Why Is the Wrestling World Still Booking John Laurinaitis?

A former WWE executive, John Laurinaitis, accused in one of the ugliest lawsuits the company has ever faced and publicly disparaged by a remarkable number of the people who worked with him, is quietly getting back onto wrestling posters. Here is who he is, what he is accused of, and why the answer should matter even if you have never watched a match in your life.

The short version, if you are in a hurry:

• John Laurinaitis, known in the ring as “Johnny Ace,” was WWE’s head of talent relations across two stints between 2004 and 2022. He was the guy whose job was to hire, fire, and decide whose career lived or died.
• He was fired in 2022 during the hush-money scandal that eventually took down WWE founder Vince McMahon, then named in 2024 in a federal sex trafficking and sexual assault lawsuit brought by former employee Janel Grant. He has denied the allegations, and was later dropped from that suit with prejudice after agreeing to cooperate with Grant’s legal team.
• Across thirty years, an astonishing number of the people who worked with him, from Jim Cornette to CM Punk to Jim Ross to Teddy Long, have gone on record to say, at various volumes of profanity, that he is one of the worst people the business has ever produced.

Now, in 2026, he has started showing up on independent wrestling event posters again.

Who Is John Laurinaitis?

If you have never watched wrestling, here is the one thing to understand: the interesting villains are not the ones in the ring.

John Laurinaitis wrestled for years, mostly in Japan and in WCW, under the name “Johnny Ace.” But that is not the job that matters here. His real power came later, and it came off-camera. Across two separate stints, Laurinaitis was WWE’s head of talent relations. In plain English: he was the executive who decided who got hired, who got pushed, who got buried, and who got the phone call telling them they were done.¹

Fans of a certain era also know his face. In the early 2010s he had an on-screen run as a smarmy corporate authority figure, a walking punchline about a middle manager drunk on his own clipboard, which, we will get to, was not exactly a stretch. He later popped up as himself on reality shows like Total Divas and Total Bellas, because in 2016 he married Kathy Colace, mother of Nikki and Brie Garcia, the wrestlers the world knew as the Bella Twins. That detail is going to come back around, and not in a fun way.²

So: a man who, for the better part of two decades inside WWE, held one of the most powerful gates in the industry, deciding other people’s livelihoods, while being, by a truly remarkable consensus, close to the last person you would want anywhere near that kind of power.

The Man Many in Wrestling Don’t Have a Kind Word For

Here is what makes the Laurinaitis story different from your average “problematic executive” think-piece. Usually, when someone falls, you get a scramble of “well, I always had a bad feeling” revisionism. With Laurinaitis, the bad feeling was documented in real time, by nearly everyone, for years before any lawsuit existed. The reviews are not mixed.

Start with Jim Cornette, the legendary manager and booker who ran WWE’s developmental territory, OVW, in the early 2000s, where he coached future megastars like John Cena and Brock Lesnar. Cornette’s run booking OVW went smoothly enough until 2004, when Laurinaitis replaced Cornette’s ally Jim Ross as the head of talent relations.

After that, by Cornette’s telling, it curdled fast: a new boss who rarely consulted him, who micromanaged from headquarters, and who, in one story Cornette still tells, had a wrestler shave his head on a whim just to see what he would look like bald. Cornette was gone within about a year, and to this day he maintains Laurinaitis engineered the whole thing to install his own people. He also, for what it is worth, ranks Laurinaitis among the worst human beings the business has ever employed, and Cornette has met basically everyone.³

Then there is the most famous shot ever fired at him. In 2011, on live television, CM Punk delivered the “pipe bomb,” the unscripted-feeling monologue wrestling fans still quote by heart. Punk’s theory of why Vince McMahon was rich but not richer was simple: he surrounded himself with “glad-handing” yes-men, and the yes-man Punk named, on air, in front of millions, was John Laurinaitis. An entire generation’s first impression of Laurinaitis is a beloved star calling him a corporate suck-up to his face.⁴

And it just keeps going, from voices with nothing in common except a shared history with the man:

