bills.
-But when Vince starts stealing cars for joyrides
and getting into fights,
Vince Sr. tries sending him away.
-Vince went to Fishburne Military Academy.
Legend has it that he got into a lot of trouble.
-He claimed that he was the only student there
to ever have been court-martialed.
I-I don't know how much truth there is to that,
but the story goes that he was an unruly kid
and that the military school kind of really
had their hands full with him.
-Until his mom finds him a girl,
as Vince explains in this 1999 TV interview.
-My mom had said, you know, you have to come meet
this beautiful blue-eyed girl.
She sings in the choir, and she's pretty,
and you're really gonna like her.
-Let's see. I think I was 13 years old and Vince was...
-16.
-Dare I say that you were older? Yes. He was 16.
-Vince and Linda married on August 26, 1966.
After college, Vince goes looking for a job
at his dad's Capitol Wrestling Corporation.
But Vince says his father again turns him away.
-Wanted me to have a more secure future.
Wanted me to be an accountant
or... or an attorney or something like that.
And I really wasn't cut out for... for any of the above.
-He's right.
Out on his own, Vince stumbles badly.
-He had talked about being a salesman, selling paper cups,
things that didn't really thrill him
and... and not doing very well at it.
-Then, for the first of many times,
Vince escapes adversity, this time aided by his dad.
-They had an announcer named Ray Morgan,
who was kind of becoming difficult.
So Vince Sr. hired his son officially as an announcer
and also gave him some small towns to promote.
-This Monday, a fantastic card of professional wrestling.
-Vince, a natural-born huckster, is soon putting those skills
to work on all kinds of side hustles.
-He was promoting concerts, rock concerts.
-And a closed-circuit screening of the infamous bout
between Muhammad Ali and Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.
-Just like I thought, I'll fight him. Right, fans?
[ Cheering ]
-In 1974, Vince even gets a chance to work
with Evel Knievel, learning tricks
from that decade's biggest self-promoter.
-Vince is one of the promoters of Evel Knievel's
Snake River Canyon jump.
-Vince pays the daredevil $250,000
for the closed-circuit rights to the jump.
♪♪
Knievel's attempt fails spectacularly,
and so does Vince.
The audience willing to pay for the event
turns out to be paltry,
and Vince loses the entire quarter million.
Just a few years later, he and his wife, Linda,
file for bankruptcy.
Yet, despite his failed ventures away from wrestling,
Vince is still convinced
that he can expand his father's business.
-He really wanted to bring his dad's wrestling company
to the next level.
-But not as an employee... As the new owner of the company.
-I knew there was just some way
I had to get my hands on this company.
-June 6, 1982.
It's sort of a red-letter date in wrestling history.
Vince sat down with his father and his father's partners.
-The deal was for $1 million.
-Vince mortgaged everything he had,
every dime that he had.
-He bought it on a balloon loan.
He describes it as, you pay a little right now
and then you pay a lot later.
-And if he missed payments,
then the ownership would revert back to the original group.
-They knew Vince knew the business,
and if he failed, he failed, you know?
They would get their money anyway.
-The message was, if you can't handle this,
if it turns out you blow it, we're taking it back.
-But there may have been an even bigger reason
why Vince Sr. was finally willing to pass the reins.
-He had pancreatic cancer,
and this may have been one of the motivations for him to sell.
-Vince Sr. had spent decades as one of the most
revered owners in professional wrestling.
-The stories that you hear about Vince Sr. don't revolve
around ruthlessness or overly competitiveness.
Once he had control in the Northeast,
he was satisfied to kind of run that territory
and do really well with it.
-As for Vince Jr., he will not be so easily satisfied.
-He had a vision to take his father's territory in New York
and literally make it the biggest wrestling company,
not only in the United States, in the world, to make it global.
-Vince Jr. was more willing to take it all and be ruthless.
-But first, Vince has to take on his father's old friends,
the mostly men running the other wrestling companies
across the country.
-Every state had a wrestling territory.
New York was the WWWF.
There was Memphis. There was Georgia.
There was Florida. There was Texas.
-There was the sense
that everybody would respect each other's territory.
-And, for the most part, promotions all over
the US and Canada coexisted
and it was a really thriving industry.
-He thought, "Why do I have to respect these boundaries?
Why can't I just start promoting everywhere?"
-Because doing so threatens the businesses
of Vince Sr.'s fellow wrestling promoters.
-You had these promoters now going to Vince Sr.,
they were his old friends, and saying,
"You have to talk to your son. He's out of control.
Are you aware that he's trying to,
you know, run us out of our towns?"
So Vince Sr. approached his son at some point,
saying, "Vinny, you can't do this."
And eventually, Vince Jr. lost his temper at his dad and said,
"Look, I'm gonna do this with or without you, Dad.
I mean, you know, you work for me now.
Are you with me, or are you against me?"
Vince Sr. kind of took a moment
and... and thought about it and... and was quiet
and then looked at his son and said,
"You know what, Vinny?
You're right. Those guys."
-And he did, by taking from them the thing they needed most.
-The talent... They all went for Vince.
Your talent's gone, you can't eat, and that was it.
-Now, either you got out of the way
or you compete against an elephant.
-Vince injects some competition into the industry,
paying wrestlers more than they can dream off
under the cozy old system.
Then he buys time from local TV stations
to promote his shows to sell more tickets.
That helps generate the cash he needs
to begin buying up struggling territories.
As his vision of a national wrestling company
comes into focus,
the master marketer goes looking for someone to inject
show business into the wrestling business.
-This man is not a television illusion.
He is not an artist's conception.
He is not a figment of the imagination.
He is the Hulk.
♪♪
-Making his first appearance in this arena,
ladies and gentlemen, Hulk Hogan.
-Vince is looking for the superhero.
He's going national, but it's not gonna work
unless he has this larger-than-life person.
-Hogan was the guy to choose. He had the great look.
-I mean, to this day,
if you ask somebody on the street
to name a professional wrestler,
they're probably still gonna name Hulk Hogan.
-Vince made Hogan just a perfect offer
that he couldn't turn down.
-Vince told him, "We're gonna put the belt on you,
and you're gonna be our number-one guy."
-He came in at the beginning of January 1984,
and by the end of the month,
he was the WWF World Heavyweight Champion.
-History being made tonight.
Hulk Hogan crowned the new WWF Heavyweight Champion.
-And, really, the linchpin to that national expansion.
It was Vince and it was Hogan.
Neither one of those guys could have done it
without the other one.
-While Vince is modernizing the wrestling industry,
some things in wrestling remain the same.
Most territories still practice what's called kayfabe,
maintaining the illusion everything's real.
- Oh! - What a move.
-Karate kick right to the side of the head.
-But what's not an illusion
is the very real threat to Vince's emerging empire,
when news magazine "20/20's" John Stossel
begins investigating kayfabe
and whether it's a fraud on wrestling fans.
-I was a wrestler in high school.
I was always a little annoyed that people, some people believe
that pro wrestling was real rather than a scripted event
where the winner is preordained and people dress up
in funny clothes and pretend anger and... and bullshit.
-It had leaked out that "20/20" was gonna do a piece.
And obviously, if it's ABC network news,
it's gonna be an exposé.
-I just thought it was interesting
that this big, growing, successful business
was based on bullshit.
I mean, cleverly done, athletic bullshit, but lies.
-Stossel's story could lead to a significant exodus
of disillusioned fans,
just as Vince has all his capital
committed to building the WWF into a national brand.
-We either did a survey or found a survey
that about a third of the people
who attended the events thought it was real.
- This is real? - Yeah, I think so, yes.
-You couldn't do a story
unless we could find some insider who would say,
"Yeah, here's how we fake this and that"
and was willing to go into a ring and demonstrate.
And eventually we found Eddy Mansfield.
-Mansfield is a wrestler with a cause,
publicizing the vulnerability of WWF wrestlers
who have no health benefits or pensions.
He hopes a story on "20/20" will raise awareness
to the plight of fellow pro wrestlers.
So he agrees to spill some secrets.
-Is this real wrestling?
-No. It's not real. No. Not at all.
I mean, if somebody would believe that, they'd be stupid.
-Nobody wanted fake blood, so everybody bled for real.
There's two ways to do that... The easy way and the hard way.
The easy way is with a blade.
-You go just like that.
-And then gradually, during the match,
it would drip around over your face?
