True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 116: The Ring Leader
Aired: 2020-11-12
Duration: 01:33:32


=== Wrestling Concieits Explained (09:07) ===

[00:00:00]  Liz, if you were a wrestler, what would your conceit be?
[00:00:05]  What would your theme be?
[00:00:08]  My theme?
[00:00:09]  Yeah.
[00:00:12]  This is such a hard question.
[00:00:14]  Okay, well, I can give you some tips.
[00:00:17]  There's like a few different ones that women can do.
[00:00:19]  I think one is like you.
[00:00:22]  Yeah, well, what am I?
[00:00:24]  I'm not like in actual wrestling.
[00:00:25]  I'm not saying I'm sure women could do anyone they wanted, but there's a kind of there's like the evil one, and then there's like the good one, and then there's like the like, I don't know what I'm doing here.
[00:00:34]  Kind of one.
[00:00:35]  I think I should do a what am I doing here one.
[00:00:38]  Yeah, like you'd be like a like a ref.
[00:00:41]  I would be a podcasting wrestler.
[00:00:45]  Mistress Caster?
[00:00:49]  Like you go in there and like you like your movies, you slap, you cup someone's ears.
[00:00:54]  Do they have like a okay, I'm gonna regret asking this and I don't mean this in relation to myself, but I'm just curious.
[00:00:59]  Have they done an e-girl wrestler yet?
[00:01:03]  Like is there like a Twitch stream or e-girl like elf like purple hair?
[00:01:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:10]  I don't know.
[00:01:10]  A lot of Twitch streamers kind of look like professional wrestlers already.
[00:01:14]  So it's like you could kind of, I mean, it's kind of a chicken and the egg situation, but like a pure e-girl wrestler, I don't think so.
[00:01:20]  I think you could do it.
[00:01:22]  I was talking to, and I want to give a shout out real quick to Rachel Millman, Friend of the Pod, who I was talking to earlier about, she was wrestle explaining some stuff to me, which is the name of her podcast.
[00:01:35]  But she was telling me about one storyline that was like about kind of like based on Occupy.
[00:01:40]  I thought that was very charming.
[00:01:42]  Where it was like the guy like jumped in the ring and it was like some movement and he got everyone in there.
[00:01:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:49]  You know, I love it.
[00:01:50]  I love a topical moment.
[00:01:53]  Yeah, I was, well, you know, I briefly wrestled as part of a crew called Whack Block and it was like an urban black block kind of thing.
[00:02:00]  And unfortunately, it was on Saudi television.
[00:02:05]  And that ended up not going over very well.
[00:02:08]  I guess they don't have either the word whack or black block in Saudi Arabia.
[00:02:12]  And so people were really not receptive to it.
[00:02:14]  And thank God that now no one will be able to see it here.
[00:02:18]  Exactly.
[00:02:19]  I did eventually go as one called The Vile Jew, but it was just a guy named J-O-O.
[00:02:27]  It was not like, I wasn't Jewish in it.
[00:02:30]  in fact i got in a lot of trouble because they made me be uh uh irish catholic
[00:02:46]  remember when i try to do like it's a long time listeners will remember when i try to do cha-ching sound like the cash register sound Oh my god.
[00:03:11]  It's like it made no sense.
[00:03:15]  I think, no, I think it was because I emphasized the cha-cha part.
[00:03:19]  Like, I don't know why, but I used to work.
[00:03:22]  I used to, I used to work somewhere where the register made like a fucked up noise by that.
[00:03:25]  So I think I'm just.
[00:03:26]  Oh my god, it's so bad.
[00:03:28]  Yeah.
[00:03:29]  Anyway, hello.
[00:03:30]  Welcome.
[00:03:30]  It's true, not.
[00:03:32]  Is it?
[00:03:35]  I'm going to try to go real quick.
[00:03:36]  Okay.
[00:03:37]  Okay.
[00:03:37]  Yeah.
[00:03:37]  Let's do it.
[00:03:38]  Hey, hi.
[00:03:38]  Hey.
[00:03:40]  Hi.
[00:03:40]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:42]  My name is Brace.
[00:03:43]  And we're joined by producer Young Johnson.
[00:03:46]  I don't know what you're doing.
[00:03:47]  What is this?
[00:03:48]  I'm being flirty.
[00:03:49]  I'm being flirty.
[00:03:51]  Is this it?
[00:03:52]  This is it.
[00:03:53]  Yeah, you got to go to Girls of the Bar.
[00:03:55]  Like, hey, I'm Brace.
[00:03:59]  This is my producer.
[00:04:00]  This is the co-host.
[00:04:01]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:02]  This is awful.
[00:04:04]  You always got to bring a male friend and a woman with you to talk to a girl.
[00:04:08]  Okay, so what are we talking about today?
[00:04:10]  We're talking about wrestling.
[00:04:14]  I was going to say wrestling, but after hearing about Vince McMahon's fucking anti-Southern biases, I guess I wouldn't say wrestling.
[00:04:22]  Southern?
[00:04:23]  Southern.
[00:04:24]  You don't know Southern?
[00:04:27]  Do you not know Southran?
[00:04:28]  Southern is what they call it down there.
[00:04:29]  They call it the Southren, the South.
[00:04:32]  They call it the Southern area of America.
[00:04:35]  Southern's a thing.
[00:04:37]  I'm serious.
[00:04:37]  It's a Southern.
[00:04:38]  They say Southern.
[00:04:39]  Okay, so we're talking about the WWE, which used to be called the WWF.
[00:04:44]  That's something I learned.
[00:04:46]  I remember because there was the Panda World Wildlife Fund and they made him change the fucking name.
[00:04:53]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:54]  That was a great Panda logo.
[00:04:57]  I think those guys also employ like death squads too.
[00:05:00]  WWF.
[00:05:01]  Yeah.
[00:05:02]  It's probably something terrible.
[00:05:06]  But yeah, we're getting into a bunch of stuff I didn't know about.
[00:05:11]  I'll just put that out there.
[00:05:12]  But it's pretty well covered up, it seems like.
[00:05:16]  Cases of sexual abuse and, you know, molestation and other kinds of abuse in the WWE.
[00:05:26]  Also, the very weird Nexus of the McMahons, the Trumps, and a bunch of other very odd characters.
[00:05:36]  I don't know.
[00:05:36]  We get into a whole bunch of stuff in this episode.
[00:05:39]  It's a real freak show.
[00:05:40]  Yeah.
[00:05:41]  I want to say, like, when I was talking to Rachel earlier about stuff, she said something that like really stuck with me.
[00:05:48]  Where she, because I literally did ask her, I was like, wait, is it fake?
[00:05:53]  That's a little idea.
[00:05:55]  Liz texted me that earlier.
[00:05:57]  I was like, that's very, I found that very charming.
[00:06:00]  What do you mean?
[00:06:01]  I wasn't sure.
[00:06:02]  Anyway, okay.
[00:06:03]  It's not, it's not fake.
[00:06:05]  Boxing's fake.
[00:06:06]  You know, I get them confused.
[00:06:08]  I'm not going to lie.
[00:06:11]  But this is what she said to me when she was kind of explaining stuff.
[00:06:14]  And she said, the ending's scripted, but the hits are real, if that makes sense.
[00:06:19]  And for some reason, this like struck me as very sad in light of what we're about to talk about.
[00:06:25]  Like an entire industry that kind of is like predicated on all this stuff being kind of fake and scripted.
[00:06:31]  And everyone, you know, we didn't even get into the labor stuff, which is, you know, we could probably do a lot of episodes on the WWE and CTE and all that crap.
[00:06:41]  But, but like, there's something real heartbreaking about the kind of like desire to be part of this community.
[00:06:50]  And it's like scripted and it feels like you're all kind of part of this.
[00:06:53]  And like all of that is like kind of fake and scripted and taken care of.
[00:06:56]  But like the abuse that you suffer and the physical, like, you know, the hits and the bruises and the torn muscles and the broken whatever and the fucking sometimes like, you know, your entire life, like that shit is real as fuck.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:12]  And like that contradiction really stuck with me.
[00:07:17]  So I don't know.
[00:07:19]  Maybe we kind of touch on some of that in this.
[00:07:22]  Yeah, I think it's a good episode.
[00:07:23]  Let's crank her up.
[00:07:44]  I'm up on the ropes.
[00:07:47]  A cheering crowd surrounds me.
[00:07:49]  Thousands of shirtless men.
[00:07:53]  Women wearing several shirts for some reason, often double XL.
[00:07:57]  Cheering.
[00:07:58]  Do it, Brace.
[00:07:59]  Do it.
[00:08:00]  I look down on the ground in front of me on the mat.
[00:08:03]  A broken man.
[00:08:05]  I leap.
[00:08:06]  My arms stretched out.
[00:08:09]  And I get to the fetal position because you know what?
[00:08:13]  I'm not cut out to be a professional wrestler, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:08:16]  I am cut out to be a podcaster.
[00:08:17]  And today on my podcast, or on our podcast, rather, we have David Bixinspan.
[00:08:24]  Well, at the time, I didn't mean to say that.
[00:08:26]  We've got David Bixinspan joining me and Liz and of course Young Shopsky, a journalist and podcaster himself.
[00:08:33]  It's at David Bix on Twitter to talk about, well, I would say this is an intersectional array of some of the topics that we cover on this show, such as foot fetish, people working for Donald Trump, very, very wrinkly women, pedophilia, and a billion-dollar enterprise, the WWE David Bixinspan.
[00:08:58]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:09:00]  Thank you for having me.
[00:09:01]  You also forgot to mention negligently killing one of your employees because you wanted to save a few seconds of TV time.
[00:09:07]  Yeah.

=== Wwe's Vitamin Gambit (02:41) ===

[00:09:08]  And massive labor violations and covering up CT and tons and tons of abuse and injury.
[00:09:18]  Yeah.
[00:09:18]  Also a fake car bomb to pretend to kill the CEO of your corporation.
[00:09:26]  So we are talking today about, well, about a broad range of things.
[00:09:32]  But specifically, you recently wrote a story about a couple of ringboys, Tom Cole and Chris Loss, and sort of what they went through in the 1990s, I guess sort of until the present day.
[00:09:44]  But just to kind of set the scene, can you tell us kind of about the milieu of pro wrestling in the 1990s?
[00:09:50]  Okay.
[00:09:51]  So WWE, then the WWF had in the mid 80s taken their company.
[00:10:01]  Well, I should say Vince and Linda McMahon took their company, which had been a Northeast regional company that Vince bought from his dad.
[00:10:09]  And, you know, was because it was in the Northeast and they had Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York and all those places, you know, was the biggest money pro wrestling promotion in the United States and one of the biggest in the world.
[00:10:23]  But at the time, and, you know, for decades, pro wrestling was regionalized.
[00:10:26]  You know, there were all these different offices around the country, very little nationally.
[00:10:30]  Cable TV started to change that, and that kind of got the bull rolling on everything.
[00:10:35]  So in the mid-80s, he takes over.
[00:10:38]  He kind of, when I say he bought it, he was able to do like a very low down payment and then pay the rest out of the massive profits that were already supposed to be coming to the company.
[00:10:52]  But, you know, he kind of gambles, does the first WrestleMania where he rents hundreds of closed-circuit venues, has Mr. T in the main event, teaming with the favorite of many of my friends and colleagues, Hulk Hogan.
[00:11:04]  I feel no pain.
[00:11:05]  I fear no man.
[00:11:07]  And classic.
[00:11:08]  Yes.
[00:11:09]  And it does big business.
[00:11:11]  And from there, they're rolling.
[00:11:14]  But in the meantime, As they're getting bigger and bigger and they become this merchandising and licensing juggernaut, you know, in the early 90s for a brief period, the Hulk Hogan chewable vitamins were the best-selling kids' vitamins in the country.
[00:11:29]  Like all sorts of stuff like this, you know, toy deals with Hasbro, all sorts of stuff.
[00:11:35]  I think I took the Hulk Hogan vitamins like as a kid.
[00:11:40]  I still had those.
[00:11:41]  Weird side note too, my old optometrist back on Long Island was like the president of the Hulk Hogan Vitamin Company.