• Jim Ross, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who actually hired Laurinaitis, later said on his own podcast that he came to regret it, that he had been treated poorly by a man he felt was constantly trying to prove he was the better executive. J.R. did not sound broken up about Laurinaitis losing his job.⁵
• Teddy Long, the longtime SmackDown general manager, has gone considerably further, alleging that Laurinaitis blocked him from earning a living “because of the color of my skin.” That is a former colleague, on the record, alleging racial discrimination. Not a rumor, a direct accusation.⁶
• Kevin Nash tells a small, telling story about Laurinaitis pitching a scheme to fine independent-contractor wrestlers for clocking in late, apparently missing the part where not punching a clock is the entire legal difference between a contractor and an employee. It is a tiny anecdote that says everything: eager to squeeze people, fuzzy on how anything actually works.⁷
• Ronda Rousey, in her memoir, listed Laurinaitis among the handful of WWE figures she genuinely could not stand, calling him an “all-around dirtbag,” and made a point of saying her only regret was a word count that stopped her from saying more.⁸

There is also a darker backstage story that predates all the corporate drama. During Randy Orton’s 2005 feud with The Undertaker, Orton’s father, the veteran wrestler “Cowboy” Bob Orton, is reported to have tested positive for Hepatitis C. The account that has circulated for years, traced back to the Wrestling Observer and Pro Wrestling Torch newsletters, is that Laurinaitis was told about the positive test and did not pass it along.

Bob Orton then bled during a brutal Hell in a Cell match at Armageddon 2005, enraging The Undertaker, who found out afterward from a doctor. Notice the shape of it, because it is the same shape as everything else: information that should have protected someone, sitting in the hands of a man who did not act on it.⁹

To be scrupulously fair, because a pile-on is not the same as a case, not every wrestler stayed angry. Matt Hardy, who clashed hard with Laurinaitis around his 2005 release, has since said he has made his peace and even holds some respect for him now, noting that being the executioner for Vince McMahon was a genuinely thankless job. That is real, and it belongs here. Someone has to deliver bad news in any company. But “he was the designated bad-news guy” only stretches so far. It explains a reputation for being disliked. It does not explain a reputation for being feared.¹⁰

Why Was John Laurinaitis Fired From WWE?

For years, all of this lived in the safe, self-contained universe of wrestling gossip, the kind of thing that stays on podcasts and message boards and never troubles the wider world. Then, in June 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that WWE’s board was investigating a $3 million settlement Vince McMahon had quietly paid to a former employee. As the reporting widened, the board also surfaced a batch of earlier settlements with other women who had accused the two men of misconduct, and the misconduct was not attributed to McMahon alone. Laurinaitis was named too.¹¹

He was put on leave, and by that August, he was fired. The scandal set in motion McMahon’s eventual exit from the company he had built.¹¹

Then it got much more serious. In January 2024, a former WWE employee named Janel Grant filed a lawsuit in federal court in Connecticut against McMahon, WWE, and Laurinaitis, alleging sexual assault and sex trafficking. What followed was a genuinely strange sequence of legal positioning from Laurinaitis’s side: first his lawyer suggested his client was also a victim of McMahon’s control; then, months later, Laurinaitis formally joined McMahon’s motion to force the case into private arbitration and called Grant’s allegations unfounded.

Then, in May 2025, he settled with Grant, agreed to cooperate with her legal team and provide evidence, and was dismissed from the suit with prejudice, meaning the claims against him specifically cannot be refiled. By 2026, when a new affidavit from Grant landed, his lawyer’s tone had cooled again.^{12 13 14}

Laurinaitis has consistently denied wrongdoing. His attorney points out, accurately, that his client is the only party dismissed from the lawsuit with prejudice, and describes him as the only figure cleared by the WWE board’s independent investigation. Those are real facts, and a fair piece includes them.¹⁴

The complaint complicates that second claim, though. It alleges that the WWE board’s special committee investigation, the one usually pointed to, never interviewed Grant at all, despite her being willing and prepared to take part, before it declared itself finished in November 2022. An investigation that reaches its conclusions without ever interviewing the woman at the center of the case is worth weighing with that in mind.²⁰

They are also not the same thing as innocence, and we are going to spend real time on exactly what the complaint says.