-That's it. See, if I was sweating, it'd pour.
-I thought, "Well, we need to have the usual person
from the professional organization saying,
'Oh, this isn't fake. This is all real.'"
So we went to Madison Square Garden
and I guess Vince McMahon okayed it
or we wouldn't have been there.
-Vince wants to send Stossel a message,
so he tells wrestler David Schultz
to maintain kayfabe and treat Stossel like any other opponent.
-Vince said, "Listen, we got a guy out here
making a joke out of the business."
Vince wanted me to tear his ass up,
wanted me to blast him, stay in character.
-Vince denies telling Schultz to assault Stossel
and disowns any involvement in what happened next.
-And then Schultz came out.
He was a little frightening.
- Is this a good business? - Yeah, it's a good business.
I wouldn't be in it if it wasn't.
- Why is it a good business? - Because only the tough survive.
That's why you ain't in it,
and this punk holding the camera... why he ain't in it,
reason these rednecks out here ain't in it.
Because it's a tough business.
-I think this is fake.
- "I think it's fake."
Now I'm thinking, "Vince wanted me to stay in character."
Doctor D would slap the hell out of somebody who'd say that.
-You think it's fake?
What's that? Is that fake?
-Holy shit. What the hell just happened here?
And then I stupidly got up again.
-Huh? What the hell's wrong with you?
That's an open-hand slap, huh?
I was always taught, man get up,
you got to knock him back down.
You think it's fake, you...
-He whacked me in the other ear.
-My ears were ringing.
-What do you mean fake?
-I was stunned, a little scared.
And that's why I crawled off.
I didn't want to get hit again.
-Two months later, Stossel's report airs.
Now it's his turn to slap the wrestling community.
-"You little pissant, John Stossel."
That's what all the wrestlers thought about him.
-Then Stossel delivers a second blow,
hitting Vince where it can really do some damage.
-I thought that McMahon and his group should be taught a lesson
that they can't go beating up reporters.
And I sued for damages.
-After what became known as the slap heard 'round the world,
Vince fires Schultz to save the WWE from a PR black eye.
But it's not enough.
In response, Vince delivers what will become his closer...
Throwing money at the problem.
Stossel is bought off for a reported $420,000.
-I wanted some compensation for my pain.
-And while Vince also suffers some pain over the allegations
his wrestlers are faking it in the ring,
that proves fleeting compared to the misery
he's suffering over their behavior out in the real world,
beginning with WWF star Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-Jimmy Snuka was Vince's number-one drawing card
at the time.
-Holy mackerel! Nailed him right on the head!
And Muraco went down heavy!
-In 1983, Snuka is dating 23-year-old Nancy Argentino.
-She ended up dead in a hotel room
they were sharing an Allentown, Pennsylvania.
-Vince calls wrestler Don Muraco
to find out what happened.
-Vince, he says, "Have you heard anything
about Snuka and his girlfriend?"
I said, "As a matter of fact,
here I am with Lieutenant So-and-so,"
and I put him on the phone to Vince.
-Snuka claims that Nancy fell,
then she went back to their hotel room and went to sleep.
But the autopsy report raises doubts
about Snuka's explanation.
-It says, "The pattern of her injuries
is not consistent with a single, simple fall.
The magnitude of the injuries
may even be suggestive of mate abuse.
I believe that the case should be investigated
as a homicide until proven otherwise."
-Vince McMahon would have great reason to defend Jimmy Snuka.
Let's say, at the time, he is charged with murder in 1983.
That would be a terrible thing for the WWF.
-If one of your top employees is being investigated for murder,
that's bad for business.
-So Vince rushes to Allentown.
After he meets with police,
Snuka is released without charges.
-Jimmy said to me, "Vince came down with his briefcase
and said to him, 'It's over.
Don't worry about it. It's done.'"
-Unlike all of the other interviews
that were done in this case,
there is no detailed transcript of what was said over an hour.
And after that meeting, the case effectively went cold.
-Vince insists that the meeting was entirely above board
and that local officials told him
that the circumstances of Nancy's death
were consistent with an accidental fall.
But three decades later, in 2015, Jimmy Snuka is arrested
and charged with Nancy Argentino's murder.
-He was a legend in the wrestling ring.
Tonight, he's accused of murder.
-The rules and the regulations and the morals that exist
in the real world don't exist in the wrestling bubble.
They've got their own way of doing things.
-The Jimmy Snuka story is a foreshadow
of the string of controversies that will confront Vince,
many of his own making.
-Because nobody's gonna say no to him.
Nobody's going to say no.
♪♪
-After buying out his father's wrestling business
for $1 million,
Vince McMahon's driving ambition is to transform
the once regional Worldwide Wrestling Federation
into the national wrestling brand.
-He has not one, but he has...
-To do it, he needs a way
to reach audiences across the country.
One solution is to air matches on the TV station TBS.
-From Turner Broadcasting System,
you're watching SuperStation WTBS Atlanta.
-SuperStation, because it has coast-to-coast distribution.
It's owned by media giant
and longtime wrestling fan Ted Turner.
-Hello, everybody, and welcome to World Championship Wrestling.
-But TBS is already home to World Championship Wrestling,
which airs Saturday nights.
WCW is owned by Vince Sr.'s longtime friend,
promoter Jim Barnett.
-Here's the man
that absolutely has the strength of 10 men.
-But in 1984, Vince Jr. muscles
the lucrative TBS time slot away from Barnett's WCW,
introducing the WWF to a brand-new audience.
- Here's Vince McMahon. Vince? - Thank you very much, Freddie.
- Welcome aboard. - Thank you.
It is indeed a pleasure to be associated with WTBS.
And we promise to bring you the greatest in professional
wrestling entertainment in the world today.
-To the rope now. Coming up. Double elbow.
-The audiences rejected it.
They were used to the more Southern brand of wrestling
that they came to love, which Vince didn't bank on,
and it was what became known as Black Saturday.
-Black Saturday for the WWF,
because week after week,
fans just don't tune in.
-Ted Turner is losing patience
and he starts entertaining offers from other promoters.
-Under pressure, Vince throws in the towel
and sells out to his biggest competitor,
Jim Crockett's mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling.
-The figure was $1 million that they paid for it.
And Vince, supposedly, who was,
you know, very bitter about this...
It was a defeat because being national on TBS
was... was a very big deal.
-It's also a wake-up call.
Vince needs to modernize the WWF.
-He decided to take the money that he was paid
and turn it against the people that had paid it to him
and use it to... to fund his ambitions even further.
- being one of the stronger... There we go!
-And that's to build not just a national wrestling company,
but a multifaceted sports entertainment empire.
It's the early 1980s,
and cable TV is introducing audiences
to specialty networks like ESPN, CNN,
and what will be most important
to Vince McMahon's immediate future, MTV.
Vince sees an opportunity to retune the WWF
by getting in bed with rock stars.
-One advantage that he had was that a lot of celebrities
had grown up in the New York area
as fans of wrestling,
and one of those was Cyndi Lauper.
-Cyndi Lauper was on an airplane flight with Lou Albano,
and then Lou Albano tells everyone
that he was managing Cyndi Lauper.
-Wrestling events were being shown on the MTV network.
They were getting specials on MTV.
- Happy New Year! - MTV!
-It brought the dated look of wrestling
into the mainstream.
-Whoo! I'm happy!
-Vince decides to spotlight his redesign of the WWF
with an expensive, celebrity-filled extravaganza
he calls WrestleMania.
-Vince's concept for WrestleMania
was the biggest wrestling event ever held times ten,
an over-the-top, closed-circuit, globally broadcast extravaganza
that would combine celebrities and wrestling matches.
-He made it into this sort of entertainment variety show.
A little bit more willing to be ridiculous,
a little bit more willing to push the envelope,
allowing people to be in on the joke.
-The... The vision was Barnum & Bailey.
The vision was Walt Disney.
That was the vision that this company
could compete on that level.
-And then they linked up with Mr. T.
Mr. T was on "The A-Team"...
absolutely super popular television show.
-People don't realize today how big a star Mr. T was
in the mid-'80s.
- You want him? - No, you take him.
-He had a great body and a mohawk,
and he wore the chains.
And he looked the part and he talked the part.
-Gonna teach me how to pump iron, get my pythons ready,
and I'm glad you brought me here.
-And he hooked up with Hulk Hogan
for the first WrestleMania.