=== Hulk Hogan's Ring Announcers (06:17) ===

[00:11:49]  And even after it went down in shambles because the steroid scandal popped up in the middle of the peak of the Hulk Hogan vitamins.
[00:11:58]  Wait, is this why Liz is seven foot two?
[00:12:02]  He still had a Polaroid of him and Hogan on his office wall for years and years after.
[00:12:07]  And yes, I should note that the popular joke around the Hulk Hogan vitamins was what?
[00:12:11]  Oral or injectables?
[00:12:13]  Oh, ha ha ha ha.
[00:12:14]  I think mine were chewable.
[00:12:17]  So all of this is going on.
[00:12:18]  And then the steroid scandals break in 1991 because an athletic commission doctor in Pennsylvania had been brazenly openly dealing steroids in locker rooms for years and also by mail order, where he would send to people's homes, sometimes under the real name, sometimes under the wife's name, sometimes under assumed names, like Hulk Hogan, Terry Balea.
[00:12:39]  One of his packages went to Tiny Bolin.
[00:12:43]  Yeah, so kind of the whole Vander Holyfield Evan Fields thing.
[00:12:46]  Yeah, So that's all going on.
[00:12:50]  Hogan goes on Arsenia to try to do damage control.
[00:12:53]  He's supposed to come clean and said he's like, no, I only use steroids three times to heal injuries.
[00:12:58]  And things kind of start to crater there.
[00:13:03]  And the publicity from that leads to Tom Cole, who had worked on the ring crew since he was a young teenager, putting up the ring, taking jackets back to the locker room, all that stuff.
[00:13:17]  He's at the breakfast table with his older brother Lee, who's about 15 years older and kind of his father figure.
[00:13:23]  And Lee asks him as he reads a Phil Mushnick New York Post column about the steroid scandal, what happened with you and that wrestling stuff?
[00:13:32]  And after a little bit, I don't want to talk about it, if I remember right, Tom is like, you don't know the half of it, and reveals that the supervisor of the ring crew, Mel Phillips, who was also a ring announcer, had been molesting him in a foot fetishy way.
[00:13:51]  Okay, so wait, let's pause here for a second.
[00:13:54]  So for our listeners and also like me who knows nothing about wrestling, but learned everything in the last over the last weekend.
[00:14:07]  Can you explain a little bit like who Mel Phillips is?
[00:14:10]  You mentioned he was like announcer, ring guy, but like what the kind of relationship there is with Tom Cole, who's the victim that you're outlining.
[00:14:19]  So, so the whole thing with what they were called calling ringboys, you know, underage kids who were helping put up the ring.
[00:14:27]  Totally not a creepy name, by the way.
[00:14:30]  Yeah.
[00:14:31]  No one knows what that could be.
[00:14:33]  Well, we can get creepier in a moment.
[00:14:36]  But so he's helping put up the ring and there are others too.
[00:14:40]  And the thing is, is that this was something that was an artifact of when wrestling was more regional.
[00:14:45]  That you would have all sorts of teen boys generally, you know, offering to help put up the ring and sometimes getting paid for it as a way to get into wrestling.
[00:14:55]  Because you did that thing back then.
[00:14:57]  It becomes kind of weird and conspicuous when WWF becomes this, you know, massive juggernaut with all these licensing deals and video games and stuff.
[00:15:08]  And yet still it was going on.
[00:15:11]  And like even actually, like, as far as I know, this is just a coincidence related to both COVID bullshit since they're making record profits this year and also possibly panic over Biden winning the election because when Obama won, Vince panicked and laid off a bunch of people because socialism.
[00:15:31]  But they laid off a bunch of people from the live event department that hasn't been used in months last week.
[00:15:36]  And one of them, Tony Chimmel, started working for them, helping to put up the ring in 1983 when he was 15 years old.
[00:15:43]  Okay.
[00:15:43]  And as far as I know, was the longest lasting employee that started as a ringboy in some form.
[00:15:50]  And he had become a ring announcer too and helped more formally on the ring crew, but he just got let go last week.
[00:15:56]  So it was like a real pathway then into the like industry.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, because I mean, them owning the only industry really.
[00:16:04]  Right, right, right.
[00:16:06]  So, you know, and Tom Cole even too, he wanted to be a ring announcer.
[00:16:10]  That was his dream as far as being involved in wrestling.
[00:16:14]  So Mel Phillips was, I would say, the number two on the pecking order of their ring announcers at the time.
[00:16:21]  For anyone who's not familiar with combat sports at all, the ring announcer is the Michael Buffer Jimmy Lennon figure, as opposed to your play-by-play announcer or color commentator or whatever, your traditional sports roles.
[00:16:34]  Which we should say R.I.P. Tummy High Zone, by the way, who just, I just want to throw that in if we're talking about announcers, because it's one of my favorites.
[00:16:44]  A thing, too, I should add here is that I actually have some experience in combat sports ring announcing.
[00:16:50]  As in, I was actually the ring announcer for a string of fights, including one long tournament at a boxing gym I used to work at.
[00:17:00]  And I will tell you, it was the most edifying experience of my life because you could just say whatever the fuck you want about these longheads.
[00:17:07]  They can't beat you up because they got to take it in good humor.
[00:17:10]  It was fantastic, but I loved it.
[00:17:12]  So, yeah, I actually really, when I read that part of the story, I was like, I get it.
[00:17:16]  Being a ring announcer is fucking great because you get to be on stage, but you don't have to do steroids and get CTE.
[00:17:22]  Yes.
[00:17:23]  So, Bel Phillips was kind of the number two ring announcer.
[00:17:26]  And, you know, he'd go on tour, obviously, since he's also helping run one of the ring crews.
[00:17:32]  And at least for a while, I mean, from the beginning of the fall 86 TV season through around March 88, which we'll get to, he was on TV every week in syndication as the ring announcer on their secondary syndicated show.
[00:17:47]  So it's not like he was a nobody too.
[00:17:51]  Was he a massive celebrity?
[00:17:53]  No.
[00:17:54]  But he wasn't a nobody.
[00:17:56]  And he, you know, as is detailed in the article, and there's even more stuff I could tell you about, you know, that just got cut for space and all that.

