41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED

33. 2003 - The McMahons Are All Over The Product

Priorities, people.

By 2003, people were exhausted by the McMahon family’s presence on television - and, since the same thing was true in 2000, anti-nepotism sentiment was rampant.

2003 was another year of controversy-desperate WWE TV. The French were bad and snooty again, through La Resistance. Jim Ross was set on fire. Al Wilson got boned to smithereens. The McMahons were in fact all over the product, and you’d hope the content of the storylines, or at least one, had something to do with it.

Vince, who had turned red, was as high as ever on power, kicking around a one-legged wrestler. Shane McMahon lived out his pathetic tough guy fantasies by trying to kill Kane. It gets much worse.

Linda McMahon was sexually assaulted by Eric Bischoff, who wanted to piss Shane off. Moreover, the Stephanie McMahon character revealed that, when she was younger - underage - Vince sexually trafficked her to business associates to get deals done. This was awful then; in light of Janel Grant’s lawsuit, it is beyond the pale.

You’d like to think all of this was rejected and deemed disgusting by the voter base on its own terms. In reality, the vote was probably not cast on behalf of abuse survivors, but on behalf of the poor undersized wrestlers, like Akio and Billy Kidman, who just weren’t getting a push. That’s sadly not a joke, again, since that specific Stephanie angle received a lesser share of the vote (26) to the general nepotism and creative awfulness (113).

The mere existence of the McMahon characters was worse, got it.