Hogan hitching his wagon to Mr. T
catapulted Hulk into the mainstream.
-As the scale of WrestleMania grows, so did the cost.
Like his youthful failed promotion of Evel Knievel's
Snake River jump, Vince pumps in a lot of his own cash.
-Vince could create a spectacle,
and spectacles cost money.
-WrestleMania was a huge gamble.
They were spreading themselves very thin.
-Vince's entire mentality was, "I'm banking on myself."
-WrestleMania is scheduled to air on March 31, 1985.
-As it was getting closer to WrestleMania,
it was very far from a sure thing.
-They booked about 200 buildings, and then a week out,
the advances were so bad they canceled, like,
65, 67 of them.
-It was looked at as almost like
Vince's folly, you know, within the business.
There was this thought of like, "Oh, my God.
This is gonna completely blow up in his face."
-The story is, if WrestleMania fails, that's it.
He's done.
-But at 11:30 on the night before the event...
-Mr. T and Hulk Hogan!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-One of the things at the 11th hour
that really helped was "Saturday Night Live".
Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, they were a last-minute replacement.
-Not another lawsuit, T!
Oh, no, T! Oh! Oh! Oh, my God!
Oh, no.
-It wound up leading to a lot more interest
in WrestleMania the next day,
a lot more interest from the closed-circuit exhibitors.
-But will it be enough?
-The whole world knows about this, man.
"Hulk Hogan & Mr. T start to train..."
-The dream team, man. The dream team.
-WrestleMania is a nowhere-to-hide,
life-or-death test of Vince's strategy
to link non-wrestling celebrities
to the WWF's biggest star.
-If there was no Hulk Hogan, the first WrestleMania,
I will tell you 100%, would have flopped,
and Vince would have gone down with it.
♪♪
-Welcome, everyone, to the World Wrestling Federation
presents the wrestling extravaganza of all time,
WrestleMania.
Standing in there. Suplex!
-The first WrestleMania was huge.
-Dropkick by Santana, and out goes the Executioner!
-It sets sales records for wrestling pay-per-views
and closed-circuit.
By gambling the WWF's financial health,
Vince McMahon wins the national recognition he's been chasing.
Even network television
is now willing to pay him to air the WWF,
starting with Saturday night's "Main Event" on NBC.
- That ring champion. - Oh! Right now...
-But even as he escapes the financial hazards
surrounding WrestleMania,
Vince finds himself ensnared in another scandal,
one that could not just bring down the WWF,
it could land Vince in jail.
-If I wanted a half-a-million- dollar-a-year contract,
I had to satisfy him.
He just didn't stop. This man just didn't stop.
-The success of WrestleMania in the mid-'80s vindicates
Vince McMahon's strategy to transform WWF wrestlers
into kid-friendly, larger-than-life superheroes.
-It is my distinct privilege
to present to you Hulk Hogan!
-But not everybody in the WWF family is celebrating.
-Rita Chatterton, she was a referee.
She was promoted as the first female WWF referee.
According to her, she eventually wasn't getting booked as much
as she wanted to get booked,
and she tried to have a conversation
with Vince about it.
On a certain night, he got her in the limo,
and according to Rita Chatterton,
he coerced her into sex, essentially raped her.
-It was basically sex and now you're gone.
-Rita Chatterton told Andre the Giant
I believe the next day.
She told another wrestler named Mario Mancini the next day.
-You know, the day after it happened,
I walked into an arena
and Rita was in the arena
leaning against the ring apron,
and I walked up to her with a smile,
ready to give her that brotherly hug, you know,
and she just burst out in tears.
And I said, "What happened?"
-A few years later, Rita tells her story on a TV talk show.
-Next thing I know, Vince McMahon
is unzipping his pants.
I was forced into oral sex with Vince McMahon.
When I couldn't complete his desires,
he got really angry,
started ripping off my... My jeans...
pulled me on top of him, and told me again,
if I wanted a half-a-million- dollar-a-year contract,
I had to satisfy him.
-I think if...
those allegations had come to light in more modern times,
you know, after MeToo,
that those would have been a much bigger deal.
-To avoid upsetting her parents,
Chatterton waits until they're dead before going public.
But by then, the statute of limitations has run out.
McMahon not only denies her allegations,
he sues Chatterton for defamation
before quietly letting the suit drop
because he needs his lawyers to defend him
against the next looming scandal.
-She did referee a little bit more
through the New York State Athletic Commission,
but as far as WWF goes,
her career was pretty much over at that point.
-As for Vince, his career is still just getting started.
The WWF's audience begins growing
as its wrestlers get bigger.
-At that time, the fans were responding
to cool-looking guys with these great physiques.
-They were just getting bigger and bigger and bigger,
and it was becoming more of a vehicle
to sell merchandise than anything else.
-Hulkamania will live forever!
-And wrestlers were expected to look the part,
no matter what it took.
-People do not understand the pressure that you're under.
Look the best you can to keep your spot in the business.
It was high pressure.
-It wasn't that Vince was directly saying,
"We want you to get on steroids."
People that worked for him might approach a guy and say,
"We'd like you to put on maybe 10, 20 pounds
in the next, you know, few weeks."
They weren't telling you how to do it.
-There are estimates that 90% of the wrestlers
in that time period were all on steroids.
-Everybody was on steroids. That's what they were marketing.
-If I look this way, I'm gonna get a better push.
I'm gonna get a better spot on the card.
I'm gonna... I'm gonna make more money.
And Vince himself was... was taking them to get huge.
-We did whatever it took to give what the people wanted to see.
-That's the why of steroids. The how is a ringside doctor.
-Dr. George Zahorian was the ringside physician
for the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission,
and he was assigned to ringside at all of the wrestling matches
in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for their TV tapings.
-And the doctor is right there at his side.
-He always had this big doctor bag,
and he would open it up afterwards and he would say,
"Is there anything you would like?"
-Valium, Tylenol 3, Percocet, Percodan,
Somas, pain pills, steroids.
-He set up shop every taping
and the guys lined up to purchase their... their candy.
-"And if it isn't there, I can get it for you
and I can send it to you."
-But starting in 1991, delivering steroids
without a prescription becomes illegal.
-This means that trafficking in steroids will be treated
in much the same manner as trafficking in cocaine
or methamphetamines.
-Soon after the ban, a steroid investigation
into weightlifting coach Bill Dunn
leads the FBI to the WWF's Dr. George Zahorian.
-Dunn had been, I gather,
caught with a large amount of steroids,
flipped, became a government witness,
agreed to wear a wire.
They used that tape of Zahorian to then get a search warrant.
On the wall of his office,
they saw that famous picture of him standing there
with Hulk on one side and Vince on the other side
and thought, "Oh, what do we have here?"
-On June 28, 1991,
Dr. Zahorian is convicted of eight counts
of distributing steroids and four counts
of illegally distributing prescription painkillers.
-And Vince McMahon was aware of it.
Everybody was.
If it was an overt agreement, "I can get you steroids,"
that's Vince McMahon being a drug dealer to his top star.
-But Dr. Zahorian is just the undercard
in the government's battle
against the illegal use of steroids
in pro wrestling.
The main event is the prosecution of Vince McMahon.
-They wanted to have a big, high-profile trial at that time
to sort of get it out there
that the law is different now with respect to steroids.
-Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation
have been indicted on charges of providing steroids
to WWF entertainers.
-The indictment says that McMahon and a doctor
conspired to distribute steroids to the wrestlers
to enhance their size and muscle development.
-Vince McMahon denies he facilitated
any illegal drug activity.
But with the trial looming,
he decides to retool the WWF once again,
this time to help protect himself.
-Because of the steroid scandal,
Vince McMahon couldn't keep Hogan around.
Vince McMahon had to shift his focus to smaller wrestlers
who were more athletic.
-In 1993, the one-time WWF savior is gone.
-You can have everything you want out of life,
and I'm not ashamed of anything I've done.
-As Hogan begins performing in Ted Turner's WCW,
Vince puts on his own show as an anti-steroid crusader.
-I promise that the World Wrestling Federation
will be the standard bearer
for drug-free sports and entertainment.
-But in July 1994, the steroid trial of Vince McMahon begins.
-There were wrestling fans there.
There were newsletter writers there.
Vince's family that would show up every day in the courtroom.
Vince shows up wearing this neck brace,
and, you know, everyone is kind of laughing at it.