=== Bel Phillips On TV (15:14) ===

[00:18:06]  Going back to at least the mid-70s, he had shown red flags to various people.
[00:18:12]  My friend John Arezzi, who used to host a wrestling radio show here in New York and had a newsletter and stuff, and has a book coming out soon.
[00:18:22]  He knew Mel Phillips through the wrestling fan club scene going back in the 70s.
[00:18:27]  And they'd have these convention get-togethers, Wrestling Fans International Association.
[00:18:32]  The photo on the article is from the 1975 convention in Boston, a hotel room there.
[00:18:39]  And he met Mel through all that stuff, and, you know, and then also being a photographer at shows and all that.
[00:18:46]  But he started to notice various red flags over the years.
[00:18:50]  Mel acting weird, you know, and keep in mind, Mel is in his mid-20s, John is a teenager at the time.
[00:18:55]  Mel acting weird when he when John got a girlfriend, and then other stuff, though, like Mel coming to visit and starting to always bring a 15-year-old boy who he was taking care of because he's had a hard life.
[00:19:10]  If listeners, a little piece of advice: if any of your friends start showing up with various 15-year-old boys that they say they're taking care of because they've had a hard life, that is absolutely, as our guest has said, a red flag.
[00:19:22]  Yes.
[00:19:23]  In the 70s, when they thought children couldn't form traumatic memories or whatever the hell it was, obviously, though, not necessarily the same.
[00:19:32]  But so there was that, I mean, possibly in a way, well, not quite as disturbing, but in more disturbing in some other ways.
[00:19:42]  He, John also, when he wrote about this back in 92, he talked about how one year Mel comes to celebrate, I think, New Year's Eve with him and brings and shows off the video camera system that he had just gotten in 1975.
[00:20:00]  It was like a monstrosity of a reel-to-reel machine and camera eight years before the first consumer camcorder came out.
[00:20:09]  Yeah.
[00:20:10]  And this was for he wired up his house.
[00:20:15]  No problem.
[00:20:15]  I mean, as best as we can tell, based on allegations later on, to videotape him playing with young boys' feet, if not worse.
[00:20:23]  Yeah, gotcha.
[00:20:25]  So there was that.
[00:20:28]  Later, there would be claims from a couple wrestlers, one who said he was there firsthand that Phillips had been caught forcibly performing oral sex on a young boy in a parking lot in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
[00:20:43]  One of the wrestlers, Bruno San Martino, would testify in his deposition that unfortunately we only have one page of, that while he wasn't there, it was a thing that everyone was talking about at the time.
[00:20:55]  And so this had been a thing.
[00:20:58]  And then even later on, I had tweeted the video.
[00:21:00]  You might even want to share it in the description when the show goes up.
[00:21:05]  You'll have announcers occasionally, not as much as they made jokes about other sexual predators in the company, but you can find, even on the WWE Network streaming service now, you know, there's an episode of Primetime Wrestling from 1989 where just Gorilla Monsoon as the host just shoehorns this.
[00:21:24]  And as Mel Phillips would say, that would knock your socks off joke into his little rapper.
[00:21:29]  So they're making little snarky references to these kind of things as they're happening.
[00:21:33]  That's actually that.
[00:21:35]  I want to put a pin on that for later, too, because there's something else related to Vince McMahon that I found pretty insane.
[00:21:42]  Well, it's basically the same kind of thing.
[00:21:44]  Although, I should note, there is at least one story of him forcibly sucking on an adult man's toe.
[00:21:51]  So it's still like it, so it's possible that the joke wasn't knowingly about child molestation, but was probably knowingly about something untoward, if that makes sense.
[00:22:04]  Yeah, it sounds like people were very aware of at least rumors enough to make jokes about it that would be like little inside jokes, you know?
[00:22:12]  Yeah.
[00:22:12]  So, okay, so we had, we had kind of like flashed forward to Tom Cole, you know, sitting there watching the Hulkan steroid scandal unfold.
[00:22:25]  And at this point, he, what happens?
[00:22:28]  He comes forward with allegations.
[00:22:30]  Yeah, so his older brother Lee says, let's call Phil Mushnik.
[00:22:34]  You know, he's the one in the local newspapers that's talking about this.
[00:22:38]  Let's call him.
[00:22:40]  They do.
[00:22:40]  He gets back to them pretty quickly.
[00:22:44]  He's not who breaks the story per se several months later in early 92.
[00:22:51]  I haven't gotten a completely clear answer that I can remember as to why, but my assumption is that because Mushnik's more of a columnist, he wanted it in the hands of someone who was more of an investigative reporter.
[00:23:03]  So Early March 92, I think it's March 11th, the San Diego Union Tribune has this big story by Jeff Savage, now a children's book author, which I'm sure is much more calming for his soul, talking about this.
[00:23:19]  You know, he talks to Tom Cole, talks also to Chris Lose, who I presume he found through Cole, but I'm not sure.
[00:23:28]  And it's a little weird because there's not much that's direct quotes.
[00:23:34]  And there's a paraphrase that he does of something Tom says that would lead to WWE contesting the molestation claims later, but it's a big deal.
[00:23:44]  And, you know, a few days earlier, Mushdick had also reported, you know, young boy is going to be, or someone who was a young boy at the time would be filing a lawsuit imminently about, you know, child molestation.
[00:23:56]  And then in the next week, all hell breaks loose with multiple TV appearances for Vince McMahon and other people.
[00:24:04]  And, you know, trying to find Tom Cole and try to settle with him.
[00:24:10]  And because they get the settlement done within a week of everything breaking, it kind of puts a lid on the story from really breaking beyond daytime talk shows and tabloid TV shows, New York Tabloid newspapers, and the wrestling newsletter and radio show scene.
[00:24:30]  So, which is why there are a lot of people who, even if they're hardcore wrestling fans, don't really know about this.
[00:24:37]  Yeah, I thought that was, I mean, it seems pretty indicative of Vince McMahon's kind of like general PR strategy is to really get out ahead of this stuff and like get himself out in the spotlight.
[00:24:48]  But like, just to back up a little bit, what exactly was Cole accusing Phillips of?
[00:24:55]  Like, what specific charges was?
[00:24:57]  Because I know he met Phillips when he was really, when he was, I think it was like, you said, I think an article about 15 years old.
[00:25:02]  Phillips is like, oh, yeah, like, you can come, you know, be a ringboy.
[00:25:05]  I'll take you to these shows.
[00:25:06]  And it gets pretty integrated into kind of the WWF at the time, right?
[00:25:12]  System and into the industry there in New York, particularly.
[00:25:16]  But like, what precise charges like does he not criminal charge necessarily, but like, what accusations does he make against Phillips exactly?
[00:25:28]  So according to the complaint that they sent WWE, which was not actually filed as a lawsuit because of the timing of the settlement, but would come out later when WWE and Vince McMahon would sue Phil Mushnick for defamation.
[00:25:42]  Phillips, quote, would frequently caress plaintiffs' feet and would rub them against defendants' own genital area.
[00:25:51]  Yeah, it sounds like a pretty cut and dry molestation there.
[00:25:55]  I mean, I don't really know exactly how else.
[00:25:59]  If you replace foot with hand there, it becomes even a little more glaring.
[00:26:03]  And so, yeah, I know there's one story you tell in the article about, I believe it's Cole calling a wrestler by his real name.
[00:26:11]  No, that was Chris Loes.
[00:26:12]  Oh, okay, never mind.
[00:26:13]  Yeah, Chris Loes calling a wrestler by his real name and Phillips stamping on his foot.
[00:26:18]  Loes complaining that his foot hurt.
[00:26:21]  And then Phillips being like, oh, well, let me just hold it for a little bit then.
[00:26:26]  And then starts rubbing it for several minutes.
[00:26:28]  Well, like.
[00:26:29]  He said it in, so this is from an interview that he gave to Cole's initial lawyer.
[00:26:36]  He says, he says, like, in a weird voice, which I kind of assume to be like a breathery, just generic creeper voice.
[00:26:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:44]  Like, you really shouldn't have used Honky Tonk Man's real name like that.
[00:26:48]  You should have, you should know, know, to show some respect type of stuff.
[00:26:52]  And as it would turn out, and this actually came fairly late in the process, I got hooked up with a past friend of Phillips's.
[00:27:00]  And we should know Mel Phillips died in 2012.
[00:27:02]  No one knew at the time because he had vanished.
[00:27:06]  But according to this old friend of Phillips, who didn't really come to terms with realizing that he did, that he thought that Phillips did what he was accused of until after Phillips died.
[00:27:17]  He told me that he witnessed on two separate occasions, teenagers who were hanging out asking Phillips, is wrestling fake?
[00:27:26]  And then him being like, take your shoe off for a second and wrenching their toes while saying, does that feel fake?
[00:27:34]  And at least one of those times he videotaped it and then later showed it for various friends.
[00:27:43]  Yeah, that is that, well, yeah, I guess that answers that.
[00:27:48]  I don't think that does answer that question.
[00:27:51]  That's, boy.
[00:27:53]  And there's another rumor, too, that's going around at this time that Phillips has a mentally maybe disabled person that he's associated with that other people in the industry called Mrs. Phillips.
[00:28:08]  A boy.
[00:28:10]  So this does not break publicly at the time.
[00:28:14]  I had no idea about this until I got a copy of Phil Mushnick's deposition, which, by the way, I should say, Phil Mushnik, regardless of all the many problematic things he said over the years, has always been in the right, pretty much, especially on this topic.
[00:28:30]  And was very generous with letting me go through his old files and stuff because he had stuff I would not have been able to get my hands on otherwise.
[00:28:38]  This is the wrestling journalist for, I think, well, no, this is the New York Post sports columnist.
[00:28:43]  Oh, sports columnist.
[00:28:44]  And he's not a wrestling guy, but he saw a story that he felt was serious and not being covered well enough, first in the steroid stuff, then this, and stuck to it.
[00:28:56]  And, you know, he stayed on top of it more than others did.
[00:28:59]  And even, you know, once it kind of disappeared, even then, he never really went back to it, though, unfortunately.
[00:29:05]  But like, it, the problem with that, too, is it also kind of hid from people who became fans or into the insider-y stuff later what the original sin was with his distaste for WWE.
[00:29:19]  So later, if he, when he would just talk about like, you know, body and violent content or whatever, you know, it was easy for them to frame him as a fuddy duddy because he wasn't also mentioning, oh, and I think they covered up a child molestation.
[00:29:35]  Yes.
[00:29:37]  So, okay, so his deposition from when they sue him.
[00:29:42]  I'll just read this directly from the article.
[00:29:44]  In his deposition, Mushnick said he had talked to McMahon about other rumored victims of abuse within WWE beyond Cole and Lowe's.
[00:29:50]  He recalled mentioning a specific name to Vince, a teen Mushnick said was referred to within WWE as quote-unquote Mrs. Mel Phillips.
[00:29:57]  As Mushnik remembered it, McMahon responded, quote, that's his guy, but he has his parents' permission, end quote.
[00:30:03]  When asked in the deposition whether he would object to a consensual relationship between Phillips and the teen had he been over 18, Mushnick noted that he had heard the individual, quote, is an intellectually, he's been described to me by several people as extremely slow, end quote.
[00:30:19]  And we were not able to find the guy to reach out for comment.
[00:30:23]  Jeez, yeah.
[00:30:25]  And so when all this stuff came out, or rather when Cole came out with this, like, what was the reaction from the WWE?
[00:30:34]  So it's weird.
[00:30:35]  So the thing that I have my hardest time wrapping my head around and kind of ends up serving as the kicker at the end of the article is that so about a week or so before the Jeff Savage San Diego Union Tribune article comes out,
[00:30:52]  everyone kind of knows this is coming between at WWE, who Savage has been reaching out to for comment for weeks and weeks without hearing back, you know, Mushnik, the wrestling newsletter people, even if they can't report on it yet, they know something's coming.
[00:31:07]  And I think this was probably, though, after Philip, excuse me, not Phillips, Phil had written the column that said that there was a lawsuit pending, but without much details.
[00:31:17]  So Vince talks to him, kind of tries to good cop him in these phone calls, and it would come out in one of Mushnik's columns, I think about two weeks later, after Vince went on Larry King and Donahue and kind of denied having any idea that any of this happened, that he prints this story in the post, which was on the front page of the sports section.
[00:31:46]  The cover headline was Sex Lies in WWF, and then the actual headline was WWF's Defense Just More Lies.
[00:31:55]  Among other things, well, let's read what he wrote.
[00:31:59]  Two weeks ago, during Poor's hard out phone calls, McMahon told West Coast journalist Dave Meltzer, then me, that he had let Phillips go four years ago because Phillips' relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural.
[00:32:12]  McMahon said he rehired Phillips with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.
[00:32:17]  And Dave Meltzer did confirm to me that that was more or less an accurate account of his own call of offense, too.
[00:32:24]  And when they deposed Phil too, they got a lot more details in there about the call and where he kind of makes it more clear that it was Vince and Linda, according to Vince.
[00:32:38]  Linda being Vince's wife.
[00:32:39]  Yeah, we haven't really talked about Linda yet, have we?
[00:32:41]  No, we'll get to that.
[00:32:42]  Linda's wife.
[00:32:45]  Who don't remember what her title was at the time.
[00:32:49]  She would end up being the president, I think, the president and CEO at different times, but she wasn't yet.
[00:32:54]  I think she was, you know, like top EVP of some kind.
[00:32:58]  But she basically ran the non-wrestling operations side of the company while Vince ran the wrestling operations side.
[00:33:04]  She ran the, you know, real company office stuff, for lack of a better term.
[00:33:10]  But, and she's the one who ended up failing in two consecutive Senate runs and then being appointed to the Trump cabinet and then quitting to run his biggest super PAC.

