Sex trafficking lawsuit against WWE and Vince McMahon heads to arbitration

(CN) — A bombshell civil sex trafficking lawsuit against longtime WWE frontman Vince McMahon won’t head to trial after the parties agreed to resolve the matter outside of court.

Former WWE employee Janel Grant brought the sweeping lawsuit against McMahon in early 2024, accusing him of a “sordid” sex abuse campaign involving forced threesomes and human feces. She claims McMahon pressured her into having sex with him on numerous occasions and trafficked her to other employees at the company — including wrestling superstar Brock Lesnar.

But late Monday night, both parties reached an agreement to bring the case to arbitration, dismissing Grant’s federal lawsuit in Connecticut and handling the dispute behind closed doors.

“Pursuant to that agreement, within five business days, plaintiff shall execute and cause to be filed a stipulation of voluntary dismissal with prejudice causing the action to be dismissed in its entirety, as to both remaining defendants, but without prejudice to the parties’ rights to pursue their claims and defenses in arbitration,” lawyers for Grant, McMahon and WWE wrote in a joint status report filed late Monday night.

McMahon had long pushed to move the case out of the public eye, citing an arbitration agreement in Grant’s nondisclosure agreement. Last month, a federal judge in Connecticut greenlit the move to arbitration and urged the parties to reach an agreement on the next steps of the case.

WWE, its parent company TKO and lawyers for Grant and McMahon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the new development.

In her initial 2024 complaint, Grant made a number of shocking accusations that rocked the pro wrestling world and led to McMahon taking a step back from his leadership role at WWE. Grant claimed she was offered a job with WWE’s legal department in 2019 after the death of her parents.

“But what seemed like a dream in the spring of 2019 quickly became a nightmare,” she wrote in the 67-page complaint.

Shortly after taking the job, Grant said McMahon, then the company’s CEO and majority owner, “pushed Ms. Grant for a physical relationship” in exchange for the promise of future employment at the company.

“As McMahon dangled career-making and life-changing promises in front of Ms. Grant, he demonstrated an increasing lack of boundaries,” Grant claimed in the suit. “During several meetings that were ostensibly about a potential job at WWE, he greeted her in his underwear, touched her, repeatedly asked for hugs and spent hours sharing intimate details about his personal life.”

Grant claimed McMahon pressured her into sex on numerous occasions, which she came to understand as being conditional to her employment.

But that was just the beginning, she said.

“She had no idea how sordid it would become, nor how the psychological torture and physical violence would leave her feeling helpless, isolated and trapped,” she wrote.

Just months into her employment, Grant said McMahon started sharing sexually explicit photographs and videos of her with other employees at the company.

Grant said McMahon also arranged for her to have sex with other employees, including WWE’s former head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, who was initially a co-defendant in the suit but has since been dismissed. She accused both men of cornering her in a WWE office in 2021 and sexually assaulting her.

“She begged them to stop, but they forced themselves on her, each taking turns restraining her for the other, while saying ‘No means yes’ and ‘Take it, bitch,’” Grant claimed.

In another example of “McMahon’s extreme depravity,” Grant said McMahon defecated on her during a threesome in 2020 and then “commanded her to continue pleasuring his ‘friend’ — with feces in her hair and running down her back — while McMahon went to the bathroom to shower off.”

Grant added that McMahon used her as a “sexual pawn to entice world-famous wrestling talent,” including Lesnar, who supposedly sent her pictures of his genitals and directed her to send a video of herself urinating. Lesnar tried to meet Grant in person, she claimed, but she was able to use the snowstorm and the Covid-19 pandemic as “an excuse to back out.”

McMahon has long denied Grant’s accusation that their relationship was not consensual, claiming in past statements that her lawsuit was “baseless,” “replete with lies” and a “vindictive distortion of the truth.”

The longtime CEO nonetheless stepped down from WWE in 2022 amid the claims. He returned as a board member a year later to help facilitate the company’s merger with the UFC.

Grant’s lawsuit was iced for several months at the request of the Department of Justice, which launched a criminal investigation against McMahon at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency. That probe was dropped after Donald Trump took back the White House in 2025, resulting in no charges filed.

Trump and McMahon have been friends and business associates since the 1980s. Trump has appeared in and hosted WWE events, and McMahon has been a significant donor to Trump’s political ambitions. McMahon’s wife, Linda McMahon, served in Trump’s first-term cabinet as the head of the Small Business Administration, and is currently the secretary of education.

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