-People are like, "You've got to be kidding me.
You're actually playing on the jury
for sympathy in a neck brace?"
-Here we go. It's a wrestling angle.
-The prosecution's star witness is none other than Hulk Hogan.
-And there were expectations
that Hogan was gonna go in there and kind of bury Vince.
-Hulk Hogan testifying
could seal the deal for the prosecution
and send Vince to prison for years.
He is the person the prosecution said
bought drugs from Vince McMahon.
-Hulk Hogan is finally here.
What is he gonna say?
-After convicting a ringside doctor
who worked WWF matches of illegally distributing steroids,
the government turns its attention
to the man running the WWF,
Vince McMahon.
-If convicted, McMahon faces eight years in prison
and half a million dollars in fines.
-And there's one wrestler the government hopes
will help secure that conviction.
But Hogan has other ideas.
-And on three different occasions,
I had the same type of muscle injuries.
That is the extent of Hulk Hogan's steroid use.
-And he's like, "I took steroids three times back in 1983.
I tore my bicep. I used it for rehab."
And it was just like, "Oh, my God."
It was just a complete, utter lie.
-Hogan framed it to the shock of the prosecutors
and to people gasping in the courtroom quietly.
"We were gym buddies. We were friends.
Sometimes I had extra steroids. I gave them to Vince.
Sometimes Vince had extra steroids. He gave them to me.
That doesn't make him a drug dealer."
-There goes their case.
-He kind of just like exonerated Vince
for any implication of his involvement at all.
-But not everyone viewed Hogan as Vince's savior.
-Vince didn't see it that way.
Vince was furious Hogan testified against him.
-Yeah, I think they didn't want
any part of each other towards the end.
It was kind of like, "You go your way, I go my way,
and nice knowing you, pal."
-But Hogan's testimony is only the first blow
to the prosecution's case.
Other witnesses took the stand and downplayed Vince's role.
-You know, maybe I'm an optimist,
but I didn't spend one minute of my time thinking about losing.
They took the verdict first against Vince.
They said not guilty.
-And when it was not guilty,
it was almost like, you know,
Hulk Hogan had just won a match at Madison Square Garden.
It was like people just popped.
-This one is my favorite one up here.
The jury announced its verdict.
That's Linda, me, and Vince hugging.
And what I always thought was interesting is
the hands clapping, 'cause that is what happened.
The jury verdict was very popular.
-You got a lot of money, you can get out of a lot of things,
which really is the story of his downfall.
Got a great attorney and he bought his way out of trouble.
No consequences.
What do you learn?
You learn that you're bulletproof.
-As we say in the World Wrestling Federation,
and it could very well be that the hunters
soon will be the hunted.
-What does that mean, Vince?
-Stay tuned, Rosanna.
-Rosanna won't have to wait long.
Soon after surviving the steroid trial,
Vince begins scanning his roster for his next big superstar,
turning his gaze north to Canada and the Hart family.
-Bret "The Hitman" Hart!
-The Hart Family is one of the most famous families
in the history of our business.
The sons were all wrestlers,
the daughters all married wrestlers.
-And Stu began the Stampede Wrestling promotion in Alberta
and had a very successful company there for a long time.
-Back when Vince first came sniffing around his territory,
Stu's business was on the ropes.
So he agreed to Vince buying him out.
-When he bought out our promotion,
I believe it was supposed to be for $1 million fee.
-My dad didn't get paid
and the whole thing was an abortive screwjob.
-He knew my dad wasn't going to contest
the legality of their agreement.
He got all of our rings, a lot of our top talent.
-McMahon, for his part, claims to have paid the Harts in full.
-He took Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart,
who was the son-in-law, as a team, the Hart Foundation.
-Internationally, we're getting reports back that we've got
a megastar on our hands in the form of Bret Hart.
-So, Vince bestows on Bret the WWF championship.
-When you were chosen to be a champion of a major company,
it meant that the promoter thought
that you were the best talent, that you were the best draw,
that you would make him the most money,
that you were the guy.
-But at the same time, remember that someone made you champion.
-Bret is soon approached by WCW's Eric Bischoff,
who waves a multi-million-dollar offer in front of him.
Vince feels he can't afford to lose Bret
to his number-one competitor,
so the WWF don makes Bret an offer he thinks he can't refuse.
-Vince heard about them giving me an offer
and I remember Vince said, he goes, "I'll make you an offer,"
and we worked out a contract.
It was $1.5 million for 20 years, I think.
-But before Bret can sign his new contract with the WWF,
Vince has second thoughts, not about Bret's talents,
but about his own finances.
WCW has peeled off TV viewers and Vince is short on cash.
-Vince comes back and looks at the commitment
that he had made to Bret Hart.
It was a drain on the company
from what we were bringing in at the time.
-Bret learns a valuable lesson
about doing business with Vince McMahon...
When there's a question about who should suffer financially,
you or Vince, it's usually you.
-Vince told me that basically he couldn't afford
to pay me the contract that he'd given me.
Kind of broke my heart. Like, it's like, okay, I get it.
And I remember I got off the phone from him and I said,
"I guess I'm done."
I hung up with Vince and I signed my WCW contract.
-Tradition says championship wrestlers give up their belt
or drop it before they leave for the competition.
And despite reneging on his deal,
that's what Vince expects Bret to do in his last WWF match
against his nemesis, Shawn Michaels.
-Here's the problem.
Bret didn't want to lose the championship.
It's your last night in the company.
We need to crown a new champion.
You know what? We'll just take it from him.
-As a consequence,
they orchestrated this limp-dick, half-assed abortion,
a bunch of bullshit.
-But that "bullshit" sells out.
On November 9, 1997, Hart and Michaels battle it out
in Montreal's Molson Centre.
-The match lasted 10, 15 minutes.
-But it's the last 30 seconds
that everyone is still arguing about.
-I could see Vince McMahon,
and Vince snaps at him to ring the... bell.
Oh, they're screwing me right now.
And I remember reaching back
and showing that I wasn't submitting,
and I grabbed Shawn's leg and started to reverse.
But you could hear the bell. Ding-ding-ding-ding.
-If I hadn't rung the bell,
Vince McMahon was gonna ring that bell.
-I wanted to just kill Vince.
I wanted to jump through the ropes and just punch him out.
I couldn't believe he did it to me, after all the years
that I gave him and all the matches and all the hard work
and he'd disrespect me like that.
You son of a bitch.
I remember I had a nice, good gobber of spit,
and I remember I just leaned over the top rope.
♪♪
Cameras were off, show's over. I got screwed.
And Vince said something to me along the lines of,
"This is the first time I ever had to lie
to one of my talent," which is such a lie.
And I remember when I got tying my last shoelace,
I started to tie it, and I go, "Well, this is it.
I'm gonna punch out Vince McMahon.
I can't believe I'm doing this."
And then we walked towards each other,
end up tying up, just like a pro wrestling match.
And I remember just sinking down and kind of
just turning my whole body and thinking,
14 years, and coming up right between our arms.
And I hit Vince McMahon
with the most beautiful Mike Tyson uppercut.
I popped him literally off... Right off the ground.
He went straight down, out cold.
Everybody was stunned. No one could believe it.
-It's like, I remember when I was a kid
exactly where I was standing
when John F. Kennedy had been assassinated,
and I remember just as precisely where I was
when I found out about the Montreal Screwjob.
-Vince immediately goes on the offensive,
appearing on TV with the black eye
he got from Bret Hart's uppercut.
-Did you or did you not screw Bret Hart?
-There's a time-honored tradition
in the wrestling business that when someone is leaving,
that they show the right amount of respect.
Bret Hart didn't want to honor that tradition.
-Vince was really giving Bret Hart all kinds of shit.
-Vince, in this interview, just came across very cold,
calculated, and very, very heelish.
-I truly believe that Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart.
-The Montreal Screwjob is a seminal moment in wrestling.
The event pulls back the curtain to reveal Vince's true nature
as the win-at-all-costs owner of the WWF.
-And then once the word got out
that he actually owns the company
and he's the power behind the throne and this and that,
Vince ran with it.
♪♪
-But soon, Vince will embrace
his on-screen character's evil spirit.
-I will never, ever forgive your mother
for giving birth to you!
♪♪
-Barely a decade after buying the WWF from his dad,
Vince McMahon's career is a whiplash
of career-threatening scandals inside and outside the ring.