=== Cole At The Center (12:18) ===

[00:33:21]  But there's, you know, there's a bunch more in here, but the point is, is like Phil Mushnik repeats that this is what Vince told him, and it seems like it's backed up to by the video evidence because he disappears from hosting Wrestling Challenge after the taping that they do in March 1988.
[00:33:40]  He's replaced by a different ring announcer, a woman named Mike McGurk, whose father was a wrestler.
[00:33:44]  And he doesn't really return to that except for one substitute taping.
[00:33:50]  But several weeks after he disappears, he's doing a live broadcast on regional cable from the Boston Garden.
[00:33:57]  So that all seems to line up.
[00:33:59]  And I should note, WWE did not deny this in their response to us, nor have they ever addressed this anywhere outside of asking Mushnik about the phone call and the deposition.
[00:34:10]  Well, so let me get this straight.
[00:34:12]  So after this scandal breaks, Vince McMahon goes on all these different TV shows, like big-rated shows, and says that he's basically never fucking, never heard of this.
[00:34:21]  Like, this is totally news to him.
[00:34:22]  You know, it's taken him off guard as much as it is anybody else.
[00:34:26]  Having just told two different reporters that he, at minimum, depending on how you interpret how it's been relayed, that he was at least suspicious that he was abusing kids.
[00:34:36]  Yes.
[00:34:37]  And not only that, he actually, you know, he claimed he had actually fired this guy or forced this guy out in some way, but actually they had kind of just put him into like relegated him further down the ladder.
[00:34:48]  They hadn't actually let go of him.
[00:34:49]  Well, fired him and then brought him back a few weeks later as long as he stayed away from kids.
[00:34:55]  Yes, in an industry that has a job that would be working very closely with him called The Ringboy.
[00:35:02]  Yeah, he was still running the Ring Crew.
[00:35:05]  Yeah, okay.
[00:35:06]  Okay, so that makes a lot of sense to me.
[00:35:08]  And so Cole gets kind of sucked into this too.
[00:35:11]  And actually, sorry to interrupt, but I should note too.
[00:35:14]  Everything Chris Lose talked about came after this.
[00:35:17]  Yeah.
[00:35:17]  Oh, so all of Chris Loes' allegations of abuse actually came after all of this.
[00:35:22]  After the 1988 stuff.
[00:35:23]  Yes, Chris Loece and also his friend, who we don't name because he never went public, but gave an interview to Cole's lawyer.
[00:35:29]  Yeah, he like all of the stuff he alleged, I believe, was from around 1989.
[00:35:35]  Gotcha.
[00:35:36]  Okay.
[00:35:37]  And so what happens with Cole during all this?
[00:35:40]  Because Cole is kind of the center of attention, or at least partially the center of attention, at the center of attention, through this whole scandal.
[00:35:48]  And what is sort of McMahon and the WWE's kind of relationship to him at this point?
[00:35:54]  Because he's no longer working for them.
[00:35:55]  He's no longer a ringboy.
[00:35:56]  He's moved on with his life, although he's obviously initiating these allegations.
[00:36:02]  But what does McMahon do?
[00:36:03]  Because McMahon, as far as I've kind of always understood it, is a very slippery operator.
[00:36:08]  In fact, both of McMahons are.
[00:36:10]  And so it seems like they were, this is kind of like a case study in how this couple operates in the way that they relate themselves to Cole.
[00:36:20]  So it's kind of weird because one of the other things that just kind of complicates and just makes everything weirder and grosser is that Cole had actually in 1990 gotten a job he was about to start actually working for them full-time as an actual employee.
[00:36:41]  He was going to help manage their warehouse in Connecticut.
[00:36:45]  But something happened the night before where Terry Joyelle, who was formerly a wrestler as Terry Garvin and was Phillips' direct superior, had basically like invited him over to his house to go over ring crew assignments because he was still going to be doing that job too, just on a more formal basis.
[00:37:07]  And I should double back a little bit.
[00:37:09]  So Cole at that time is 19, three years earlier when he was 16.
[00:37:14]  And this we didn't put in the article just because we didn't have room.
[00:37:17]  But in an interview he did in 99 that we do quote pretty heavily with the newsletter wrestling perspective, he said that Garvin had not propositioned him when he was 16, but like been weirdly pushy about doing drugs with him.
[00:37:36]  Yeah, I read that part.
[00:37:37]  He's like, hey, yeah, yeah, come on, do this Coke, do this Coke.
[00:37:39]  Like, come on, come on.
[00:37:40]  And I'll tell you what, I've seen a lot of guys do that trick on a lot of different people.
[00:37:44]  We all know what they're trying to do.
[00:37:46]  Right.
[00:37:47]  And now, you can see, though, why Cole would let his guard down three years later because nothing's happened for three years.
[00:37:54]  It seemed like once he kind of gave better signals, not that it should be on him, but just to give a better picture of what he said, that Garvin realized he was making him uncomfortable and asked if he should leave.
[00:38:06]  And he said yes in the original incident.
[00:38:08]  So you can see why nothing's happened in the intervening three years.
[00:38:12]  Why he'd be like, okay, yeah, if he's saying his wife and kids are home, sure, I'll go over to his house and look over the assignment book with him and stuff.
[00:38:20]  So at this point, he's 19 and about to start at the warehouse job the next day.
[00:38:28]  So they get there, and Garvin's like, oh, I forgot my wife and kids are in Florida.
[00:38:35]  And then, quoting Tom in the 1999 interview, he goes and turns on the TV and a porno comes on.
[00:38:42]  I was like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
[00:38:45]  He's like, has your girlfriend sucked your dick like that?
[00:38:48]  I was like, what?
[00:38:50]  He's like, let me suck your dick like that.
[00:38:53]  And classic move.
[00:38:56]  Classic move.
[00:38:57]  Listen, fellas, don't do this.
[00:39:02]  I can't even make it.
[00:39:03]  Just don't do it.
[00:39:04]  Yeah, just abuse.
[00:39:06]  Yeah.
[00:39:06]  Yeah.
[00:39:07]  It's abuse.
[00:39:08]  It's kind of like impressive how much it sounds like every weird, this is how you identify an abusive situation book that was in like the junior high school library.
[00:39:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:20]  It looks like it's like an after, or it sounds like it's an after school special or something.
[00:39:25]  That's what's so crazy about this one to me is because I read that interview that you're quoting from, and it's like, he not only is like, let me suck your dick.
[00:39:33]  And then Cole's like, no, I'm not going to let you suck my dick.
[00:39:37]  He just keeps pleading, like, please, let me suck your dick.
[00:39:40]  And Cole just has to keep saying no.
[00:39:42]  It's like, it almost seems like it's one of the clumsiest molestation attempts that like I've ever like come on attempts.
[00:39:49]  I don't even know what to call it, but it's like, it's, it's incredible.
[00:39:54]  Like, it's such a strange thing.
[00:39:55]  And Cole ends up sleeping in, I think, a van that night outside because the guy's like, oh, no, it's, it's too snowy for me to drive you to the train station for you to go home.
[00:40:03]  You know, I have to drive you tomorrow.
[00:40:05]  And then he just drives him there wordlessly the next day.
[00:40:08]  Yeah, and then he gets there and immediately Mel Phillips fires him and is like, you know why.
[00:40:13]  Yeah.
[00:40:13]  Terry likes to try to break straight guys.
[00:40:16]  Yeah, yeah, which is just not a great read.
[00:40:21]  So that's the end until all the coverage and all that, basically.
[00:40:42]  And so McMahon, I know, all right, like we've already established, does this kind of media blitz, but then they also end up meeting with Cole, right?
[00:40:50]  Yes.
[00:40:51]  So on Larry King, he's like, well, I don't know if there's a lawsuit.
[00:40:57]  We may have been served today and I didn't hear yet, blah, blah, blah.
[00:41:01]  Meanwhile, they end up having the meeting with Cole on Sunday.
[00:41:05]  You know, that was Friday, and then this is Sunday.
[00:41:08]  And then the Phil Donahue show is scheduled for Monday.
[00:41:11]  So, to some degree, you can sense a ticking clock over Vince's head.
[00:41:18]  And they do the settlement conference.
[00:41:22]  And I should note, there is a bunch of stuff in there that's way too weedy for this podcast or the article about how Geraldo Rivera's producer convinced Tom Cole to get a different lawyer and all sorts of shit related to that.
[00:41:40]  That, again, it's so in the weeds that would take forever to explain here.
[00:41:43]  And that's why it's not in the article.
[00:41:45]  Because legit, it would require maybe another whole article to explain.
[00:41:49]  But this new lawyer, who they always regretted getting rid of their old local Utica lawyer, because he was the one who was like, immediately, let's find other victims, let's find other people who have evidence and interview them and blah, blah, blah.
[00:42:04]  So this new lawyer, according to the way Tom Cole explained it, would just keep leaving the room with the WWF lawyer and just leaving him alone with Vince.
[00:42:13]  I'm always doing that with my clients.
[00:42:15]  Leave him alone with the people they're suing.
[00:42:17]  Yeah.
[00:42:19]  And at some point, he blurts out that he doesn't care about the money.
[00:42:24]  He just wants to work there, which he would then say in that interview was the stupidest thing he ever said.
[00:42:30]  I would probably agree with that.
[00:42:31]  And they settle for like 55 grand and him getting a job.
[00:42:35]  Jesus Christ.
[00:42:36]  Yeah.
[00:42:36]  And then the next day is Don and Hugh.
[00:42:39]  So Vince asks for tickets for people.
[00:42:43]  It's unclear how many he actually got, but it's reported at the time by Dave Meltzer in his Wrestling Observer newsletter that Vince asked for like 20 comp tickets for plants so he could have people ask favorable audience questions or try to steer the crowd reaction.
[00:43:01]  But sitting there is with Linda on one side of him and Linda's good friend Elizabeth Hewlett, aka Randy Savage's manager slash real-life wife, Miss Elizabeth, on the other.
[00:43:16]  Tom Cole is in the audience, but because the Cole stopped talking to the people they were talking to, like one of the wrestlers who's on the panel, Barry Orton, he realizes, maybe we shouldn't mention their names.
[00:43:31]  And surprisingly enough, Donnie Hugh never brings up Tom Cole, even though the name of the episode is about, I don't have the transcript in front of me, but it's something like wrestling rocked by teen boys sex scandal.
[00:43:45]  But it's very rarely talked about during the episode.
[00:43:48]  Then it would turn out, Cole would say this in that interview.
[00:43:52]  Meltzer has reported it.
[00:43:53]  I'm not 100% sure if it's sourced from Cole or also from others.
[00:43:59]  But apparently, Vince's plan was someone will bring up Tom Cole's name, and then he'd be like, well, Mr. Cole's here today.
[00:44:07]  We just settled with him yesterday and point him out in the audience.
[00:44:11]  And he'd get, as Meltzer always called it, his Perry Mason moment.
[00:44:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:16]  That's like this, that's that's the sorkin coming out of Vince McMahon right there, which I've always said he got in him.
[00:44:24]  Well, wait, so we should pause here for a second because I want to like, if I think we should focus on Vince McMahon and the McMahons for a second.
[00:44:33]  Sure.
[00:44:33]  Because I think too, if people listening, like, if you don't know anything about wrestling, like you certainly, I think I would assume that you know who Vince McMahon is just from like media osmosis.
[00:44:50]  But also because he's been back in kind of, I mean, in the recent years in the Trump era, he's been kind of back on TV in various, you know, various ways.
[00:45:02]  So you mentioned the McMahons and we mentioned Linda, who I want to get into as well.
[00:45:09]  That, you know, they basically run this as a very tight ship, right?
[00:45:14]  But let's kind of get into the character of Vince because I think there's a lot to talk about there.
[00:45:19]  What makes you say that?
[00:45:22]  Okay, so Vince was born in North Carolina.
[00:45:27]  His mom was a woman that his dad, you know, already a promoter of some sort, I think by then, or maybe about to start promoting because his grandfather was also a promoter, more so boxing than wrestling.

