Linda McMahon’s longtime relationship with her ex-husband Vince McMahon is a complicated one.
The couple dated throughout high school and wedded when Linda was 17. Together they founded the sports-entertainment company that eventually became known as World Wrestling Entertainment—WWE for short—that made them billionaires.
Below is a look back at the couple’s decades-long relationship, including reports of infidelity, bankruptcy, and, most recently, the announcement of a separation just as Linda is poised to lead the Department of Education as a Donald Trump appointee.
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An early start
Linda, 76, and Vince, 79, are both natives of North Carolina. Vince had a turbulent childhood and was raised by his mom and numerous stepfathers—including one who abused him and his mother—after his biological dad, the big-shot wrestling promoter Vincent J. McMahon, abandoned the family when he was a baby. Linda, meanwhile, was the only child in a conservative Baptist family.
Linda first met Vince when she was 13 and he was 16. They connected through her parents, who worked in the same building as Vince’s mom at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. Vince said in 2010 that he enjoyed spending time with Linda’s family because her household was filled with “stability and love” and he “wanted more of it.”
Linda and Vince started dating while they were in high school, despite their schools—a military academy in Virginia for Vince, a public school near the North Carolina coast for Linda—being hundreds of miles apart.
After graduation, Vince moved back to his home state and attended East Carolina University to study marketing. Vince asked Linda to marry him after she graduated high school and they got hitched shortly after, with Linda saying “I do” when she was just 17 in 1966. She then joined Vince in enrolling at East Carolina that same year to study French.
Bankruptcy, pregnancy, and a repossessed car
Linda graduated from ECU in three years and the couple moved to Maryland. There, Linda worked at a corporate law office where she translated French documents, trained as a paralegal, and studied intellectual property rights. At the same time, Vince said he worked as many as 90 hours a week at a nearby quarry.
Vince wanted to be a promoter like his father, who he first met when he was 12, and he invested his earnings into a number of failed business ventures. That included financing a stunt by Evel Knievel and investing in a construction company that Linda said went “belly up.”
By 1976, the couple was on the ropes financially. They briefly relied on food stamps and, by the year’s end, filed for bankruptcy. Linda said she watched in agony as her car was repossessed from her driveway while she was pregnant with Stephanie, her second child and only daughter. The McMahon’s house was eventually auctioned off, too.
Big break
The McMahon’s didn’t let that setback kill their big business dreams. Instead, as Linda explained to CNBC in 2017, they needed to “go right back into it, on the mission and the plan and the strategy that we knew and understood.”
That strategy, it turns out, was pro-wrestling.
Vince had already been working for his father’s World Wide Wrestling Federation in a number of roles—as a promoter, play-by-play commentator, and as a ring announcer—but they made their big break in the early 1980s when the couple officially founded Titan Sports. That company, which later was renamed to the WWE, employed Linda as its “co-chief executive” and exploded in popularity after the McMahon’s purchased the WWF in 1982 from Vince’s ailing father.
The McMahon’s transformed professional wrestling from an industry controlled by regional promoters and turned it into a national spectacle, with super stars like Hulk Hogan and The Rock central to its takeover.
Scandals in the ‘90s
The first of many scandals in Vince’s career came in the early 1990s. The bombastic CEO was indicted for allegedly overlooking the distribution out steroids to his wrestlers—a charge that could have sent him to prison for up to 11 years. In the trial, wrestlers attributed their drug use to wanting to meet the demands of Vince and their fans. Vince was ultimately acquitted, but the scandal shined a light on the darker side of his rapidly-growing wrestling world.
Just prior to the scandal going public, Linda penned a memo to the company’s vice president ordering him to terminate the on-call physician and warn him about imminent charges he faced over steroid distribution. Linda’s political opponents later used this letter—nicknamed the “tip-off” letter—against her during her failed 2010 Senate campaign.
Not long after, in 1992, a former referee in the WWF accused Vince of raping her in a limousine after she allegedly refused to give him oral sex. McMahon has long denied that accusation.
Fallout from that allegation lingered into the 21st century, with the ex-wrestler Leonard Inzitari corroborating the claim in a 2022 interview with New York magazine.
That interview came just after Vince’s accuser, Rita Chatterton, filed a sexual abuse lawsuit that was ultimately settled outside of court.
Tanning bar incident
Vince grabbed unsavory headlines again in 2006 after a woman told police the WWE boss had showed her naked photos of himself, groped her, and tried to kiss her inside a Florida tanning salon.