-In the early-to-mid-'90s, Vince was so distracted.
So he's fighting on all these fronts,
these scandals and things breaking all around him.
-There was a former referee that was hiring young ring boys
and he had some type of a toe fetish.
I mean, really, really weird stuff
was coming out to the extent of,
"Oh, bro, that's so unbelievable.
It's wrestling. That can't be true."
-And he's perhaps not able to put as much attention
and care into the product, and it was showing.
-With the WWF's TV ratings now in a nosedive,
Vince McMahon is facing his worst fear...
No longer running the country's
most successful wrestling entertainment company.
That title could soon belong to a media mogul
with exceptionally deep pockets.
-Ted Turner bought out Jim Crockett Promotions,
and it became WCW.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Eric Bischoff had been given control of WCW.
He decided that he wanted to go head-to-head with Vince McMahon,
and he talked Ted Turner into it.
-We just want to be as successful as Vince is,
and then we'd like to, you know, kick his butt.
-And according to Vince, Ted Turner calls Vince
and... and says that, "I'm in the wrestling business."
-And he goes, "Well, that's great, Ted.
I'm in the sports entertainment business."
-And those are two completely different philosophies.
-World Championship Wrestling has always been
one of our most popular programs,
and now WCW is about to dominate the globe
in professional wrestling.
-Bischoff immediately gets to work
running Vince McMahon's playbook by stealing away WWF talent.
-You had Hulk Hogan, you had the Macho Man, Randy Savage.
You had all of these big stars of the '80s,
and Vince slowly began taking them off television.
And so Eric Bischoff believed
that these guys still had the ability to draw.
-Hogan went over, Piper went over,
Rick Rude, Curt Hennig.
One by one, they started signing WWE talent.
-I think Vince was having a very difficult time
when the tactics that he used to win the first war
were being used on him and he was behind.
-Vince McMahon calls a company-wide meeting,
and he says, "Well, they've taken everybody,"
and I'm sitting there and I'm like,
"Wait a minute. You're the victim now?"
-It was funny to me because he was going like,
"They're stealing my talent."
And I go, "Vince, that's how you built your company.
You stole everybody's talent."
-Eric Bischoff put "Monday Nitro"
opposite "Monday Night Raw".
And what happened was you had a nostalgia effect.
You had these kids who were like, "Oh, my God.
Hulk Hogan is... You know, he's on WCW.
Macho Man Randy Savage."
And then Eric, he brought in wrestlers from Japan,
wrestlers from Mexico
that worked a very different style.
They were high fliers.
It was very, very fast, very colorful.
And Vince's product felt slow, old.
-Papa Shango striking sheer terror
in the hearts of this capacity crowd.
-I think it was '95, '96, that he was losing $6 million a year,
and WCW ended up winning the ratings war
for a straight year and a half every single Monday.
-Ted Turner, WCW beating him for 83 weeks at his own game.
That set a fire underneath Vince McMahon.
-So the man who once drew inspiration from Walt Disney
dramatically changes course,
rebranding the WWF as more adult,
meaning more violent and a lot more sexual.
-We've embarked upon a far more innovative
and contemporary creative campaign.
It is far more invigorating and extemporaneous than ever before.
-Vince stole all sorts of stuff.
He stole a lot of the concepts
that Eric Bischoff had come up with.
He stole the hardcore and the violence.
-It was almost like Vince's own inner self
kind of exploding into the WWF product,
you know, violence and class warfare
and just different kinds of sexual content and edginess.
It was a play to win this war.
-The WWF's graphic story lines target the WCW audience...
Angsty teens and 20-somethings.
-Vince McMahon's got the Midas touch.
He's the guy who knows how to reach those teenagers.
-Including with this guy, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
-I do what I want, when I want,
and if I don't want to answer no questions, I ain't got to.
What I do ain't none of your business.
I don't give a rat's ass if you own the WWF or not.
-Steve Austin... huge star.
If you were a kid in high school,
middle school in the '90s, you could go to school,
there'd be Austin 3:16 shirts everywhere.
Everybody knew "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
-Vince goes on air and justifies
the WWF's edgier rebrand
after getting some pushback from parents and the press.
-So when we hear some people squawking and whatever,
I think that's a good sign because it says
that we are going up to a certain edge creatively.
We don't want to go over that edge and fall off.
That's not good, either.
But I think you have to open the creative envelope.
-WWF slowly started kind of chipping away
and getting people interested in watching their show again.
-"Raw" and "Nitro" were on at the same time,
Monday night on two different networks,
so you already had a lot of fans who would switch back and forth.
But then as it started getting better, then they started going,
"Well, well, hold on. Put the remote down.
We're not going back to 'Nitro'.
I want to see Austin kicking
Vince McMahon's ass on television.
This has never happened before."
-Austin stuns Mr. McMahon!
-And I don't think there's any subject matter,
by the way, that's off bounds, that's off limits.
-That includes writing himself into the show
as the amoral Mr. McMahon,
the power-hungry, take-no-prisoners owner
of the WWF.
Some see it as typecasting.
-I enjoy destroying lives.
-Mr. McMahon takes on every top-billed star of WWF,
from The Rock to Triple H,
and an infamous head-to-butt match
with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
-You said you could beat Vince McMahon
with one arm tied behind your back.
-Stone Cold is...
Stone Cold's laying Mr. McMahon's bare ass out
with a leather belt!
-Even Vince's family isn't safe from the wrath of Mr. McMahon.
-I will never, ever forgive your mother for giving birth to you!
-Your mother had a certain... reputation.
A good-time-girl reputation, if you get my drift.
-The father-daughter feud culminated
in the "I quit" match,
where Vince chokes out his own child with a steel pipe.
-Mr. McMahon is one of the greatest
heel characters of all time. Yes.
-Critics say the World Wrestling Federation
blows away the envelope of good taste
with a parade of raunchy characters like a pimp
who struts into the ring with prostitutes.
-And I want you to roll a fatty for this pimp daddy.
Light that blunt up and say...
-Pimpin' ain't easy!
-The WWF fan never saw this before.
The numbers got higher and higher and higher and higher.
We turned it into must-see TV.
-A lot of the women, you know,
that started coming up wanted to be wrestlers
and they didn't really want the women to be wrestlers.
They thought, "People don't want to watch women wrestle.
They want to see T&A disguised as wrestling."
Basically, the idea was hire people
who could pose in Playboy,
and many of them did pose in Playboy,
and go out there and wear as little as possible
and rip clothes off and all this.
And that's when the TV ratings with the teenagers,
the teenage boys... Through the roof.
-After 83 straight weeks of losing out to WCW,
there's finally cause for Vince to celebrate.
-McMahon said there's only one group
that he pays attention to, and that's his audience.
And he will bend in any direction
that they tell him to.
-Forget the morality, forget the ethics.
Strictly from a business standpoint,
you go too far, then what's next?
A chainsaw? You can't go there.
- Are you approaching that? - I don't know.
I think the audience is gonna tell us.
- Or he will tell the audience. - Don't go in there!
Don't go in there! [ Gunshot ]
-On behalf of the World Wrestling Federation,
for those of you who were offended,
those viewers, we humbly apologize
for the incident that took place last Monday night on "Raw".
-By the late '90s, what's dubbed the Attitude Era,
puts Vince McMahon back on top.
But to stay there, he resorts to more and more drastic theatrics,
including a home invasion on a controversial 1996 episode
of "Monday Night Raw". - We are live.
Austin is outside of Brian Pillman's home.
-Steve is a dead man walking!
Because when Austin 3:16
meets Pillman 9 millimeter Glock...
- Oh, my God. - I'm gonna blow his sorry ass
straight to Hell!
-Don't go in there! Don't go in there!
-The reaction was pretty negative to it.
I mean, it was pretty darn negative.
Vince had to actually go on television and apologize
for that angle 'cause it got so much negativity.
-We humbly apologize for the incident
that took place last Monday night on "Raw".
-I think that's the only angle Vince ever apologized for.
-Including the ones involving stunts in which his wrestlers
didn't always want to participate.
-Vince McMahon wanted wrestlers to start being actors
at this point, and he couldn't understand
why they didn't want to go along with it.
-Surely the era of the superhero
who'd urge you to say your prayers
and take your vitamins is definitely passé.
-It was that tipping point that we reached at that time
between "We're not gonna use great wrestlers
just 'cause they're great athletes.
