Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit against former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, former WWE executive John Laurinaitis & WWE itself, and sworn statements from the late Ashley Massaro that have been released since that suit was filed describe a culture of sexual harassment & abuse at the company.
Two recent interviews with people who worked for WWE (then the WWF) in the 1980s indicate that’s been an issue at the company since not long after McMahon bought the promotion from his father more than 50 years ago.
Both deal at least in part with the ‘ring boy scandal’ of the early 1990s, which involved accusations that ring announcer Mel Phillips and former wrestler-turned vice-president of operations Terry Garvin sexually abused teen boys who Phillips recruited for work setting up at shows and running errands. Tom Cole went public with his story of abuse in 1992, two years after he said he was fired following an incident where he turned down a sexual proposition at Garvin’s home.
Cole’s story prompted nationwide media coverage of his accusations. Phillips and Garvin left the company and didn’t return. Pat Patterson resigned after being implicated in the scandal, but maintained his innocence and soon returned with Cole’s blessing. Vince McMahon admitted at this time that he’d fired Phillips in 1988 because his relationship with children appeared “peculiar” and “unnatural”, but was later rehired on the condition he “steer clear from kids.”
For more in-depth coverage of the ring boy scandal, see Abraham Josephine Riesman’s book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America (an excerpt on Cole & the scandal can be found here) and David Bixenspan’s reporting for Business Insider.
Cole died by suicide in 2021 at the age of 50. His brother Lee has continued to pursue justice on Tom’s behalf, and last night (Feb. 19) posted an interview he conducted with another former ring boy named Shawn.
Shawn says that he believes Tom Cole’s story, as he had similar experiences with Phillips. He describes road trips where he and other young men would share a hotel room with the ring announcer, who would pretend to wrestle them with a focus on their feet, with which Phillips had a fetish. Shawn said many of the ring crew recruits “came from broken type homes. We were all pretty much — we had similar backgrounds.”
He described his interactions with Phillips by saying:
“There are like two Mels. There is the Mel Phillips that is the ring announcer that took you to the shows, fed you, gave you money. Then there is the behind the scenes Mel that, once the hotel door room shuts, it’s a little different.”
While he didn’t have as many dealings with Garvin, Shawn described why the former wrestler gave him “the creeps”:
“I only ran into Terry Garvin a few times. It depended on where you were. Terry Garvin was a pretty big, for me — a bigger man. He came off friendly, but then, he gave me the creeps. I just felt nervous around him. Put his arm on your shoulder, ‘Hey, how are you? So, you want to get into wrestling?’ ‘I like it. I’m too small to be a wrestler.’ I just had bad vibes with him. It gave me a bad vibe because of my background [in foster care and homes].
“Now you’re feeling, ‘If you ever want to…’ ‘I don’t know if I want to do that’. There is a difference where Mel didn’t do that. One is more aggressive than the other. I felt like, ‘Hey, I can help you,’ but it felt like there was something else and he wasn’t going to do it just for himself. That’s just the vibe that came off him, but I didn’t see him that much.”
He also saw signs that Phillips behavior was an open secret at WWE:
“I was kind of warned by a wrestler, later towards the time I was getting ready to leave [in Aug. 1987]. I can’t remember exactly who told me. It was, ‘Be careful. Be careful who you’re with.’ Then, come to find out, later in life, every body knew Mel had this fetish. To me, if all the wrestlers knew, who else knew that he had this fetish?
“I do remember when I was with somebody else, we were at the show, and someone had talked to Mel about having all these boys around. I didn’t really think, ‘What’s going on?’ Someone talked to Mel about it, though.”
The idea that WWE officials occasionally told Phillips to be more discreet about or stop what he was doing with the ring boys is also supported by former wrestler Paul Roma’s interview with NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield. Roma was a WWE talent from 1984-1991, and when asked by Banfield if the accusations in Grant’s case sounded like the Vince McMahon he knew, he replied:
“It was pretty regular, you heard it on a regular basis for the most part. Then you wouldn’t hear it for a while. Then it would come full circle. But it wasn’t so much Vince as it was the people that he had surrounding him.
Roma goes on to describe a “casting couch” for male wrestlers that he alleges existed in the company during his time there:
“You’re talking about an industry where you have young, good looking, well-built men in the ring. Half naked — three quarters naked actually. It left the door open. He had a lot of people around him, vice-presidents and bookers that were very much into that, and they put you in a really bad situation especially once you start making some money and you kind of get comfortable with that, and then you find out that your job’s on the line. Either do it or get fired. I witnessed quite a few that walked away, the money wasn’t worth it for them to go that route, so to speak.”
Banfield asked Roma to clarify what male wrestlers were asked to do, and he responded:
“They were asked to do things — sexual things — with other men, that they did not want to do. My former partner being one of them. I was actually in a cab ride in Washington, and we were coming back. The gentleman next to me kept saying it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the Benjamins… The next day we were filming for our second TV taping and he was gone. He jumped on a flight and went back home and never showed up again to wrestle.”
He does not specify the identity of the tag partner he’s referring to (Roma teamed with several different people during his time in the then-WWF, most famously Jim Powers and Ray “Hercules” Hernandez). He did explain to Banfield why he feels the harassment and propositioning had to come from executives or powerful people at the company:
“That’s all it could be. If somebody is going to give you money, it has to be that. There is nothing else. It’s not going to be one of the boys that you’re wrestling with. They’re not going to offer you money.
“Even my former partner. They offered him money, drugs. ‘Just lay on your back you don’t have to do a thing.’”
When his partner went to a higher up about the advances, Roma said he knew it was bad for them professionally:
“And I say ‘Well why would you do that? You just killed our team. What do you think he’s going to do? He’s going to go to the people who propositioned you. And what do you think is gonna happen to them — nothing.’”
Banfield brought up an interview she conducted with an enhancement wrestler from that era, Mario Mancini, who claims to know of an incident from years ago “that’s even worse than some of the allegations in Janel Grant’s lawsuit”. Roma is familiar with the incident Mancini referenced, but wouldn’t get into specifics. He said:
“I really shouldn’t right now but yes, I do know what it is and it is worse… Mario and I are really surprised. We spoke about it. We’re surprised that no one has come forward but on the flip side, I think they’re of an age now they may be married and have kids and they don’t want to open Pandora’s box. I can’t blame them.”
You can watch Lee Cole’s interview with Shawn here, and Ashleigh Banfield’s with Paul Roma here.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, confidential support is available by calling 800.656.HOPE, and links to other resources can be found here.
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