As Linda McMahon is set to face a confirmation hearing Thursday to lead the Education Department, several former WWE employees, their family members and two current and former education officials are raising concerns about whether she is fit for the position overseeing more than 50 million students in about 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools around the United States.
At issue, these people say, is her commitment to safeguarding children and overseeing Title IX, which protects students against discrimination, amid allegations in an October lawsuit that she was involved in turning a blind eye to child sex abuse at the hands of a World Wrestling Entertainment employee during her tenure as an executive at WWE. An attorney for McMahon has denied the claims. McMahon isn’t accused of sexual abuse.
“I’ve had many friends who have their own histories and their own traumas with sexual assault that have reached out and said, ‘This is a slap in the face,’” Kristina Ishmael, an Education Department official in the Biden administration, told NBC News.
A current Education Department employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of losing her job said she also had concerns about McMahon’s competence to lead the department because of her involvement in the lawsuit and lack of education experience.
The lawsuit accused McMahon and her husband, WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, of enabling the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, known as “ring boys,” by a WWE ring announcer decades ago.
“She let a pedophile run through her company,” said the sister of an alleged victim, her voice breaking with emotion. She spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identities of some of the John Does. “She knew better. It was her duty to report this to the police and have that man arrested.”
If she is confirmed, McMahon could face a unique challenge, leading a department Trump hopes to dismantle. Sources familiar with the plan told NBC News that Trump is preparing an executive order to eliminate the department, a move that would require congressional approval.
Top Senate Democrats who spoke with NBC News appear more focused on policy questions for McMahon than on the controversies surrounding WWE.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking minority member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he’s likely to focus his questioning on how strongly she’d push to privatize public education, whether she’d support pay raises for teachers and whether she’d support efforts to cut programs in low-income school districts.
An aide to a Democratic senator on the HELP Committee said McMahon’s lawsuit is “on our radar, but we’re not going to show our cards before the hearing.”
McMahon would come to the job with very little education experience. She previously served for one year on the Connecticut Board of Education in 2009. She stepped down from that role and as CEO of WWE ahead of her unsuccessful run for the Senate in 2010. She had a second unsuccessful Senate run in 2012. And she was the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term and is currently an independent director of Trump’s media company.
McMahon, a mother of two, touted being behind WWE’s Get R.E.A.L. program during her confirmation hearing for her seat on Connecticut’s Board of Education in 2009. The program, which launched in 2001, used WWE superstars to deliver educational messages to teenagers.
In a statement denying the allegations against McMahon, attorney Laura Brevetti said: “This civil lawsuit based upon thirty-plus year-old allegations is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations, and misrepresentations regarding Linda McMahon. Ms. McMahon will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit and without doubt ultimately succeed.”
An attorney for Vince McMahon told NBC News in a statement that the negligence claims in the lawsuit are “untrue and unfounded.” Representatives for WWE and its parent company, TKO, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The White House didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment on the allegations against Linda McMahon.
McMahon is named as a defendant alongside Vince McMahon, WWE and TKO Group Holdings in a lawsuit filed in October in state court in Maryland on behalf of five men who allege they were sexually abused as boys by Melvin Phillips Jr., a ringside announcer for WWE, in the 1980s. The lawsuit alleges McMahon knew about the sexual abuse and did nothing to stop it.
Phillips is alleged to have used his position to recruit adolescent ring boys to help set up and take down wrestling rings at WWE events, only to exploit them later under the guise of mentorship, according to the lawsuit.
A ring boy who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit told NBC News he suffered physical and sexual abuse by Phillips, who died in 2012.
“It definitely was not a safe place for a child to be,” said the former ring boy, who requested anonymity because the alleged abuse took place when he was a minor.
He said it was exciting to be a part of WWE and “to meet the wrestlers and be on the road and do things that normal kids didn’t get to do.”
But he said Phillips “could strike out at any time. He would force himself on us. He would just throw you down on the ground and use wrestling to sexually abuse the boys.”
Since the lawsuit was filed, other accusers have come forward.
As the leader of the Education Department, Linda McMahon would oversee its Office for Civil Rights, which enforces critical child protection policies like Title IX, a civil rights law that prevents federally funded schools from practicing sex discrimination.