They have to be willing to put on goofy outfits and do skits."
-But many of these new gimmicky story lines
don't land with fans.
So Vince is once again forced to find the next big superstar
to re-energize the WWF.
And like before, it's the Hart family that delivers.
-Owen Hart. As a rookie, he was spectacular.
His acrobatics were amazing.
He could flip backwards off the ropes.
He could land on his feet from every direction.
-Number one, baby!
-Owen has the athleticism,
but not the over-the-top personality
of a Hulk Hogan or "Stone Cold" Steve Austin,
the traits that have always resonated with Vince.
-In the new entertainment, Attitude Era,
they didn't know what to do with Owen.
-They had him doing one horseshit persona after another.
The Blue Blazer. The American Eagle.
I was shaking my head.
-Here it comes. It's Owen Hart! The Blazer!
-Vince can be very spiteful for his own amusement,
give them very demeaning characters or roles,
and kind of have fun at their expense
because he's their boss.
He can be a tyrant.
-Vince tries to write Owen into edgier story lines,
but Owen refuses,
but perhaps because of how he treated Owen's brother
Bret in the Montreal Screwjob, Vince keeps Owen around.
Then Vince decides to put Owen's athleticism to the test.
♪♪
On May 23, 1999, Owen travels to Kansas City's
Kemper Arena for a WWF event called "Over the Edge."
From eight stories up, Owen will be lowered into the ring.
-Owen did not want to come down from the rafters.
They talked him into it.
-He's done the gimmick before.
-The idiot is stuck in the harness!
-Riggers experiment with a quick-release harness
so Owen can get back into the action quicker.
Some claim the WWF replaced their original riggers
with a cut-rate crew who say they can make it happen.
But the poorly designed quick-release mechanism
they use proves deadly.
-I looked at my monitor, and all of a sudden, I looked up.
I just caught Owen come into my line of vision.
A blur. Foof.
-But, like, all the fans are watching,
and at first, they're thinking, "That's weird.
They dropped a dummy from the rafters.
-I thought I heard screaming, and then I felt something brush
against the side of my head and my shoulder.
And I'm thinking in my head, "What the heck was that?"
And when I turned and looked, there was Owen.
He was, like, laying in the ring, like, faceup.
And I just started screaming for help.
-I thought he hit the turnbuckle or the ring post
'cause it really sounded sick, sick, sick.
-Somebody said, "Owen just fell."
And I went, "Owen fell? What?" He goes, "Owen just fell."
-Well, it's one of the most shocking things I've ever seen.
This is not a... your typical wrestling story line.
This is a real situation.
-I said, "...never seen anything like that."
Not on any wrestling program, not on any television program.
It's never happened before.
-I was just reiterating to the fans
this is not a part of the show.
We're here to entertain and have fun.
But this is neither.
-As emergency workers tend to Owen
and his shocked colleagues look on,
someone calls Vince to decide what to do next.
-And they wheeled Owen past us to go to the ambulance, and...
Mm.
-Vince's decision sends shockwaves through the WWF.
-They didn't want to stop the show.
So Jeff Jarrett, who was real close with Owen,
did a promo, and he was in tears.
-Owen Hart, I'm praying for you, buddy.
-The show must go on.
They got to go in there and do their match
with Owen's blood in the corner.
-Kevin Dunn, the executive producer,
thought that I had been told what the deal was.
And I said, "Kevin, nobody's told us anything.
What is the update?"
And he said..."He's dead.
And you're back in 10, 9..."
-And I have the...
unfortunate responsibility
to let everyone know that Owen Hart has died.
Owen Hart has tragically died
from that accident here tonight.
-It's only after deciding to continue the show
that Vince finally reaches out to Owen's wife
to tell her that there was an accident.
But he leaves it to the doctor
to deliver the news that devastates her.
-I miss my husband,
and I'm sad for myself that I'm a widow at 32
and I have two children that are fatherless now.
-A police investigation into Owen Hart's death
begins immediately.
If criminal negligence is found,
Vince's WWF could very well get shut down.
-I think a lot of fingers were being pointed.
Did they cut corners? Was it a cut-rate kind of thing?
-Owen was such a loyal and dependable
and reliable and safe performer,
and, you know, it's so upsetting that he needlessly died
just for a silly ring entrance.
-What hurt Vince at the time and the company, image-wise,
and this can't really be overstated,
was the decision to continue the show.
And that's something that has been second-guessed ever since,
even to this day.
-Should the show go on?
Should we cancel the show?
Come on, man.
Nobody was in their right mind that day
to make any kind of a decision, including Vince McMahon.
-Owen Hart's death makes national news.
When a reporter questions Vince about his culpability,
she's immediately met with Vince's first rule
of crisis management...
The best defense is an obnoxious offense.
-First of all, I resent your tone.
Um...
No, no. I resent your tone, lady, okay?
You know, this was a tragic accident.
-On June 15, 1999, Martha Hart begins her pursuit for justice.
-My legal counsel filed a wrongful death lawsuit
against WWF, Vince McMahon, and all others
I believe are responsible for my husband's death.
-Vince denies acting spitefully towards Owen
or any culpability for this accident
and successfully sues the manufacturer
of the quick-release device.
Martha Hart eventually settles with the WWF for $18 million,
using the money to start The Owen Hart Foundation.
As Martha and her children try to rebuild their lives,
Vince finds himself
in the middle of yet another shocking incident,
when a plane full of his employees travel on
a WWF chartered transcontinental flight from Europe.
-I remember sitting in the first-class section.
I think Jim Ross was up there.
-Normally the coaches and the managers sat up there,
and in this case, the wrestlers were in the back.
-Wrestlers would behave badly on the road, on planes,
in hotels, and in bars.
And on this privately chartered flight, they got out of control.
-As alcohol and pills flow freely,
a couple of wrestlers begin assaulting
the flight attendants.
-And I was in the galley.
He had me back against the back door,
and I couldn't... I couldn't move.
I couldn't get away from him.
He was spitting around his penis and he wanted me to touch it.
And he... he took my hand and... and put it on him.
-After a wrestler intervenes,
another moves in on the still-shaken stewardess.
-He grabbed my shirt and pulled me down
and my shirt buttons got ripped.
He told me he was gonna lick me,
and then he proceeded to try to do that.
It was a moment of great...
violation, discomfort,
to have a person put their hands on you
without you wanting them to do that.
And then he passed out.
-Once safely back on the ground,
the two flight attendants sue.
Vince intervenes and does one of the things
he does best... Throw money at the problem.
-They offered us a settlement.
Money is... Money is what ends up on the table, I think,
and... and then it also buys you silence,
which then can add to another layer of the guilt of a victim.
Like, it can... it can be a cycle that's not good, yeah.
Perpetually bad.
-Paying people off becomes Vince's go-to strategy
to make bad press disappear,
but he'll eventually learn the danger
in buying people's silence.
It only works until somebody talks.
-If these stories from the actual people
inside started coming out, I-I don't even know
if there would be a wrestling business by the time
all the investigations were complete.
-For decades, Vince McMahon proves to be uniquely skilled
at surviving scandals, from claims of sexual harassment
to illegal steroid use,
even an accidental death lawsuit
by first unequivocally denying responsibility for any of them.
So it's business as usual in 2006,
when he quickly dispenses with an ugly new allegation.
-That was another story back in the day,
where he went to a tanning salon called Tanzabar.
-In the police report, it says a 22-year-old
tanning salon employee met Vince McMahon
when he went in to buy 20 minutes of tanning.
He asked her to take a photo of him
so that he could send it back to his girlfriend in New York.
And then when she handed his phone back to him,
he sort of scrolled through a number of photos
that he had taken of himself.
-He ends up, I believe, showing pictures of himself,
naked pictures of himself to the tanning salon attendant.
-He allegedly grabs her, touches her,
tries to lift up her blouse,
tries to kiss her, according to her allegations,
and then she rebuffs him, ends up putting both her hands
on his chest to push him away,
and then he responds by saying, you know,
"I was only trying to have a little fun."
-And the woman ran out of the room yelling and screaming,
"Call the police!"
Found out it was Vince McMahon.
-The police determined there's probable cause
that McMahon had committed a crime.
So they refer that to the local prosecutor's office,
who, in turn, decline to prosecute
because there's... There's not enough evidence.
-While Vince's lawyer fervently denies
that the woman was paid to drop the charges,
others aren't so sure.