=== Vince McMahon's Southern Roots (15:32) ===

[00:45:39]  But it's still, it's the family thing.
[00:45:42]  Actually, no, excuse me, no, Vince Sr. would not have started promoting yet because he met Vince Jr.'s mom while he was stationed in the military in North Carolina.
[00:45:52]  So that's how Vince is born.
[00:45:58]  And he doesn't know his dad for like the first 12 years of his life, I think, growing up in a trailer park.
[00:46:04]  According to what he would later say in a Playboy interview, although part of this, he did say in more general terms, apparently during this coal settlement negotiations that he had been molested as a child.
[00:46:17]  And then later reveals in the Playboy interview that he had been molested both by his brother, his older brother's girlfriends and like his friend's girlfriends, and also by someone who he implies is his mom.
[00:46:32]  And yes, and he had a fucked up life to one degree or another.
[00:46:38]  I mean, it's it's clear he did, regardless.
[00:46:43]  And he ends up, though, kind of really connecting with his father as a teenager and eventually working for him, you know, first, I think, promoting small towns and then as an announcer on TV and eventually takes on more and more responsibility before eventually buying him out more or less in 1982.
[00:47:06]  So there's a bunch of just weird shit that comes from even like the less horrifying parts of his upbringing.
[00:47:14]  Like he has a massive complex about southern people.
[00:47:19]  Like he doesn't like him or is it or he really?
[00:47:21]  How do I put this?
[00:47:22]  Like he's clearly like got a self-loathing aspect to it, but like it gets super extreme where it's like everyone who has a southern accent has to take, you know, like speech courses to get a more neutral TV accent or like with announcers at least.
[00:47:38]  Like wait, Vince McMahon just like hates southern people?
[00:47:41]  Oh yeah.
[00:47:42]  Oh, I don't know.
[00:47:43]  That's a weird thing.
[00:47:44]  But that's the thing with TV and this and southern accents.
[00:47:47]  Like for example, like I know Stephen Colbert, like when he was a kid, practiced really hard to get rid of.
[00:47:52]  He's from like North Carolina, I think.
[00:47:54]  Maybe South Carolina, one of the Carolinas.
[00:47:56]  And he like practiced real hard to get rid of his southern accent, which I think is how he got to like have such a like newscaster voice.
[00:48:04]  Yeah.
[00:48:05]  Yeah.
[00:48:05]  When he was doing like acting and comedy or whatever.
[00:48:08]  Right.
[00:48:08]  But he pushed this on wrestling announcers.
[00:48:10]  But then like anything that was associated with like the southern style of pro wrestling, because when pro wrestling was more regional, WWF wrestling was kind of like a, how do I put this?
[00:48:23]  WWF wrestling was closer to like every negative stereotype of pro wrestling you've ever seen.
[00:48:29]  Like a bunch of lumbering big guys very obviously missing each other type of thing when they punch each other type of thing.
[00:48:35]  Yeah.
[00:48:37]  Pretty blatantly racist, nodding out.
[00:48:41]  Well, that's in the southern wrestling too.
[00:48:43]  But the southern wrestling was more fast-paced, exciting, you know, kind of more passionate, just kind of more fun to watch.
[00:48:52]  I mean, the best example I can always think of is once when Debbie Harry was on Letterman to promote Videodrome of all things.
[00:49:00]  She's talking about how her and Christine have become big wrestling fans.
[00:49:03]  And she's like, oh yeah, I watched wrestling from Atlanta, New York on cable.
[00:49:08]  And Letterman like half-jokingly asked which is better.
[00:49:11]  And she's like, oh, the Atlanta wrestling.
[00:49:13]  It's a little funkier.
[00:49:14]  Things get a little more wild.
[00:49:16]  So anything that he associates with southern wrestling or not his dad's wrestling, he hates.
[00:49:23]  So for example, it's as granular and weird as so wrestling rings in the northeast were generally had ring ropes that were actual rope.
[00:49:35]  And I think stemming in part from, you know, boxing rings being repurposed and stuff like that.
[00:49:41]  In the south, they used elevator cable kind of wrapped in garden hose and like gaffer tape, which hurt more when you bounce off of them, but if you're standing on them, give you a lot more better footing.
[00:49:56]  And generally, most wrestlers prefer that.
[00:49:59]  But because he associates it with southern wrestling, WWE rings have never had cable ring ropes.
[00:50:07]  He thinks announcers who get excited is too southern.
[00:50:11]  Like, it's just weird shit like that.
[00:50:14]  Yes.
[00:50:15]  He thinks, like, he thinks like joyousness is like a sovereign feeling or something.
[00:50:19]  It's like you can't.
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:21]  It's just really weird.
[00:50:22]  And like, there's, I'm sure there's a bazillion things I'm forgetting about.
[00:50:25]  And like, he has all sorts of control-freak stuff that stems from this too.
[00:50:28]  Like, there's a very specific language of WWE.
[00:50:31]  That's literally what the pamphlet they would give out to people in the company.
[00:50:37]  Like, they're not wrestlers.
[00:50:39]  Yeah, they're WWE superstars.
[00:50:42]  It's not a belt.
[00:50:43]  It's a championship title.
[00:50:46]  Yeah, he's a good brand manager.
[00:50:48]  He knows what he likes.
[00:50:49]  I can appreciate that.
[00:50:50]  You don't get a title shot.
[00:50:51]  You get a championship opportunity.
[00:50:55]  Some of it just makes no sense.
[00:50:57]  And then there's all sorts of weird stories.
[00:50:59]  Like, some of the better ones is that him and Trump are kind of the same dude, except Vince is the creative one and probably smarter, too.
[00:51:10]  But like, for example, like the well-done steak with ketchup thing, Vince does that too.
[00:51:17]  Great minds.
[00:51:19]  And Vince actually has fought Trump before, right?
[00:51:24]  Like he's flicked his nose and like pulled his tie.
[00:51:27]  Okay, so they have a relationship going back to the late 80s.
[00:51:31]  Ironically, just a few weeks after the initial Mel Phillips thing went down, was WrestleMania 4, which Trump paid a site fee for to have it as a Trump Plaza event at the Atlantic City Convention Center and paid them so much that they did it again the next year.
[00:51:49]  And he'd occasionally make guest appearances and stuff.
[00:51:52]  And then once the apprentice gets big, Vince negotiates this deal in 2007 where the big feature match at WrestleMania will be each of them in a wrestler's corner and the losing wrestler, their billionaire, has to shave his head.
[00:52:09]  So, because this is like peak of the apprentice, you know, Trump's hair being such a big deal culturally, Vince being Vince and having his own thing about his hair where he always liked,
[00:52:25]  he always liked to tell the bad guy announcers to say he had a toupee because he was so proud of how luxurious his hair was that it looked like a toupee and he wanted the other guys to joke about it on the air.
[00:52:40]  So that is still to date the biggest selling wrestling pay-per-view event of all time.
[00:52:45]  Something like, I think over 1.3 million homes bought that.
[00:52:50]  Wow.
[00:52:50]  Yeah.
[00:52:52]  Like, you know, even like, you know, big UFCs and stuff, like only a small handful have beaten that.
[00:52:58]  You know, even with boxing fights, you know, it's only, you know, the biggest later Tyson fights and the big, you know, later Mayweather fights that beat something like that.
[00:53:08]  You know, that's gigantic.
[00:53:11]  And, you know, obviously Trump's representative wins and Vince gets his head shaved in the middle of the ring.
[00:53:17]  But, you know, during the match, Trump tackled Vince to stop him from interfering.
[00:53:21]  And then after the match, Steve Austin, who was the special referee, gave his finishing move to Trump, who took it very badly, as you'd expect.
[00:53:29]  But, you know, because he's trying not to hurt him and all that.
[00:53:33]  And they continue to have this relationship on and off.
[00:53:36]  They do a storyline thing where he buys part of the company and they make the mistake of releasing a real press release and it tanks the stock the next day.
[00:53:44]  And they had to undo this long storyline they had planned the next week and just all sorts of stuff like that.
[00:53:51]  And they inducted him to the celebrity wing of their Hall of Fame in 2013.
[00:53:55]  And now, keep in mind, so he's fully into birther stuff at this time.
[00:53:59]  Vince is well, Trump.
[00:54:02]  Okay, Trump.
[00:54:02]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:03]  And so at Madison Square Garden for this, with so by then, and really for years now, the WrestleMania crowd is mostly people traveling from out of town.
[00:54:15]  So this is a very diverse crowd of wrestling fans, albeit spendy wrestling fans.
[00:54:20]  He gets booed out of the build.
[00:54:22]  Trump does.
[00:54:23]  Yes.
[00:54:24]  Wow.
[00:54:25]  Oh, yeah, because it's the height of the birth of thing.
[00:54:27]  People, yeah, I will say.
[00:54:28]  Trump is quite popular in 2013, too.
[00:54:30]  And a lot of different people like wrestling.
[00:54:32]  It is not.
[00:54:33]  I think they have this association of it with like just being like redneck people or whatever.
[00:54:38]  Oh, it is so much.
[00:54:39]  I didn't know that.
[00:54:40]  Okay, so it's twofold.
[00:54:42]  One, wrestling fans just on a basic level are much more diverse than most people realize.
[00:54:48]  Heavily popular among black TV viewers and Hispanic TV viewers.
[00:54:53]  Like they tend to WWE get, you know, the word that's used in TV is over-index in black and Hispanic viewers.
[00:55:02]  They're extremely popular among black and Hispanic TV viewers.
[00:55:07]  And also, the only study that's really been done that I've seen about political leanings with sports fans that I forget who did the study, but it's a Business Insider article from 2013.
[00:55:18]  It's fairly easy to find.
[00:55:20]  There's this chart that it's different sports on the chart.
[00:55:26]  One axis is left to right.
[00:55:28]  The other is how active are they as far as voting.
[00:55:32]  On that chart, wrestling fans were further to the left of just about everyone other than NBA and WNBA fans.
[00:55:40]  But with very low voter turnout.
[00:55:43]  So yeah, so Trump is not going to be very popular at this moment with these guys.
[00:55:48]  No, and also, this is a thing that Dave Meltzer reported in the Wrestling Observer, like right after Trump gets elected.
[00:55:56]  Once Trump got elected and really once, I think once even he was the frontrunner, at least for the nomination, they just never acknowledged him.
[00:56:04]  They were not going to acknowledge that someone in their hall of fame was the president or that the former company president and all that who used to be on the TV was in his cabinet because they feared alienating all those black and Hispanic viewers.
[00:56:19]  Yes.
[00:56:19]  That's so interesting to not even acknowledge the idea.
[00:56:24]  That's funny because like you mentioned earlier, like Linda McMahon was in, I mean, Vince McMahon's wife and a huge, I mean, yeah, I remember seeing her on TV and stuff when I was a kid, was literally in Trump's cabinet.
[00:56:37]  Yes.
[00:56:38]  She was the SBA administrator and she had a small business administration, right?
[00:56:44]  Yes.
[00:56:45]  And she had a much easier hearing than most of the cabinet appointees, which it was kind of weird.
[00:56:52]  So on one level, I get it because when you're looking at, you know, Betsy DeVos and all these other people, Linda McMahon running the SBA doesn't seem that bad because, you know, it's, she's not entirely unqualified for it.
[00:57:10]  You know, it's like, I get why maybe.
[00:57:12]  It's kind of like a smaller gig for internal headlines.
[00:57:16]  Right.
[00:57:16]  I get why various senators may have thought they needed to pick their battles.
[00:57:19]  Like, I can get that.
[00:57:20]  But even then, though, both of her opponents in the two Senate races in Connecticut were on that committee and didn't bring up any of the shit they knew about, really, with WWE.
[00:57:33]  Yeah, but to be fair, like, I mean, if we want to like rewind back to the, it feels like, you know, a billion years ago, the like Trump confirmation stuff.
[00:57:44]  Like, I mean, the Democrats didn't do a lot.
[00:57:47]  You know, they couldn't do a lot, but they didn't, they didn't make a stink about a lot of things.
[00:57:52]  I mean, it is true that Linda is like a major, major Republican donor.
[00:57:58]  And I would suspect that The way that that kind of like money gets sloshed around is that it's less partisan as people might think.
[00:58:09]  Just the way that it gets kind of laundered through different philanthropic causes and, you know, groups and whatever.
[00:58:18]  So I'm like not too surprised just because she is like such a money, money-making force.
[00:58:24]  But it is true that that's like kind of in line too with the way that a lot of the, well, I mean, not the like big blockbuster ones, like you say, DeVos or, you know, Barr or any of the other kind of like big guys, but the kind of smaller one.
[00:58:40]  Yeah, just, oh my God, I totally forgot about him.
[00:58:42]  Low-key fell off.
[00:58:45]  But they, you know, it's like they they kind of like went a little under the radar and didn't get a lot of pushback.
[00:59:13]  Yeah.
[00:59:14]  So since you mentioned it's now a good time to talk about how the big man's are in some form the all time biggest donors to the Trump Foundation.
[00:59:20]  Yeah.
[00:59:21]  Are they?
[00:59:22]  Yes.
[00:59:23]  Jesus.
[00:59:24]  So, okay, I wrote an article for Deadspin about this when the Trump Foundation had whatever, the settlement or the consent agree or whatever it was with the New York prosecutors, because there's a lot that's still not known about this.
[00:59:39]  So I want to say it was two donations in 2007, 2009.
[00:59:46]  And at the time, and when this first came out, and like it was Smoking Gun, who was the ones looking at the 990 forms from the Trump Foundation originally, it wasn't really considered a big deal.
[01:00:00]  Everyone just kind of assumed because of the years where it happened, that these were donations in lieu of appearance fees for when he had appeared for them.
[01:00:14]  Which, you know, there is proof of other times that he or Melania did stuff like that.
[01:00:20]  And if you don't know that the Trump Foundation is a massive grift, which wasn't front and center at the time, there's nothing really wrong with that either.
[01:00:31]  You know, yeah, to just be like, give the money to my donation or to my fucking charity as a donation.
[01:00:36]  Don't give it to me.
[01:00:37]  Right.
[01:00:39]  But then things get weird.
[01:00:43]  The Trump 990 forms say that both of the donations came from World Wrestling Entertainment.
[01:00:48]  When Smoking Gun first covered this, and it got picked up some other places, like various mainstream places, Christian Science Monitor, you know, all sorts of, you know, not super widely, but that they that they had done this article.
[01:01:02]  I think it was like he is the least giving billionaire because they were going by how the foundation just hadn't spent on much of anything, you know, as far as causes.

