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Janel Grant, the former WWE employee who is currently suing Vince McMahon over alleged sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of McMahon, which led to McMahon having her sign an NDA. When The Wall Street Journal began reporting on the McMahon-Grant story as the WWE Board of Directors at the time became aware of the situation and launched their own internal investigation, McMahon stopped contractually agreed upon payments. This eventually led to McMahon retiring from the company, only to return and use his power as the most powerful shareholder to force himself back into power in order to sell the company to Endeavor, creating TKO. After Grant filed a lawsuit and additional aspects of McMahon's alleged acts became public knowledge, McMahon stepped away from TKO.
At an event calling for reform to prevent NDAs from being used to silence the survivors of abuse, Grant made the following comments, including stating that she was suicidal over the situation:
"I was writing this on the way in the car.
Um, wow. I'm a little taken aback. Um, I really shouldn't be here.
Um, by a series of miracles that I can't account for, I'm alive today. Whew. On June 15th, 2022, my life was rewritten into someone else's storyline and I was globally outed in the Wall Street Journal. I got a call that I didn't expect. On the day of a very big meeting of a new job I had, and it was in front of my new bosses, and it was in front of a high-rise full of residents whose homes I was entrusted to protect.
So imagine me getting a phone call I didn't expect saying that at any minute the Wall Street Journal would be publishing a story about me, Vince McMahon, and a non-disclosure agreement.
I was told, if anybody asks me about this, I can't make a comment. I can't acknowledge it. I can't say I'm not okay. And if anybody approaches me, I can't acknowledge years of life to people who saw me live it. And it was like somebody set fire to my home, intentionally with me still inside of it. So I, I blacked out and I ended up.
In a closet with a belt and a stool placed under a metal rod. And thank God somebody saw me and stopped it. But that is the life wreck and the mental health impact of this particular NDA. Oh my God. I wrote, stick with me. I'm going somewhere with this. Okay, so why am I here today, the people and organizations that have supported me when I was the loneliest person on planet Earth, when my life got decimated in the Wall Street Journal, with them, I would not be here.
And one of those people is Beth Hamilton. I read something she wrote and it helped me. And around the holidays, Thanksgiving, I reached out to thank her. And so the act of just saying thank you, like a human-to-human moment, a phone call, when that leads to this moment, me being here, it feels like something in history is about to play out differently.
It feels like the world may be signaling it's ready to change, like when somebody shows up to talk about NDAs. Um, workplace safety depends on transparency because when employees cannot speak, patterns can't be seen. When patterns can't be seen, they can't be stopped. When they can't be stopped, harm spreads.
When an NDA is used to seal dangerous behavior, it simply relocates the harm to the next employee, the next office, the next victim. No one should be required to trade silence for accountability, and no workplace should be able to become safer for an institution than the people inside of it. So for years, I have watched my life play out outside of a window, and I am serious when I tell you I went outside 10 times last year.
That is the level of threat. That is the level of feeling unsafe. That is the level of power that I am on the other side of with this NDA. I promise you, I have seen some of the worst in humanity and I have seen some of the best colors ever in people, and that is also why I'm here. I might be leaving here the same way I arrived, which is deeply struggling, financially devastated, um, no family, isolated.
But right now I'm in a dress. Smiling and I am standing in front of you, good people who are willing to take a few minutes of your life and listen. And I thank you 'cause I'm about to take you on a little bit of a ride here. Okay. I mentioned coercive control in my statement originally. I wanna offer that as something to help you immediately.
It's a tool that somebody gave me, six words, coercive control. It happens in increments. It changed my life, it empowered me. Suddenly I had words for incomprehensible relationships. It made sense why questions suddenly were not, like they didn't sting, they were just something I wasn't about to answer. Um, because I understood person-to-person relationships, person-to-workplace, and person-to-world, seriously, turn on CNN and just use a coercive control tactic and, you know, point it out, so with this one NDA, as I said, there are a lot of people living and working in fear.
We are in Connecticut. This one broke the hamster wheel for whatever you do going forward, the decisions that you make, let this be your number one cautionary tale of what you do not want under an NDA.
There are, just as an example, five, um, we'll call them intersections, lanes of traffic associated with this NDA. You have a federal criminal investigation by the DOJ, you have an SEC investigation with criminal penalties, you have a shareholder derivative suit with a trial scheduled for June. You have a Second Circuit decision about the crime-fraud exception that resulted in a loss of attorney-client privilege.
And my civil suit, my God, that's one big pileup. So this NDA was a tool that Vince could use to justify anything while I remained in a system for exploitation and actually in a position for anyone to exploit me. So in June 2022, actions and reactions told us a lot about who people are, what an environment is like, and whether we are safe.
The company reached out and requested that I make a joint statement that this was a consensual relationship and that they wanted to know this to the extent that I needed or wanted something, a.k.a. more money on the table. I refused. And then in the second Wall Street Journal story, Andrew Li, the company spokesperson, said it for me that it was consensual.
So someone, a group maybe behind my back without my knowledge, without my input, um, made that decision for me. It's consensual. We say so and pressed that decision on me via the company spokesperson in the Wall Street Journal. So leaving out one half of an experiencing party, um, on a decision like that is not consent.
The company publicly announced an investigation and I was given permission to participate in it. That was not gonna be considered a breach. They perceived that I somehow already breached. I mean, that would've been the moment to tell me. Um, here's the part that I've been really waiting to say that summer, I spent six figures to participate in this thing.