-Well, when you have that kind of money,
I gue... I guess things go away.
-Any time there's accusations,
no court case, you presume payoff.
But I don't know that.
These rumors have been in a wrestling forever.
The tanning salon story came out,
but whether it's true or not,
these were not isolated incidents.
-Vince was a known womanizer.
But I don't want to say
it was kind of expected in the... in that industry
'cause, you know, everybody was.
-But for many wrestling fans,
Vince's alleged abhorrent personal behavior
proves less concerning than his apparent willingness
to exploit the tragic deaths of his wrestlers,
beginning with Eddie Guerrero.
-Wrestling fans, of course, all know who Eddie Guerrero is.
He's considered as one of the absolute best wrestlers
of all time.
-When Eddie dies tragically at 38 from a heart condition,
Vince McMahon immediately organizes a tribute show.
-Eddie Guerrero has passed away.
-But months later, Vince sees an opportunity
to generate some heat off Eddie's death,
and authorizes wrestler Randy Orton
to trash Eddie's memory.
-Let me tell you something, bro.
Eddie ain't in Heaven.
[ Crowd boos ]
Eddie's down there... in Hell!
-Some fans are furious at the idea
that Vince would exploit Eddie's death
in a naked grab for TV ratings.
Nearly two years later, everyone will be shocked at Vince's
"fire, ready, aim" response to another tragic event,
one that will leave folks openly questioning if Vince cares
at all about the health and safety of wrestlers in the WWE.
-If you're a wrestling fan,
how could you not be a fan of Chris Benoit's work?
-In June 2007, Benoit is scheduled to perform in Texas,
but no one's heard from him.
So just hours before the show,
police are dispatched to Benoit's house,
where they discover the bodies of Chris,
his wife, Nancy, and young son, Daniel.
-At this time, no one knew what happened.
Did someone break in? Did carbon monoxide happen?
No one has answers.
-Police notify the extended Benoit family,
while inside the arena,
word spreads quickly among the wrestlers
about what happened to Chris and his family.
-Vince McMahon, the chairman of the board,
couldn't go on the air and not do anything.
So we went on the air and did what we thought was right.
-Tonight, this arena here in Corpus Christi, Texas,
was to have been filled to capacity...
with enthusiastic WWE fans.
-We tried to honor the guy, we tried to honor his family,
we tried to honor his fans, but we didn't have a full story.
-So tonight will be a three-hour tribute
to one of the greatest WWE superstars of all time.
-Vince is premature in the tribute,
because not long after calling him one of the greatest,
the real story comes out.
-Right now, it's being investigated
as a murder-suicide.
However, until we get the crime lab reports,
it's undetermined exactly what happened.
-On Friday evening,
it appears that there was some sort of altercation
between Chris and Nancy,
that Chris restrained Nancy with duct tape
and then utilized a telephone cord to strangle her
and then placed a Bible next to her body.
Next morning, on Saturday,
Chris, we assume, gave his son Daniel Xanax,
and then murdered him in his room,
being suffocated by his father.
A Bible was then placed next to Daniel as well.
On Sunday, Chris then went down to his home gym
with a half drunken bottle of wine,
he wrapped a towel around his neck,
and he took the metal cord from the lat pulldown machine
and put it around his neck.
He adjusted the weights to 240 pounds,
and then he released it.
-We did not know all the information.
That's our fault.
We were trying to serve the audience.
It was a major story,
it was hitting all the news sources,
and we had a TV show.
-Vince attempts damage control for his decision
to publicly canonize Benoit.
-Last night on "Monday Night Raw",
the WWE presented a special tribute show
recognizing the career of Chris Benoit.
However, now, some 26 hours later,
the facts of this horrific tragedy are now apparent.
Therefore, other than my comments,
there will be no mention of Mr. Benoit's name tonight.
-But soon, the story shifts away from Vince's
ill-advised statement following the murder-suicide
and to the more damning question of the role wrestling itself
played in the deaths of the Benoit family.
-Speculation is running wild.
Did steroids play a role, or is there another explanation?
We have an exclusive interview with WWE chairman Vince McMahon.
-WWE did everything they could to combat any coverage
in the news media that indicated that drug abuse or steroid abuse
was the cause of the homicides.
-And obviously, this was not an act of rage.
It's an act of deliberation.
When you do something like this over three days,
it's not an act of rage, be it steroid rage or roid rage,
whatever it's called, or any other rage.
-In his autopsy, Chris Benoit was shown
to have enormous amounts of testosterone in his body.
Testosterone is still a steroid that's banned
in all major sports.
-Despite a wellness program
Vince set up to monitor his wrestlers for drugs,
critics say the system he created too often failed.
-Preposterously, Chris Benoit passed the wellness checks
leading up to the murder, despite the irrefutable fact
he was taking enormous amounts of steroids.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-But neuroscientist and former wrestler Chris Nowinski
has a hunch that Chris's behavior was informed
by a little understood condition
that is also adversely affecting some football players... CTE.
-Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE,
is a progressive, degenerative brain disease
that appears to be started by hits to the head.
-Oh, my God!
-With Chris, he actually had what would be defined as
a severe case of CTE at 40 years old.
-Three years after the shocking murders,
Vince is finally forced to address the appalling policy
surrounding his wrestlers' health and safety.
After a thorough review,
the WWF permanently bans all chair shots to the head.
But like the NFL, violence in pro wrestling
has never been a bug, but a feature.
So, it's a problem
Vince McMahon has never been anxious to move center stage,
especially back when his company embarked on a move
that would transform the WWF
while helping set the stage for Vince's ultimate demise.
-The seeds of Vince McMahon's downfall
were planted back in the late '90s.
Despite being rocked by a series of personal
and professional scandals
that might have taken down other businesses,
Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation
was a cash-printing financial juggernaut,
so Vince decided his company needed to go to the place
where that kind of success is rewarded...
Wall Street.
[ Cheering ]
-[ Yelling indistinctly ]
-WWF in 1999 was having its hottest period of business ever,
even hotter than the hot run with Hogan
in the mid-'80s.
Vince liked the idea of being a stock that you could trade
in the New York Stock Exchange.
-With an eye towards this initial public offering,
from 1998 to 1999,
Vince went to work, doubling the WWF's revenue
to over $250 million.
-He made huge money.
And so, just like that, Vince is a billionaire.
-But with great power comes great responsibility,
or maybe just greater oversight.
-The WWF... It had to be more above board.
It couldn't be the secret company with the secret moneys
and the, you know, payoff.
Your finances had to be a lot more transparent.
-The IPO for WWF put the final nail
in the coffin of defeating WCW.
-WCW was still relying on Hulk Hogan
and Randy Savage and Roddy Piper,
and didn't realized that in wrestling,
everybody has a shelf life.
There was nothing they could do to stop Steve Austin
and The Rock from getting this young audience back in.
-From 1997 to 2000,
WCW went from making $125 million a year
to losing $65 million a year.
That's a lot of mistakes.
-Vince blew them away very quickly.
-The major concern was just putting them out of business,
was just eliminating them from competition.
-And at the end of the day,
Vince bought World Championship Wrestling
for essentially, you know, $2.5 million, $4 million.
It's inconceivable.
- "Nitro" had its last episode in March 2001.
-Here I am on WCW Television.
-When Vince bought WCW,
they kicked it off by this almost surreal angle.
-It was just a matter of time before I, Vince McMahon,
bought my competition.
-And actually, he appeared on "Nitro".
-That's right.
I own WCW.
-I don't know if anybody else could have done
what Vince did without being as cutthroat as he was.
He was tunnel vision on "I will build this.
I will see success."
-He wasn't going to allow himself to fail.
-By the early 2000s,
Vince essentially owns all professional wrestling,
or at least the kind of professional wrestling
you can watch on mainstream TV.
While that will be good for his investors,
it will leave many fans wondering what happened
to the WWF they loved in the '90s.
-There were a lot of people internally,
particularly marketing people,
they wanted to have a family friendly product again
that was more maybe advertising friendly, sponsor friendly.
They wanted to be able to sell merchandise to children,
which they had stopped doing.
-They don't want to sponsor a show
where this dude hit this other guy
in the head 12 times with a chair,
he's bleeding everywhere, blah, blah, blah.
-You can't have the half-naked women.
We can't have story lines involving porn stars
and that kind of thing.
-There is a sentiment from the audience, "This is too tame.