=== Stephanie McMahon: One to Watch (14:28) ===

[01:01:12]  Like that got some attention, but like, you know, Smoking Gun never heard from WWE about it, even though they explicitly, I believe, said it was for the appearances.
[01:01:22]  But then when it becomes an issue during the Linda campaigns, first, like, they keep changing stories about it.
[01:01:30]  Like, the WWE PR person says, oh, I think it was from Vince and Linda's own foundation.
[01:01:36]  Then he calls the reporter back to correct them and being like, no, it was Vince personally.
[01:01:42]  And at one point, I'd have to have it in front of me to remember the exact chronology.
[01:01:46]  I think that maybe says Vince and Linda, then says just Vince.
[01:01:48]  And then later it becomes Vince and Linda again.
[01:01:51]  And it's just super confusing because, again, A, in the context of 2007 and 2009, I don't think you can blame them if, like, either for a regular donation or in lieu of appearance fees.
[01:02:04]  But like, all this is, you know, it just gets super confusing.
[01:02:09]  And they've never given a clear answer.
[01:02:11]  Like, why did the Trump Foundation say it was WWE?
[01:02:14]  Which, look, even though the Trump Foundation was a massive grift, there's no reason for them to lie about that.
[01:02:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:22]  So it's hard to know, but yeah, like they are easily the biggest donors in the history of the Trump Foundation, one way or another.
[01:02:30]  Yeah, I'm looking at this tweet from Stephanie McMahon, who I actually want to ask you about, because she strikes me as, I don't know how to describe her, one to watch, we'll just say.
[01:02:44]  But she like tweeted something in March of 2015.
[01:02:48]  She tweeted, quote, philanthropy is the future of marketing.
[01:02:52]  It's the way brands are going to win.
[01:02:54]  Right.
[01:02:55]  And yeah, that seems to be like her approach as she's taking over a lot of, I mean, it seems to me, I mean, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, because again, I don't know too much about this, but it seems like she's really steering a lot of the ships in terms of what's going on, the changes at the WWE.
[01:03:12]  Okay, so yes, whatever anyone thinks of her, she has done an incredible, an incredible job since she's become their chief brand officer as far as changing their reputation corporately.
[01:03:23]  She's a real girl boss.
[01:03:26]  Yeah.
[01:03:26]  Oh, literally, it got delayed, but she was writing a memoir.
[01:03:32]  I don't even know when it's supposed to come out anymore.
[01:03:34]  And the original title, which I think got dropped, but they had even trademarked it, was Lady Balls.
[01:03:39]  No.
[01:03:40]  Yes.
[01:03:41]  Yes.
[01:03:43]  And that's awful.
[01:03:44]  Also, it just made me think of the movie Ladybugs.
[01:03:46]  Great movie.
[01:03:48]  That is the, wait, that is the Rodney Dangerfield and why we're forgetting his name all of a sudden.
[01:03:54]  Jonathan Brandis vehicle.
[01:03:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:03:56]  What's the deal with, what's the deal with Stephanie?
[01:03:59]  Okay, how do I put this?
[01:04:02]  So her thing these days is doing the whole very transparently fake corporate person routine that clearly works in the corporate world, but not to real people.
[01:04:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:16]  And it's clearly paid off for them, but there's a bunch other shit mixed in.
[01:04:22]  Like, so that quote, because at the time she's quoting Biz Stone, the non-Jack Dorsey Twitter co-founder, who was appearing at their business partners conference that they do every year during WrestleMania weekend.
[01:04:36]  And for what it's worth, the Biz Stone segment was not in the video they put up on their corporate website after, which, you know, she tweeted that during the summit, which is probably part of that.
[01:04:46]  Although, you know, if someone like Biz Stone is probably getting paid to be there, maybe it's in his contract that they can't distribute the videos.
[01:04:52]  It could be one or the other.
[01:04:55]  Here's what made that quote much more concerning at the time.
[01:04:59]  Besides that it comes off very brass and you know, Stone would even say a few hours later after it got a lot of attention that, oh, he just he just means that it's a good byproduct of doing philanthropy.
[01:05:10]  It's like one of the quiet things you're not supposed to say out loud.
[01:05:15]  Right.
[01:05:16]  So corporate marketing.
[01:05:18]  Here's the problem with saying that on that day.
[01:05:22]  This was, I believe, the Saturday of the 2015 WrestleMania weekend.
[01:05:26]  This is during the afternoon.
[01:05:28]  That night, several hours later, was the first ever Warrior Award, which we need to get more into that in a few minutes, but which they started after the Ultimate Warrior passed away, literally getting home for WrestleMania the previous year, which they were giving to the family of Conor Mahalik, who was a young fan who had died of the pediatric cancer about a year before.
[01:05:48]  And there's a whole thing we could get into about how them kind of lionizing a one dead kid and showing all the cool stuff they did with him before he died kind of makes kids who are going through make a wish and don't get that feel shitty.
[01:06:05]  But that's a whole other conversation.
[01:06:08]  The thing is, you know, they're giving this award to his grieving father and his little brother and stuff later.
[01:06:19]  And that's the day she chooses to tweet that.
[01:06:22]  Yeah.
[01:06:22]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:23]  So it's just like a little on the note.
[01:06:25]  Transparently like what they're doing later that night.
[01:06:27]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[01:06:28]  Yeah, I would say that her wrestling move is the lean in.
[01:06:32]  Ooh, Liz, baby.
[01:06:34]  Classic.
[01:06:35]  Classic Liz right there.
[01:06:37]  Also, I should know, too, that last week she was on the podcast that, what is it called?
[01:06:43]  Token CEO that the Barcelona Sports CEO does.
[01:06:47]  Thank God you didn't say Caller Daddy.
[01:06:50]  Someday soon I'll be on that one.
[01:06:52]  Well, so by the way, Eric and Ardini said Barstool CEO is also now on the WWE board of directors as of my God.
[01:07:00]  Yes, Tell World is real.
[01:07:02]  Jesus.
[01:07:02]  We've got to get you on there.
[01:07:05]  So I actually do.
[01:07:06]  Okay, wait.
[01:07:07]  So I have a question then, because I think we do have to wrap up in a little bit.
[01:07:12]  I've heard rumors that Vince's, and I think it's pretty clear maybe if you watch videos of him, like he's not well, right?
[01:07:20]  Like mentally or physically or both?
[01:07:23]  Both.
[01:07:24]  Like maybe some rumors about like a stroke or that he, you know, he's not maybe up to speed in ways that he used to be.
[01:07:36]  I mean, try to dance around this.
[01:07:38]  I mean, he's clearly more frail than he used to be, if nothing else.
[01:07:42]  I mean, he's in his mid-70s at least.
[01:07:46]  And he's definitely less muscle bound than he used to be for whatever that's worth, when he was super muscle bound into his 60s.
[01:07:53]  Actually, hold on.
[01:07:54]  Let me find some of those Vince muscle and fitness covers to show Liz and horrify her.
[01:08:02]  Mentally, I mean, he definitely has lost his fastball over the years, you know, creatively and stuff, and does a lot of stuff that doesn't really make sense anymore.
[01:08:14]  Well, I guess what I'm asking about is like, because I'm curious about, you mentioned, okay, Barstool Sports.
[01:08:21]  What is the C?
[01:08:22]  I can't remember.
[01:08:22]  What does her?
[01:08:23]  Eric Mardini.
[01:08:24]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:08:25]  See?
[01:08:25]  Yeah, I'm on top of this.
[01:08:27]  So, okay, I'm just curious about what the future of the WWE is, like without Vince McMahon, because that's going to be a thing probably sooner than later.
[01:08:36]  And it seems like they're trying to, you know, figure that out, right?
[01:08:40]  Yes.
[01:08:41]  And also, I sent you the first muscle and fitness cover in the chat just now.
[01:08:44]  Fuck, man.
[01:08:45]  This is fucked up looking.
[01:08:51]  My friend Mark.
[01:08:52]  Mar and Almighty have fallen.
[01:08:54]  Oh, my God.
[01:08:55]  I remember my friend Matt Randazzo, author of a book about the whole Chris Benoit thing, but also various mobsters and stuff.
[01:09:06]  I remember him doing an interview where he described that cover as like Vince's old head on a gay porn star box.
[01:09:13]  Yeah, I totally look like that.
[01:09:14]  That's exactly.
[01:09:15]  Yes.
[01:09:15]  And here is the more renatched, more obviously Photoshopped cover as well.
[01:09:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:09:22]  When's this from?
[01:09:23]  Okay, so the Muscle and Fitness.
[01:09:25]  Okay, so the first one.
[01:09:28]  That one's, the Muscle and Fitness one is 2015.
[01:09:32]  The later one?
[01:09:33]  Yeah.
[01:09:34]  Okay.
[01:09:35]  And then the older one.
[01:09:36]  The older one's like 2008.
[01:09:38]  He is, he is, that is a, that's a, that's a hell of a look, I'll say that.
[01:09:43]  Yeah.
[01:09:44]  Oh, no, I just mean like, you know, if you're bringing like, okay, Stephanie, she's like a girl boss.
[01:09:49]  She's very, I'd say she's like a very modern, like you mentioned, you know, doing all these kind of like, she's kind of brand marketing wizard, very like soft corporate voice.
[01:10:00]  Like she seems very in tune with like various corporate trends and bringing in the CEO of Varsity Sports.
[01:10:09]  It just seems like.
[01:10:11]  you know, they're looking towards the future on like how they're going to pivot the company.
[01:10:15]  And I'm curious as to like what that like literally means, I guess.
[01:10:20]  Or what, potentially.
[01:10:22]  It's weird because like everyone seems to have a kind of good idea of it, but they have steadfastly refused to ever put out a public succession plan for reasons that'll become more understandable in a moment.
[01:10:36]  So as the way everyone sees it is that whenever Vince isn't in charge anymore, which everyone presumes is when he dies, because otherwise he's never going to cede control, is that Stephanie will be the CEO in the face of the company, which Wall Street will probably be fine with at this point after all the stuff she's done and, you know, Eisenhower fellowship and all those things.
[01:11:00]  Like she's made her executive E bona fides.
[01:11:04]  Yeah.
[01:11:04]  Yeah.
[01:11:06]  Whereas the so she, the idea is like in the older WWE, I guess she will be the Linda and her husband, Paul Levesque, will be the Vince.
[01:11:16]  Paul Levesque, better known as WWE superstar Triple H.
[01:11:20]  Oh, shit.
[01:11:21]  I used to have his action figure.
[01:11:22]  Now, the problem is, though, is that Wall Street clearly is not impressed by a wrestler becoming an executive.
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:30]  But he's like really increased his exposure over the past like whatever.
[01:11:34]  Like he's like kind of pivoted into being different things, right?
[01:11:39]  Like he's doing a kind of corporate pivot himself, no?
[01:11:43]  Yes, you know, got a haircut.
[01:11:46]  But, you know, still wrestles occasionally.
[01:11:48]  Not in a while, though.
[01:11:50]  But Vince wrestled sometimes.
[01:11:52]  Vince wrestled.
[01:11:53]  I think the last actual match Vince did was 2011 or 2011.
[01:11:58]  No, but I'm saying it's like, it's like a guy can go from the boardroom to but he can't do the other.
[01:12:03]  It's, you know, this is more Wall Street discrimination.
[01:12:06]  Sure, sure.
[01:12:07]  But I mean, he can't fit any suits.
[01:12:11]  He's too big.
[01:12:12]  He's got to slow it down too, though, because every time he wrestles, pretty much he starts to tear muscles off the bone and all that.
[01:12:19]  He has torn both of his quads, one peck.
[01:12:23]  I think one of the quads might have been twice.
[01:12:28]  How do you think that?
[01:12:32]  I respectfully decline to answer that on the grounds that it may be considered defamation without proof.
[01:12:37]  Liz, look at the, look at, so we don't get sued.
[01:12:40]  Look at the thing.
[01:12:41]  Look at the gesture I'm making here.
[01:12:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:44]  No, no, I didn't understand how you lived.
[01:12:45]  Are you making a jerking off guess?
[01:12:47]  I mean, it does increase your testosterone.
[01:12:49]  No, no.
[01:12:49]  I mean, I'm a big, unfortunately, I'm a big football fan, and more fortunately, I'm a big NBA fan.
[01:12:55]  So I totally know how these guys, you know, get over these things.
[01:12:59]  It's just like doing that twice to one muscle.
[01:13:02]  Like, that's pretty intense, you know?
[01:13:04]  Yeah.
[01:13:04]  Yeah.
[01:13:05]  Especially a quad.
[01:13:07]  So theoretically, he's going to be the Vince.
[01:13:09]  He's running the wrestling operations.
[01:13:11]  Stephanie will run everything else.
[01:13:13]  And who knows?
[01:13:16]  I mean, you know, they were in the meetings that got them the big TV deals, even though it was probably more the, you know, CAA negotiators who got that done.
[01:13:24]  And who they then hired.
[01:13:27]  Yeah, actually, yeah.
[01:13:28]  Now the new president and what is he?
[01:13:31]  Chief.
[01:13:32]  He's chief something else officer.
[01:13:34]  I don't remember what is Nick Khan, who was the CAA guy who negotiated the TV deals.
[01:13:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:13:40]  And that's what's so wild about this is this industry is so insanely incestuous.
[01:13:45]  Yeah, and even something like WWE that you wouldn't think is like, I don't know, I feel like as we've kind of like moved through from the like 80s, then into the 90s and now into like whatever this new era is going to be, it's like all these different incestuous circles that just all seem to be related to one another.
[01:14:06]  Yeah.
[01:14:08]  Where were we?
[01:14:08]  Now I feel like I lost my train of thought of where we were going with that.
[01:14:11]  Well, we got, we got, I think we actually have to wrap up pretty soon.
[01:14:14]  So we've got this, the McMahons who are wildly successful.
[01:14:18]  We didn't even have time to get into some of the shit that Vince McMahon has gotten himself into in his own allegations and stuff like that.
[01:14:26]  I will link to some of those articles below.
[01:14:28]  There's an anecdote in one of them that is insane to me.
[01:14:32]  But I want to get back to, to sort of wrap up here to the story of these two boys, Cole and Lois, and what ended up happening to them.
[01:14:41]  Because like you said, Cole was offered this $55,000 and this job with WWE, but he doesn't stay there very long, does he?
[01:14:50]  No.
[01:14:52]  So, okay, so Chris Lowe's first off, because that's really the quicker one to deal with.
[01:14:56]  Yeah.
[01:14:57]  He disappears very quickly.
[01:15:00]  An old friend of his, Mike Sawyer, who wrote a wrestling newsletter and stuff, would later write a letter to the wrestling observer saying that one day he went to a meeting at WWE headquarters and came back a changed person and just never talked about wrestling again.
[01:15:18]  And he just kind of falls off the face of the earth.
[01:15:22]  And then I shouldn't also note too, I mean, you know, people can read this in the article, but the reason we're focusing on these two, or these are the ones that are named in the article.
[01:15:31]  There are other people with allegations in the article, including one of Chris Lowis' friends, which I think we did allude to earlier.

