WWE's Cody Rhodes And Triple H Address Recent Vince McMahon Allegations
Cody Rhodes and Triple H asked about the "dark cloud" of Vince McMahon.
With Vince McMahon having been forced to resign in disgrace for a second time in the midst of allegations of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse from former WWE employee Janel Grant, the post-Royal Rumble press conference saw that matter raised with both Cody Rhodes and Paul Levesque.
At around the 20-minute mark of the press conference, Nick Hausman of Haus of Wrestling was the first to bring up the allegations against McMahon, asking Cody about the "dark cloud" over WWE and what changes can be made to the company.
Rhodes - who won the men's Royal Rumble last night - responded:
"I know as far as the news is concerned, we were finding it out, reading the same things that you guys were reading. You said a dark cloud, certainly. As far as TKO, Nick Khan and the board clearly took it very seriously, acted immediately. Looking at the future, I don't know the answer to that, and I think somewhere is a really probably basic tenet of just this crew more than ever, from a roster standpoint, is very family. [I've] never seen anything like this. Most of the time, wrestling locker-rooms [feature] fighting, making fun of each other, sandbagging each other in the ring, all that nonsense. This crew is very team-based, and perhaps that's the ingredient; is everyone looking out for everyone, being accountable. I know for me as a performer and competitor, I've been through dark periods in our industry before, and it might sound cheesy, but it's very reinforcing if you're in my position that it's a time when, 'Hey, we've got 50,000 people out here. I want to give them something else from this weekend that isn't a terrible situation, terrible news.' And I think we were able to do that, and obviously as more news comes out we'll be seeing it just like you do."
Speaking after Cody, Paul Levesque was likewise asked about the recent allegations against Vince McMahon, although Levesque opted to focus on the positives of what he labelled an "amazing week" for the organisation in regards to striking a deal with Netflix and Dwayne Johnson joining the TKO Board of Directors.
When asked by Jon Alba of Fightful about what degree of prior knowledge he had of the allegations against McMahon, Levesque responded:
"I'm gonna do exactly what you would expect me to do here. Look, we just had an amazing week. I just said it, a ten-year, $5 billion Netflix deal, Rock joining our Board, we just sold out the Royal Rumble, put 48,000 people in the Tropicana Field. I choose to focus on the positive. Yes, there's a negative, but I wanna focus on that and just keep it to that."
Cameron Hawkins of The Ringer would follow that up by asking the WWE Chief Content Officer about what's being put in place to help employees feel safe.
From Levesque:
"I'll give you the most generalised answer that I can: everything possible. That is a very important thing to us, a very important topic to us. It's as simple as 'everything possible'.
When Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics asked if Levesque had read the lawsuit put against McMahon, the response was:
"I did not. I think Cody mentioned it, that we all found out in real-time when you were, and that's the truth. I'll go back to what I said before. It's an amazing week for us. I just, at this point, I don't even want to get bogged down in the negatives of it. I just want to focus on the positives and where we're going. We're at the most exciting time of the year for us, we're at the most exciting point to me, business-wise, that we've ever had. Cody might have said, I don't know exactly how he said it, but the best positioning of this company since the Attitude Era. I've been through that era, I understand what it's like. I feel like we are in the middle of something that, while we might not be able to put our finger on it right now, five or ten years from now we're going to be saying, like, 'Wow, what a time that was!' I want to focus on that.
While it was always going to be the case that the alleged disgusting behaviour of Vince McMahon would be handled in such a way by WWE personnel if brought up to them, credit goes to those journalists at the post-Royal Rumble press conference who attempted to raise this matter with Cody Rhodes and Paul Levesque.
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