It's not wild enough.
Bring back the Attitude Era."
-A lot of fans blamed it for the declining popularity of WWE.
-WWE sucks.
I have watched the slow and steady
regression of this company.
-From 2001 to 2022,
the ratings have gone down every single year.
-Sometimes, you sacrifice popularity for money,
and... and WWE... WWE's done that in many decisions
that it's made in recent years.
-Even though the audience declined,
they have become a more profitable company
than they ever were before.
They are, at this stage of the game,
getting the majority of their revenue from TV rights fees,
where you have Fox or you have Comcast NBCUniversal
that are paying large amounts of money,
totaling in billions to get this programming on the air.
I don't think that these media giants
would be as quick to do business
if you were back in the Attitude Era,
where you had an elderly female wrestler
giving birth to a hand on television.
-A hand?
-So, despite the grumblings from longtime WWE fans,
Vince is making more money than ever,
and that's when, according to some experts,
he starts getting lazy.
-He had the monopoly.
He's making billions of dollars.
He's got a contract with Fox.
He's got a contract with USA.
He's getting millions of dollars,
whether the product is good or bad,
and I-I really think from that point forward, man,
I think he just coasted.
-Nowadays, it's kind of this stagnant, stale, sterile style
that's kind of lame and uninspiring.
The fan base has dwindled.
-And Bruce Hart attributes that to Vince
getting everything he wanted
when he took over his father's territory.
-Ultimately, it's been one of the worst things
that ever happened to the business.
It's kind of destroyed the grassroots of the business.
Back in the day, there was all these different styles.
You know, Calgary had a unique style,
and San Francisco had a style.
Charlotte, North Carolina, had certain style varieties,
the spice of life,
and that was the case with wrestling.
-And fan satisfaction is at an all-time low.
-Dude, I can't watch the show.
It's too long. It doesn't make sense.
-Absolute torture for me.
I would rather be watching ballet, bocce, darts,
anything but this show.
-$2.3 billion television deal over five years.
You can write the worst show ever,
you're gonna be fine.
-And in his mind, this is still the end all, be all,
the greatest show out there.
That... That's how delusional he is.
-But he's about to get snapped back to reality.
-The billionaire CEO and primary shareholder
of World Wrestling Entertainment
stepping back temporarily
from his leadership roles within the company.
-In July of 2022,
the Houdini of professional sports finds himself
trapped by past misdeeds from which he cannot escape.
-The former WWE chief executive, Vince McMahon,
paid hush money to four women to cover up allegations
of sexual misconduct and infidelity.
-Vince McMahon has agreed to pay four women over $12 million
over the past 16 years to keep quiet
about allegations of sexual misconduct.
-That's according to "The Wall Street Journal".
-Vince had a number of payouts to various women over the years.
-Payouts he expected to remain secret
by using non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.
-There were a total of at least four NDAs
that "The Wall Street Journal" reported on.
A former paralegal, a former contractor,
a former WWE talent, a former manager.
-Apparently, one agreement included a 2006 pact,
and that involved a former manager
who he allegedly initiated an intimate relationship with,
and paid her $1 million to keep quiet about it.
-Reportedly, he wired money from his personal accounts
to pay for the NDAs.
-I think within the world of wrestling
and certainly within the company, everybody knew.
Yes. But I mean, as far as wrestling fans know,
they didn't know.
-And for those in the audience long entertained
by the evil Mr. McMahon character,
the new accusations sound like business as usual in the WWE.
-The first story in "The Wall Street Journal"
about these allegations came out,
and next thing you know,
Vince is strutting out on "SmackDown".
-Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Mr. McMahon!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-I'm here to simply remind you of the four words we just saw
and what we call the WWE signature.
Those four words are "Then", "Now", "Forever",
and the most important word is "Together".
-Everybody cheers "Yeah!"
Goes about his day like nothing had happened.
That was his response to that first
"Wall Street Journal" story.
-Vince eventually claims that he never did anything wrong
and points to clauses in the settlement agreement,
specifically disavowing any wrongdoing.
But unlike with his other indiscretions and misdeeds,
McMahon quickly discovers he can't just turn these charges
into part of the show.
-This is a publicly traded company.
These are SEC violations.
-And that has apparently led to the Department of Justice
and the SEC making their own inquiries.
-The billionaire CEO and primary shareholder
of World Wrestling Entertainment
stepping back temporarily from his leadership roles
within the company.
-And then another story broke.
That one was talking about coercing a woman...
You know, paying a woman $7.5 million
and coercing her to have sex through his power.
And then when she stopped having sex with him, he demoted her.
And I read this and it was just like,
I don't know that he can survive this.
-Nobody has said one time, "I am innocent.
I did not do that."
-If you write something about Vince that is negative to him,
he goes after you right away.
I thought, "Vince and his lawyers
are gonna go after those writers."
He did not touch them.
And I go, "Oh, my God, it's all true."
-The... The silence is just absolutely deafening
because that's not Vince, not when he's not guilty.
-The accumulation of all the things
that occurred over the years,
whether you want to call it karma
or whatever you want to call it,
they... they did finally catch up with him.
-And at least one person
essential to Vince McMahon's success has jumped ship...
Linda McMahon.
-Well, you have to remember that Vince and Linda,
they really built it together.
So there was that sense of even though all these things
are happening to our marriage and these scandals,
and Vince himself has admitted many times
that he was certainly a lot less than faithful to Linda,
they continued on, and I think part of it was
because of this empire that they had built together.
-They've been separated for quite some time.
I-I was told this around 2012,
but again, we get back to wrestling.
Everything's a secret.
-Well, now it looks twice as bad for Vince
because now it looks like he was cheating on his wife
when the reality was they weren't together.
-But now her involvement with the company is nil.
-Are you concerned at all about the investigation,
the hush money?
-Come on. Come on.
I told you I was here to talk about AFPI.
-And after 40 years at the helm of WWE,
Vince McMahon steps down, using those same four words
he delivered defiantly to his fans just days earlier.
He sent out a tweet.
-Earlier tonight,
my father,
Vince McMahon,
retired from WWE.
[ Crowd booing ]
-I don't think anybody would have ever said
that Vince McMahon would have ever stepped down.
-The idea that Vince is gone...
It was bizarre because everybody figured
that he was gonna do this until he died.
-The WWE is his life.
-And of course, it's wrestling,
so a lot of fans believed, eh, he'll be back,
or he's not really gone.
-I'm sure wherever he's hunkered down,
he is doing as much WWE work as he can get away with.
-It's a complicated ending
for the most divisive figure in sports entertainment.
-Obviously, he was extremely flawed,
but as a businessman,
as a wrestling promoter...
fantastic.
-I think he'll be remembered as the most dominant
wrestling promoter there ever was.
-And to his daughter, now left to manage the WWE,
he remains a man worthy of admiration.
-Thank you, Vince. Thank you, Vince.
[ Crowd chanting "Thank you, Vince" ]
-The bad of Vince McMahon is what he did to get there,
the bodies that were left in the wake for one reason or another.
We're slowly cleaning up this mess that Vince had left,
and the show is improving dramatically.
There was concern that stock price was gonna plummet.
Vince McMahon, the only guy that can make wrestling work
in this country, is gone,
and instead, he is gone and it's actually doing better now
than it was doing before he left.
-To me, it's really all about money and power.
When you reach a certain status
and when you reach a certain level,
I do believe you believe you are bulletproof.
How could you have done these things
without the fear of it coming out?
You honestly thought these women were gonna sign a piece of paper
and you were just gonna get off scot-free?
-When Vince McMahon dies, he did not want the tombstone to say,
"Vince McMahon, world's greatest wrestling promoter."
Vince wanted to be that guy who had a movie studio,
who promoted boxing,
who ran the rival football league to the NFL.
That's the guy he wanted to be.
And at the end of the day, he tried in all those places,
and he failed everywhere, except one.
-Would I call him an evil person?
I would not.
I would call him a complicated person
who was enabled by an industry
that allows people with a dark side
to entertain that dark side with impunity.
-And in the end, his legacy is that he was
a... a guy with a lot of money,
and he thought he was above it all, and he wasn't.
-I really believe it's the tip of the iceberg.
It's the carny business.
And what happens in wrestling stays in wrestling,
but all it takes is one person,
and then those floodgates open.
So, I-I... unfortunately, I just think you're gonna see more.