The woman allegedly fled in distress to a Papa John’s location at the end of a Boca Raton strip mall before calling authorities. The alleged incident was recorded by police, who wrote in a report that there is “probable cause to believe that Vince McMahon did actually and intentionally touch against the will” of the victim. However, authorities ultimately decided to not press charges against the celeb, who’d been in town for the Royal Rumble in nearby Miami.
The former WWE writer, Chris DeJoseph, revealed this year that he was at the McMahon family home for a meeting when the allegation first became public. He said both Linda and Stephanie were peeved.
“The meeting was completely cut off,” DeJoseph said. “We were all thrown out. We all had to go home. We got halfway throughout our meeting and that was it, and we didn’t see him for another three days. And I remember Stephanie, I think she was red hot. I think Linda was pretty hot, too.”
McMahon denied any wrongdoing through his lawyers in 2006.
Gig in Trump Administration
The McMahons were longtime supporters of Trump and made a pair of donations in 2007 and 2009 that totaled $9 million to his foundation. It was around that time when Trump appeared on Wrestlemania in 2007 and famously shaved off Vince’s hair on live TV.
Years later, Linda went as far as donating $6 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC just before Trump was elected to his first term in office.
Shortly after winning the election, Trump announced in December 2016 that he’d nominated McMahon to lead the Small Business Administration. She was easily confirmed for the role and served in the position until 2019, when she resigned to lead a Super PAC that sought to get Trump re-elected.
Her tenure was widely viewed as successful and was scandal free. Perhaps that’s why she is—so far—the only member from Trump’s first term to be appointed to his cabinet a second time. In the meantime, she’s serving as a co-chair on Trump’s transition team.
Deluge of sexual misconduct allegations
Perhaps the darkest year for the McMahon family came in 2022. That’s when Vince was slapped with bombshell allegations of sexual assault and secret settlements.
The WWE’s board launched a probe into a supposed $3 million settlement McMahon made to a former employee he allegedly had an affair with. The woman, who’d been hired as a paralegal, reportedly saw her salary double once their relationship began. Once it ended, the Wall Street Journal reported that the woman was pressured to sign an agreement that silenced her.
That probe opened the floodgates for a deluge of sordid allegations. The WWE’s board said it uncovered that he’d paid a combined $12 million to four women over the years in exchange for their silence over allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.
Among the worst allegations came from a former wrestler who accused Vince of coercing her into performing oral sex on him. When he allegedly pushed for more and the woman declined, she claimed that Vince demoted her and then let her contract expire. He was also accused of sending unsolicited nude photos to a woman in the company.
McMahon and WWE declined to comment at the time to the Wall Street Journal.
McMahon’s image had been tarnished and pressure grew for him to step down at WWE. He did just that in June, but he was back at the company by January 2023.
That second stint didn’t last long. A little over a year later, Vince resigned from his role as CEO of the TKO Group—the name of the merged company between UFC and WWE—after he was hit with more sexual misconduct allegations.
Those allegation came from Janel Grant, a woman who worked in WWE’s legal and talent departments. She alleged that Vince had forced her into a sexual relationship—threatening to fire her if she didn’t oblige—and passed around pornographic pictures and videos of her to other men in the company. Vince has denied those accusations.
Lawsuit and a quiet divorce
Both Linda and Vince have been named in the most recent sex scandal involving the McMahon name. Five former ring boys accused the couple of inaction in a sex abuse lawsuit. The anonymous men alleged that between the 1970s to the 1990s, the former WWE announcer Melvin Phillips Jr. groomed and sexually assaulted them and other minors—abuse they allege was known about by the company’s executives but was not acted upon.
Phillips’ “peculiar and unnatural interest” in young boys prompted the couple to fire the announcer in 1988, the lawsuit said. However, they quickly reinstated him on the condition he “steer clear from kids,” which the lawsuit claims he didn’t.
Linda’s lawyer, Laura Brevetti, called the lawsuit’s complaints “baseless” on Wednesday. It was in that very statement that Brevetti revealed Linda and Vince, after nearly six decades together, were separated.
“This civil lawsuit based upon thirty-plus year-old allegations is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations, and misrepresentations regarding Linda McMahon,” Brevetti said in a statement to the Daily Beast. “The matter at the time was investigated by company attorneys and the FBI, which found no grounds to continue the investigation. Ms. McMahon will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit and without doubt ultimately succeed.”
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