On Monday, Janel Grant dismissed her lawsuit against World Wrestling Entertainment and Vince McMahon, moving her case from the federal courts to private arbitration.
The arbitration will be held confidentially and will likely end in Grant receiving a settlement.
Grant filed her suit in January 2024. Details of her case were reported by Vice and the Wall Street Journal shortly after, including the existence of a federal criminal investigation into McMahon involving some of the allegations she herself had made – sex assault and sex trafficking. Grant said she received notice in December that the FBI had stopped pursuing the case.
The fallout of Grant’s case erupted in the WWE shareholder trial, where revelations that executives with both the company and TKO had violated rules and deleted evidence – specifically Signal chat messages. The allegations were part of a sanctions filing by Judge J. Travis Laster, who declared numerous shareholder claims as facts in the case after executives broke rules and deleted messages .
Some of the messages were related to a criminal investigation of McMahon by the FBI and the Department of Justice. Laster wrote in his sanctions order that after WWE general counsel warned board members and executives to not delete text messages and other electronic data. They deleted the messages anyway.
This wasn’t the first time this year TKO executives had been accused of deleting text messages that had been ordered to be held as evidence. Dana White testified in a hearing in an anti-trust case involving fighter Misha Cirkunov in February, stating he hadn’t deleted texts. Cirkunov’s reps asked for the hearing complaining that