Their investigation on new legal retainers and on medical care that saved my life. I preserved my evidence. I believed that somehow I would be interviewed for this investigation and get my life back and figure out what happened. Then the feds reached out ahead of speaking with me. I was onboarding a brand-new legal team.
So while our hair was on fire and getting everyone onboarded, we gave them my evidence and said, review this in advance. Based on that objective review of hard evidence, communications with people across the company and that leadership then and now, the feds informed us that this was now a covert investigation into human trafficking and the criminal misconduct of WWE, Vince McMahon, and this NDA.
These are matters of both public safety and public interest. And if you wanna know why this case, my federal civil lawsuit, is not an employment law case, that is because the feds requested that I say nothing, that this be covert, that they could do the work that they needed to do to investigate human trafficking and criminal misconduct.
So while I was preparing to participate with the DOJ and the SEC and the company's independent investigation, um, the company's was closed without speaking to me. And, um, I couldn't share that with anybody. I'm under an NDA, so I'm just gonna speed skate like the Olympics through 2023 because I promise you this keeps building up.
There are people living and working in fear here. And there is a headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut right now that is full of intimidating people that I care very much about. Three years and five law firms cannot get answers about who, what, when, where, or why I breached. If anybody perceived it, they haven't shared it.
And I felt like I was being punished for even working with the feds. In March of 2023, I got two things from the SEC. I got a subpoena and I got whistleblower status three days later. Well, a couple days have, forgive me, Vince McMahon and Ari Emanuel suddenly appeared on CNBC to announce a deal of Endeavor and WWE, so color me the most surprised person on planet Earth.
Um, then the FBI started to send me communications that I'd been identified as a potential victim. I got those letters for two and a half years, then in July, 'cause it can get better, um, a search warrant and a grand jury subpoena with my name in it and words like trafficking were served. Then bigger, two more grand jury subpoenas were served on Jerry McDivitt and K&L Gates based on a ruling. It appears my name is in those, too.
So then in September of 2023, the company paid for my participation in the federal investigation. I was out six figures. This was a lot more. So if anyone postures like this isn't serious, they spent some serious money on it.
So I don't know how many more red flags you need. But going into 2024, when I filed my federal civil lawsuit at the last conceivable second, because I really didn't wanna do this. I knew what I would be about to throw my life into, but I had been dragged in by this NDA into a federal investigation, the SEC, all the consequences, all the things that have happened that have made my life so small and isolated, I didn't start that. It's like it found me.
I put myself in the shoes of everyone I knew, everyone I worked with, anyone who lost a job, has been intimidated, who has told something, got no answers. I put my name and my face on it, and by the way, my face, that's my work photo because that's the audience I needed to reach to tell them whatever you may have been told before, here I am.
So I could not have lived this truth bigger with that swan dive into the world and in 2024, actions and reactions continue to tell us who people are, what an environment is like, and whether it's safe. Sorry. Um, I encourage you to ask yourself, how should a reasonable person and a reasonable organization respond to my filing when it mirrors a federal and criminal investigation?
Two examples, and keep in mind these are corporate leaders who knew me by name, by face, by office location, um, by emails, by text, by casual conversation. First, during this federal investigation, a love letter was purportedly found on a corporate laptop and published in the New York Post. The article also rewrote my life again.
Um, this was a public humiliation and an intimidation of a person who gets letters from the FBI that say victim. And it's also witness intimidation. Discouraging others from speaking out, speaking to, or even associating with me for fear of their own wellbeing and their families.
And in the summer of 2024, reporters and viewers noticed there were parallels between a storyline that unfolded for several months on television and my situation.
So does it look like we work in a safe environment when the destination point, if you are hurt, is weaponized use of your experience on live TV every Monday night for months by their actions and by their reactions? This is a lot more about current leadership than it says about me.
So how do we make change in the world? By showing up in it, especially when it's a tough conversation to the board of TKO. If you didn't know this part of your origin story, now you know. I hope you will have conversations with us. I hope you have conversations amongst yourselves, and I hope that you don't rely on old instincts with new insight.
All of you have some say in how my life turns out from here, including how quickly I may be able to move on and find help and healing and leadership perhaps means stepping into the unknown, listening and discussing things, even when they're hard, being willing to take first steps like we are all right now here today.
I mean, this is the second time I've ever even spoken about this. I would've thought there would be one more time by now. Right. But it's been the feds and you, so thank you.
Um, and in conclusion, um, 'cause speaking of healing, there are organizations like The Alliance who are willing to help people like me, and I'm committed to paying it forward and supporting others as they have supported me.
I hope this time has helped to enlighten and educate and empower you in service of clarity that leads to dignified and productive conversations that create solutions.
And when the right people meet at the right time for the right reasons, mountains can move. We're already taking steps forward today. The people in this room, the people listening, and we're all working forward to evolve, to create something safer and bring the cycles that have caused so much fear and so much hurt and so much loss and grief for far too long.
On a positive note, I want to say thank you for your time. I look forward to speaking with you, and I look forward to working with you."
You can watch Grant's comments below:
***
If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or in immediate emotional distress, help is available. You can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or chat via 988lifeline.org.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911 (or your local emergency number).
If you are outside the U.S., you can find international helplines at www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines.
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