Vince McMahon Was Allegedly Involved With WWE WrestleMania 39, Communicated With Endeavor Execs Ahead Of 2023 Return

Court documents have seemingly revealed that Vince McMahon collaborated with Endeavor executives ahead of his brief 2023 WWE return, with McMahon supposedly involved with WrestleMania 39.

In documents obtained by Brandon Thurston in collaboration with POST Wrestling, documents obtained as part of the ongoing WWE shareholder lawsuit seemingly show that McMahon was in contact with Endeavor execs, with message logs including the likes of Mark Shapiro, current TKO chief financial officer Andrew Schleimer, and then-Endeavor CFO Jason Lublin detailing McMahon’s status with WWE post-retirement following claims of ‘hush money’ settlements made by McMahon to alleged abuse victims using company money.

A message exchange between Shapiro, Schleimer, and Lublin in July 2022 ‘predicted’ that McMahon would be back in WWE by 2023:

“Nick and Stephanie are going to take over the WWE for the next nine months. Vince [will] be back with a new board or he will take the company private or he will sell it/coming to us. The race is on. The courtship is on,” Shapiro wrote in a message dated July 22 2022 - the day McMahon announced his ‘retirement’. Why Shapiro was seemingly so confident with his prediction is at this time unknown. This ultimately led to January 2023 where McMahon used his controlling voting power to return to the company as a board member, rearrange the board’s membership and announce the plans to sell WWE.

The documents are part of a lawsuit filed by WWE shareholders against McMahon and Endeavor, with Nick Khan, Paul Levesque, and former WWE executives George Barrios and Michelle Wilson also named as defendants. The plaintiffs in the suit - led by the Ohio Laborers’ Pension Fund - have accused McMahon of orchestrating the WWE/UFC merger in order to consolidate power and put his own interests above those of other shareholders.

The documents further show communication between McMahon and Endeavor head Ari Emanuel during McMahon’s hiatus from WWE, including an August 2022 exchange where Emanuel offered to fly from Paris to Italy to meet McMahon after McMahon met with a senior banker who served as WWE’s financial advisor during the sale process. That same banker had worked with Endeavor previously as well as McMahon as part of the 2020 XFL re-launch.

Further exchanges were revealed between McMahon and WWE CEO Nick Khan in February 2023 concerning creative matters for the then impending WrestleMania 39 event, with McMahon asking Khan if Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes were aware of ‘new creative’ for the event and the year after, with McMahon noting he had previously asked Paul Levesque and Bruce Prichard. Khan replied ‘langis’ and further told McMahon to read the word backward which is assumed to be an instruction to take the matter to Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

“That interaction, regarding “new creative,” runs counter to Khan’s statement a month later on CNBC that McMahon wasn’t involved in the creative process. The public record doesn’t show more about what “new creative” McMahon was referring to or whether he had any influence in Roman Reigns’ win over Cody Rhodes in the main event of that year’s WrestleMania, an outcome that surprised many fans,” stated Thurston in the article.

The shareholder lawsuit is now nearing the end of the discovery phase, and is scheduled to go to trial in June 2026

H/T: POST Wrestling & F4WOnline