=== Abuse on the Road (10:25) ===

[01:15:40]  There's that.
[01:15:40]  And then there's also someone who would sue them in 99 and appear to have gotten a settlement based on what happens with the court docket and also him telling both me and the Huffington Post that he had an NDA that he meant he couldn't talk.
[01:15:59]  And so there's a few more people who had come forward.
[01:16:02]  And then, as far as Tom Cole, so he gets this job.
[01:16:06]  Before long, he comes off the road because he's getting a surprising number of cat calls from fans.
[01:16:13]  Either people are recognizing him from the one photo of him that was on some TV shows, or they're just deducing that someone who's a ring attendant is probably someone who got molested.
[01:16:26]  So he's getting cat calls from some asshole fans.
[01:16:29]  Some of the wrestlers are saying shitty things to him.
[01:16:31]  It's not in the article, but I found one newsletter, actually Mike Sawyer's old newsletter a while back where Lee Cole, Tom's older brother, had told him at the time that one wrestler said to him something to the effect of, oh, is that an earring?
[01:16:48]  So it's true that you're a faggot.
[01:16:50]  Ah, yeah.
[01:16:51]  Or something like that.
[01:16:52]  So even though he was abused for years by a member of this organization, he himself is now receiving abuse from other members of this organization and the fans of this organization because he came out about it.
[01:17:06]  Yes.
[01:17:07]  So eventually he's just like, I can't be on the road.
[01:17:11]  I can't do this.
[01:17:12]  They end up suggesting they pay for him to go back to school because he had like a ninth grade education.
[01:17:19]  And he does get his GED.
[01:17:21]  And then they pay for him to go to a community college, which just he did not have the preparation for as someone with a ninth grade education and who had been a street kid for so long and all that.
[01:17:34]  And he ends up, you know, no showing a lot of his classes and eventually failing.
[01:17:40]  And having signed an agreement that said he could be fired if that happened, they fire him.
[01:17:46]  Although there's some other stuff leading up to that, which we didn't have room for in the article, but Tom mentions in the wrestling perspective interview, which I'm guessing he'll link as well, that one of the senior ring crew assignment people, Steve Taylor, had written a memo, which I have, because it was in Phil Mushnick's stuff, being like, wasn't he only supposed to be here for a year and stuff like that.
[01:18:16]  So it was like planned from the start.
[01:18:18]  It seems that way.
[01:18:19]  So Tom ends up off the road.
[01:18:22]  School thing doesn't work out.
[01:18:23]  He actually files a new lawsuit before he's fired because obviously he knows it's going to happen because of the terms of the deal about school and gets fired in this Linda McMahon letter that's just so condescending.
[01:18:37]  Should I read the part, at least that's in the article?
[01:18:40]  Yeah.
[01:18:41]  I mean, it's not long.
[01:18:42]  It's only a little more than a page, but I don't think I need to read the whole thing.
[01:18:45]  So this is how the letter ends.
[01:18:49]  Vince and I believe, and this is from Linda again, if I didn't say that.
[01:18:53]  Vince and I believe that we have, over the past year, demonstrated our willingness and our support, not only financially, but emotionally to helping you.
[01:19:02]  But at this point, we believe that we have done everything we can.
[01:19:05]  Therefore, this letter is to advise you of your termination with Titan Sports, which was the parent company name at the time, effective immediately, and that you will receive your last paycheck this week.
[01:19:16]  Then she gives like the HR info and the closing line.
[01:19:19]  Again, Tom, I find this action truly regrettable.
[01:19:22]  The opportunity of a lifetime is a terrible thing to waste.
[01:19:27]  Yes.
[01:19:28]  And then like there's other fallout.
[01:19:31]  Mike Mooneyam is a friend of mine who has been the Charleston Post and Courier's wrestling columnist for decades.
[01:19:38]  He interviews Linda and he asks, like, do you still think he was sexually abused by Mel Phillips?
[01:19:46]  She says, quote, as I found out now, no, I don't.
[01:19:50]  I think he's very confused.
[01:19:53]  Yeah, that's one thing that you talk about in the article is how basically after they fire him and wash their hands of him, they're just like, they just, they just sort of change history and say, like, no, actually, he was never abused in the first place.
[01:20:04]  Like, he just misunderstood the fact that this guy liked feet.
[01:20:07]  Yeah, and then Tom and his family pick it outside WWE headquarters.
[01:20:13]  It's on News 12 Connecticut, one of the local cable news stations.
[01:20:18]  There's this whole kind of suite of them that Cable Vision, well, now Optimum, I guess, owns slash owns, you know, News 12 Long Island, News 12 Connecticut, News 12 New Jersey, stuff like that.
[01:20:27]  News 12 Brooklyn, I think, too.
[01:20:30]  And they do a story on it, and there's an interview with Linda.
[01:20:35]  I did reach out to them to see if they had the raw footage.
[01:20:38]  Unfortunately, I did not.
[01:20:39]  So this is all we get from that.
[01:20:41]  So she says, first, that Mel was put on suspension pending investigation.
[01:20:46]  The investigation was taking so long.
[01:20:48]  There was so much negative happening with it that we finally told Mel it was better for him and better for our company for him to go on in a different way.
[01:20:58]  And then the rest comes from the reporter's narration.
[01:21:00]  McMahon doesn't deny Phillips had a foot fetish, but she said it had become a joke and was blown out of proportion.
[01:21:07]  Jesus.
[01:21:08]  So I think that is pretty indicative of how the McMahons handle this.
[01:21:13]  And it's sort of striking to remember that these are the people at the head of, well, not at the time, I don't think, but, you know, a billion-dollar industry who basically like themselves fucked this kid over and you know, sort of countless other people too.
[01:21:28]  It's sort of extraordinary.
[01:21:29]  Yeah.
[01:21:30]  And to me, one of like the saddest things in a weird way is like, even though the thing about what Vince told Phil Mushnick and Dave Meltzer right off the bat about what he knew and suspected, that was covered everywhere.
[01:21:45]  It just, it wasn't even among the places covering it treated as that big a deal, which I never understood because at that point, the big issue is what did they know and when did they know it?
[01:21:55]  And then for some reason, I have no idea what, everyone just forgot about it.
[01:21:59]  Like, it's not any retrospectives anyone did.
[01:22:02]  Like, as far as I can tell, like, people just forgot that Vince had said this.
[01:22:07]  Yeah.
[01:22:08]  And so, like, even people who are like fairly well versed in this, like, did not know about that part until either like I told them when I was working on the article or they saw the article.
[01:22:20]  Yeah.
[01:22:21]  So, and then, like, to make it worse, like, in that Tom Cole interview, he describes this thing where he's talking to the WWE lawyer, I think, on the roof of their office building and says, like, what would you do if you found out Vince knew?
[01:22:36]  And that he said something back, like, I would stop representing them.
[01:22:39]  I'm a parent or something like that.
[01:22:43]  So, Tom didn't even know what Vince had said.
[01:22:45]  Yeah.
[01:22:46]  Like, that is, like, that's just another layer of sad on top of everything else that this just got buried this way.
[01:22:55]  And, you know, then, you know, lately they have been handling other, you know, other sexual misconduct allegations kind of oddly as well.
[01:23:04]  So back in June, stemming from a non-WWE wrestler, an independent wrestler, you know, who just kind of makes his living in small promotions around the world, well, made, as you'll understand in a second, David Starr.
[01:23:18]  His ex-girlfriend accused him of assaulting her at least once during their relationship.
[01:23:25]  And all of a sudden, I think maybe in part due to his reaction, which went from, well, I've been looking up gray rape to then saying, oh, no, I'm not a predator, to deleting his Twitter.
[01:23:38]  Then dozens and dozens of women in wrestling started tweeting their stories of abuse from within the wrestling business.
[01:23:43]  And the ones that involve people that work for WWE have kind of some of the, some of them were dealt with, but mainly just the people who either admitted to doing something, like maybe being inappropriate with their wrestling school students.
[01:24:00]  A lot of this was in England for some reason, by the way.
[01:24:03]  Or one guy who I believe was accused of raping a woman and said something to the effect of, look, I had a bad drinking problem then and had a lot of blackouts.
[01:24:15]  It's possible that I did this.
[01:24:17]  They were fired.
[01:24:18]  No one else was.
[01:24:20]  They claimed that their policy is basically like, if there's an arrest, there's a suspension.
[01:24:25]  If there's conviction, there's a firing.
[01:24:27]  Or if there's incontrovertible proof.
[01:24:30]  But meanwhile, you have another wrestler, Velveteen Dream, who multiple people on Twitter have showed screenshots of DMs of him flirting with underage guys.
[01:24:41]  Class.
[01:24:42]  And like, even there's like a audio clip from him sending it within some messaging app, asking one of them, where do you go to school?
[01:24:51]  And they've kind of ignored it.
[01:24:54]  And this is also a guy who's just had a lot of disciplinary issues anyway, so it's just bizarre that they are.
[01:24:59]  And Matt Riddle, the former UFC fighter who's there, who his ex-mistress accused of sexually assaulting her during their relationship, he tried to get a restraining order against her only for her to go to Times Up Legal Defense Fund, get an awesome lawyer, and then have that lawyer point out repeatedly in the responses, like, it seems like you fabricated some of the evidence here.
[01:25:23]  Yeah.
[01:25:23]  Like trying to make one tweet look like another.
[01:25:28]  Like in terms of like, this is us redacting where she didn't redact someone's phone number when in actuality, no, they were putting a piece of paper over the one where she did redact it.
[01:25:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:25:38]  And just stuff like that, checking off the she threatened to use weapons boxes and then saying nothing about it and all sorts of stuff like that.
[01:25:46]  And then all, so like, and he's just still around.
[01:25:51]  Although now they've taken his first name away, which reportedly is so people are less likely to find bad stories about him when they Google him.
[01:26:00]  That makes sense.
[01:26:01]  Yeah, that's why I stopped going by Gretchen.

