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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

An employe at McMahon's company, WWE was accused of systematically sexually assaulting vulnerable boys who worked at the company. McMahon persuaded them not to sue, and told one she would support his education. When his grades dropped, she stopped paying tuition support. He later killed himself.

In 1992, Cole, then twenty-one years old, and another ring boy told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Phillips had molested them. They said that he groped their feet for hours at a time. (Phillips would lock the kids into wrestling holds.) Sometimes he rubbed their feet on his penis. (Later, other ring boys alleged that Phillips had forced them into oral sex, ejaculated on them, and attempted to have penetrative sex with them; the McMahons have denied knowledge of the actions.) Cole later accused a W.W.E. executive named Pat Patterson of groping his butt, and an executive named Terry Garvin of turning on pornography and asking to perform oral sex on Cole during a work conversation.

When the story broke, the three men left the company. According to one account, the McMahons let Patterson go personally, at the mansion, and both Vince and Linda cried. (Patterson was reinstated soon afterward.) Vince held a series of damage-control phone calls with Phil Mushnick, a sports writer with the New York Post. Mushnick later testified in a deposition that Vince told him, “We had known for some time that Mel had a peculiar and unnatural interest and attachment to children.” Vince said that they’d fired Phillips before, years earlier, but had subsequently rehired him “out of the goodness of our hearts.” He framed this as a joint decision: “We brought him back with the caveat that he steer clear of children.”

Cole threatened to sue the company. At a meeting with the McMahons in New York to discuss a settlement, Cole’s attorney left the room several times, leaving him alone with the McMahons. Cole recollected that Linda seemed compassionate. “I thought having her present and a mother’s instincts were invaluable,” the company’s longtime lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, later said. Cole said she told him that she believed him, and that she wanted to help. He remembered her saying, “I consider you in a sense like a son. I want to look at it that way. I want you to come to me with your problems.” Cole opened up. At a later meeting at W.W.E. headquarters, according to Cole, the McMahons sought the names of other potential accusers with whom he, along with his brother Lee, was communicating. At the McMahons’ coaxing, he gave them access to his brother’s answering machine. (Vince denies this.) His lawyer had sought a monetary settlement, but Cole, who’d left the company, said that he just wanted his job back. The McMahons agreed, and also gave him fifty thousand dollars in back pay. Linda McMahon and Cole also made a separate agreement: he’d be paid as an employee but would return to school, as McMahon wanted. “I talked to this young man as I would my son, and told him how supportive of him we would be,” she later recounted. He signed a document that she’d prepared, agreeing that his employment was contingent on his academics.

As the journalist David Bixenspan, who has reported on the ring-boy allegations, has detailed, Cole enrolled at a community college. McMahon corresponded with his professors. Cole found that he was still traumatized by the abuse and had a hard time concentrating. He asked McMahon if he could drop out and resume working for the company. She told him to stick with it. Cole stopped attending class. He failed. His transcript was sent to McMahon. “I was very disappointed in your performance,” she wrote to him. “At this point we believe that we have done everything we can. Therefore, this letter is to advise you of your termination with Titan Sports, effective immediately.” She concluded, “The opportunity of a lifetime is a terrible thing to waste.”

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