Post Wrestling’s Brandon Thurston and John Pollock recently conducted an interview with Janel Grant, the former WWE employee and girlfriend of Vince McMahon whose sex trafficking lawsuit against McMahon and WWE (which has since been moved to private arbitration) led to McMahon’s final(?) ouster from the company in January 2024.
A year-and-a-half earlier, the story of Grant’s relationship with and alleged abuse by McMahon was leaked anonymously to the WWE Board, which then conducted an investigation
and found more than $14 million in payments for non-disclosure agreements with past McMahon partners, as well as related sexual misconduct allegations against him. A few months later, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Board’s investigation, which led to McMahon’s temporary 2022 resignation from WWE.
Post covers the backstory for their interview in much more detail, and I highly encourage you to read the write-up they published about the interview today (Sept. 22) and seek out the full interview when it drops in a special edition of the Pollock & Thurston podcast. Even just the synopsis gives us the most complete look at who Grant was before she met McMahon in 2019 that I’ve seen anywhere.
The quote summarized in our headline is what seems to be generating the most interest, however. Asked what she currently feels toward McMahon, who denies all Grant’s allegations, she replied, “forgiveness”.
The rest of her answer also reveals what “occupied her brain” rather than blaming Vince:
“Forgiveness. I don’t know how else to describe it, other than there’s something that does not take up space in my brain. I feel even empathy, because in a weird way, and this is extreme polar opposites, the thing that might… the series of events that caused The Journal story to happen — whatever it was — it equally impacted him… There are so many people involved in [the] decision-making that I can’t sit still and process.
“Instead, what occupies my brain is whatever series of events and decision-makers caused the anonymous emails to happen or The Wall Street Journal story to happen, and the events that have played out since, however they have played out. That is what occupies my brain.”
Post summarized the anonymous email situation thusly:
Just over two months after [Grant’s] NDA was signed, an anonymous emailer, identified only with the handle “drosen77,” used an encrypted email address to send various members of WWE’s board of directors three emails on March 30, April 11, and April 14, 2022, alerting directors of the relationship between Grant and McMahon. To this day, we don’t know who was behind those emails, and as far as we know, none of the various investigations related to the scandal identified the sender. The writer described themselves as her friend, but Grant denies she had anything to do with the emails.
Grant says having her story exposed publicly (and even though she wasn’t named originally, she says people she knew identified her what was included in the article) left her contemplating ending her life:
“… because my life was instantly not mine anymore. There was a narrative that rewrote my life, like my life is not mine. So what is life?”
Again, we highly encourage you to read Post’s full summary here.