=== Redacting Revelations (03:00) ===

[01:26:06]  Well, Jesus, David, thank you.
[01:26:08]  Thank you for joining us.
[01:26:09]  This has been a hell of a journey into the heart of the WWE.
[01:26:15]  Before we go, do you have any stuff you want to plug real quick?
[01:26:18]  I know you said you had a podcast.
[01:26:20]  Yes, yes, thank you.
[01:26:21]  So, you know, like you said, I think up front and also in the description, I'm on Twitter at David Bix, David B-I-X.
[01:26:30]  My podcast that I do every week with my friend Chris Elner, a wrestling historian, between the sheets taken from the dirt sheet nickname for the wrestling newsletters, every week we do an absurdly long podcast looking through how a given week in history was covered by wrestling media, sometimes finding some very questionable stories and very obvious sourcing from certain people that were known to be talking to such newsletters.
[01:26:57]  And it's a lot of fun and it's very different and it's probably a deeper dive than you'll get on anything else if you're into this kind of stuff.
[01:27:04]  And you can find that pretty much wherever you find podcasts.
[01:27:08]  Just look for the one that has us as the hosts.
[01:27:11]  We also have Patreon, patreon.com slash between the sheets, where if you do the $5 level or higher, you'll get a deep dive into a given topic.
[01:27:22]  So basically instead of a week, it's a topic or a multi-part series.
[01:27:26]  And so we're in the middle of like four of six on one that we were doing.
[01:27:31]  And we'll throw in other stuff, mailbags and stuff.
[01:27:33]  And at higher levels, they can pick a week, stuff like that.
[01:27:36]  And the other thing, I need to start giving this more attention because part of it I was actually waiting for the Business Insider article to come out because I had recorded a podcast that I wanted to be able to release after that.
[01:27:49]  And then COVID happened and the articles got delayed for months and months, which worked out for the best because there was certain sourcing and stuff we had after, but still.
[01:27:57]  So I do have a sub stack, Babyface V Heal.
[01:28:01]  You know, try to put up whatever, you know, I'm not doing anywhere else or my geekier pursuits up there.
[01:28:08]  And the podcast is going to be there too.
[01:28:09]  And hopefully it'll come fairly soon.
[01:28:11]  I just want to do new wraparounds for that one because it's a so it's two parts with me and David Roth, the formerly dead spin now defector, going over the Phil Mushnick lawsuit, which, because he is so fascinated by Phil Mushnik being in the right on something, is pretty interesting stuff.
[01:28:26]  And hopefully it'll come out within the next month or so.
[01:28:30]  Sick.
[01:28:31]  That's about it.
[01:28:32]  Well, thank you, David.
[01:28:34]  I am going to go back and take some steroids, I believe.
[01:28:39]  Liz, I'm sure, will go to her usual.
[01:28:41]  Liz manufactures steroids during the day, usually as sort of like a day job.
[01:28:45]  She does it more for the passion.
[01:28:47]  And of course, our producer here will most likely have me sign a contract where I give him 90% of my earnings and then force me to take Liz's drug.
[01:28:57]  So we're all on board, baby.
[01:29:00]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[01:29:02]  And we'll see you in the ring, baby.
[01:29:04]  My pleasure.
[01:29:05]  Thanks for having me.

=== Grabbed Liver, Jokey Jokey (03:09) ===

[01:29:06]  Oh no, I'm getting punched.
[01:29:35]  See, this is the problem.
[01:29:35]  This is the problem.
[01:29:36]  This is why we can never do this again.
[01:29:38]  You can't.
[01:29:39]  It's like we got to do, and you know, we got to do the intros.
[01:29:43]  We got to do the outros.
[01:29:44]  And we just sit here.
[01:29:44]  We're sitting here like schmuck staring at each other.
[01:29:46]  And it's like, a frame of reference, a little behind the curtain.
[01:29:50]  Liz Young Chopsky and I have been sitting here for 45 minutes trying to craft this two-minute outro by not saying anything and just staring at each other.
[01:29:58]  It is three in the morning.
[01:29:59]  I just want to get out of here.
[01:30:00]  And finally, something in my brain stapped.
[01:30:02]  I was like, why don't I pretend to get punched?
[01:30:04]  But then I started doing it.
[01:30:05]  And right as I started doing it, I was like, oh, Liz is going to think I'm stupid.
[01:30:08]  I'm going to pull my punches on myself.
[01:30:10]  I think that in retrospect, I'm in for a great ending bit.
[01:30:16]  Oh, thank you.
[01:30:17]  I'll keep going then.
[01:30:18]  Oh, ow.
[01:30:19]  Oh, no.
[01:30:20]  All right.
[01:30:20]  All right.
[01:30:21]  I think we're good.
[01:30:22]  My dad.
[01:30:23]  So my dad, when I was younger, used to, no, Real quick, real quick, real quick.
[01:30:27]  My dad, when I was younger, used to do this thing to me where he'd grab my liver like he'd like, or like make it stand into a stop.
[01:30:37]  What?
[01:30:38]  Yeah.
[01:30:38]  And so, like, you know, well, I don't know.
[01:30:41]  You can't grab an organ.
[01:30:45]  Well, I mean, he couldn't grab mine anyways.
[01:30:47]  I am the body without organs.
[01:30:49]  It's about books about me.
[01:30:51]  But he would make his hand into a claw and just shove it into my side.
[01:30:56]  Not too hard or anything, although sometimes.
[01:30:59]  And he would go, oh, he grabbed my liver.
[01:31:02]  He grabbed my liver.
[01:31:03]  And I guess that was from like wrestling he used to watch as a kid, but that always stuck with me.
[01:31:07]  Like, so sometimes whenever I have literally been like that phrase for some reason popped into my head a lot.
[01:31:14]  And I've actually been getting like my physical real ass kicked.
[01:31:18]  Well, not my actual ass, like my face and chest and stuff, like beat up by people.
[01:31:23]  And I've thought that in my head, like, oh, he grabbed my liver.
[01:31:25]  He grabbed my liver.
[01:31:27]  And it's always so fucking funny to me.
[01:31:30]  Because you just imagine anyone who's getting beat up saying that.
[01:31:33]  I guess in wrestling, we used to have the claw and he would grab people's livers.
[01:31:37]  This seems fucked up on your dad's part.
[01:31:41]  He would, well, eventually he told me that I actually don't have a liver.
[01:31:45]  So he wouldn't really fuck with me.
[01:31:46]  Yeah, well, my dad is with that organ.
[01:31:48]  So you're fine.
[01:31:48]  You know, it's just, it's like a, it's like a hard pinch of a lot of your body.
[01:31:52]  It's not like that.
[01:31:53]  Really punch me.
[01:31:55]  Anyways, my name is Liver.
[01:32:01]  I'm Liz.
[01:32:02]  That was funny.
[01:32:03]  No, you're liver.
[01:32:04]  You're liver friends.
[01:32:05]  That got me.
[01:32:06]  That got me.
[01:32:08]  And we are joined by Young Kidney.
[01:32:10]  And the episode is called.

=== Betting On Micropods (01:15) ===

[01:32:16]  Well, you're just changing it up.
[01:32:19]  Fuck, man.
[01:32:20]  Do you know what happens is that we always lose it around this time.
[01:32:23]  Also, when we do an interview, because now it's like, oh, now it's time, our time to be jokey, jokey, jokey.
[01:32:29]  But if we do like a whole episode where it's just the two of us, we don't like kind of collapse towards the end like we're doing right now.
[01:32:35]  Well, also, our episodes are like two hours long now.
[01:32:38]  Yeah.
[01:32:38]  And I get home.
[01:32:39]  Do you know when that happened?
[01:32:40]  Why are we that happened?
[01:32:43]  And we say that every three episodes, we're like, wait, we just recorded like two hours.
[01:32:46]  And then like, I know someone on Twitter said that.
[01:32:48]  They said, you're, you always go long.
[01:32:52]  Yeah.
[01:32:52]  Yeah.
[01:32:52]  Sorry, guys.
[01:32:54]  Yeah.
[01:32:55]  You know what?
[01:32:55]  Next one?
[01:32:56]  15 minutes.
[01:32:58]  Yeah.
[01:32:58]  We're doing, actually, we're just doing 10-minute sod sickles.
[01:33:02]  Yeah, micropods.
[01:33:04]  Micropods.
[01:33:05]  Yes.
[01:33:06]  Yes.
[01:33:06]  I bet we could.
[01:33:07]  I tell you what.
[01:33:08]  I bet if you wrote up like a thing about micropods, we could get someone to give us a bunch of money.
[01:33:13]  A little micropodding.
[01:33:15]  We could get iHeartRadio or something to give us like a billion dollars if we did micropods.
[01:33:19]  Another billion dollars.
[01:33:20]  Another.
[01:33:21]  Yes, excuse me.
[01:33:21]  Yeah, they did give us a billion dollars just to start.
[01:33:23]  Stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:33:27]  All right, let's get let's let's end this fucking thing before I say something stupid.
[01:33:31]  All right, we'll see you next time.