During Trump’s first administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos overhauled campus sexual assault regulations to give accused students more avenues to defend themselves, restrict how schools could investigate sexual assault allegations and limit schools to investigating only incidents that happen at school or as parts of school activities.
Last year, during Biden’s tenure, the department rescinded the Trump administration changes and replaced them with ones more favorable to LGBTQ students and to students coming forward with abuse allegations, but a judge struck them down.
In a letter sent to schools this month, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, said the department would begin enforcing the first Trump-era regulations again.
In addition, education groups and department officials are concerned about what McMahon’s leadership could mean for the Office for Civil Rights’ future if the department were to be dismantled. The National Education Association, a teachers labor union, explained in an article on its website how folding the Office for Civil Rights into another agency could harm students.
“Many expect the White House to move the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, a move that would severely weaken its ability to protect students against discrimination based on race, gender, and disability,” the NEA wrote on its website.
The Justice Department’s civil rights work is primarily carried out through litigation, and the Justice Dept’s civil rights division conducts only a fraction of the administrative enforcement investigations that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights does. “So that means that you are filing a lawsuit that’s going to take years,” said Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, representing Education Department employees, as well as an attorney for the department’s Office for Civil Rights. “We are enforcement. We are not litigators. We don’t have to file with the courts. We are able to pick up the phone with the school district.” The Education Department can cut funding to a school for refusing to come to an agreement.
While the country’s largest education labor unions are concerned about the potential elimination of the department, others say it could be a good thing overall.
DeVos, who has long supported privatizing schools, echoed Trump’s call to eliminate the department, saying, “Students will be better off without” it.
In an op-ed in Bari Weiss’ online publication The Free Press published Thursday, DeVos calls the Education Department a “middleman” that serves only to add “cost and complexity.” She said she struggled to get the department to “make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first.”
The former ring boy who spoke to NBC News said that while he never met Linda McMahon, he was deeply concerned that she may lead the Education Department because she’s not taking any accountability for what happened to him and others at WWE.
“Until she takes accountability and shows some remorse and some responsibility, then she shouldn’t have that position,” he said. “She’s involved in covering it up. So what else will she cover up?”
Allegations that McMahon and her husband were aware of claims against Phillips first surfaced in the late 1980s, when she reportedly played a role in rehiring him after his initial dismissal in 1988. He was fired again in 1992 with $300,000 severance, according to the lawsuit.
In a sworn deposition first reported by Business Insider, New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick testified that Vince McMahon admitted both he and Linda McMahon knew about what they characterized as Phillips’ “unnatural interest and attachment to children.” Vince McMahon reportedly said, “Linda and I decided this was wrong,” and the McMahons fired Phillips, only to rehire him weeks later. According to Mushnick’s testimony, Vince McMahon claimed, “He was returned by Linda,” with the condition that he “steer clear of underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids.”
By 1992, accusations against Phillips and WWE employees burst into full public view, with ring boy Tom Cole filing a lawsuit against World Wrestling Federation, Mel Phillips and others alleging abuse. Linda and Vince McMahon weren’t named as defendants in Cole’s lawsuit. Cole claimed he was fired after he refused to engage in sexual acts with another WWE executive. He settled to get his job back with $55,000 in back pay, according to the agreement signed by Linda McMahon.
Tom Cole’s brother Lee Cole told NBC News that Linda personally contacted his brother over the years. She also thanked him for staying silent about the abuse at WWE during her 2010 Senate run, according to the current lawsuit.
Lee Cole said his brother’s final words to him before he died by suicide in 2021 still haunt him: “You make sure you let them know what they did to me.”
Lee Cole now hosts the podcast “Wrestling with the Devil,” on which he amplifies the voices of former ring boys who allege abuse by Phillips.
A supporter of Trump’s, he is disturbed by the choice of McMahon to lead the Education Department — and he has written to Sanders, of the Senate HELP Committee, to raise concerns about her nomination.
“I’m a big Trump supporter, and I’m very disappointed in his selection of Linda McMahon,” Cole said. “It didn’t matter whether you were a child, a man, a woman — nobody was safe from sexual abuse in that company.”