What Janel Grant’s Lawsuit Actually Alleges

On May 7, 2025, Janel Grant filed a First Amended Complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut against McMahon, WWE, and Laurinaitis. It runs to 101 pages of numbered allegations, demands a jury, and brings claims under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Speak Out Act alongside state-law claims. Everything that follows is what Grant alleges.

Laurinaitis has denied it and, as covered above, was later dismissed from the case with prejudice after settling with Grant and agreeing to cooperate against McMahon. Hold both of those facts at once: an allegation is not a verdict, and a dismissal that follows a settlement is not a finding that nothing happened.^{20 13}

How Janel Grant ended up at WWE

How Grant says she ended up there matters, because it is the spine of the whole case. In 2019 she was grieving both of her parents, unemployed, and financially wrecked when a neighbor connected her to McMahon, who lived in her building. The complaint alleges he dangled a job and, in his words, “a life,” then made a physical relationship the running price of the employment he kept promising.

She was placed in an entry-level “administrator-coordinator” job in WWE’s Legal department at $75,000, a role the complaint says was effectively invented for her. It also alleges a detail that should sound familiar by now: McMahon had signed a $7.5 million NDA with a different woman only months earlier, one more thread in the web of settlements that eventually surfaced as the hush-money scandal.²⁰

Where John Laurinaitis comes in

Laurinaitis’s role in the complaint is not that of a bystander who got unlucky, and the timeline is the reason. It alleges his involvement began in November 2020, months before Grant ever reported to him on paper, when McMahon started pressing her to make explicit photos and videos for Laurinaitis and coaching her on what to send. It alleges the two men traded explicit content through McMahon, that McMahon once video-called Laurinaitis and recorded Grant nude for him without her consent, and that Laurinaitis sent an explicit video of his own from Arizona to be passed along.

On or about December 29, 2020, the complaint alleges, the three met in person at McMahon’s condo, where McMahon told Grant to introduce herself to Laurinaitis as a neighbor and girlfriend who worked in law, not at WWE. Afterward, it alleges, Laurinaitis looked her in the eye and told her he could read people the way McMahon could and that he “would take a bullet for” McMahon, then messaged her, “Thanks for the fun afternoon.”²⁰

Only after that, on March 9, 2021, did McMahon direct Grant to transfer into the Talent Relations department to report directly to Laurinaitis, with a promised promotion to Vice President. The complaint alleges that transfer carried an expectation, from both men, that she would continue with Laurinaitis sexually, and that McMahon directed her to visit Laurinaitis before the start of workdays for sexual encounters. So the sequence it lays out is an escalation, not a single lapse: explicit content in November 2020, an in-person encounter that December, a formal move into his department that March, and then the office itself.²⁰

What the complaint says happened in the office

What that transfer looked like day to day is its own set of allegations. The complaint says that once Grant reported to him, Laurinaitis directed her to his hotel room before work, casting her as his “breakfast,” and that forcible touching became routine whenever he was in the office.

It alleges WWE built him a custom corner office suite with an internal door that connected straight into Grant’s office, and that Nick Khan and Brad Blum, two of the most senior people in the company, helped plan it. It even alleges that WWE corporate funds paid for the hotel stays where the encounters happened. If any of that holds up, it is the detail that should stop a promoter cold: not two men acting in secret, but a company arranging the room.²⁰

The single most serious allegation naming Laurinaitis concerns June 15, 2021. The complaint alleges that he and McMahon forced Grant into Laurinaitis’s office at WWE headquarters, behind a locked door while colleagues worked nearby, and assaulted her on a conference table. As she pleaded with them to stop, it alleges, it was McMahon who said “No means yes” and, moments later, “Take it, bitch,” while the two men took turns restraining her for one another and Laurinaitis forced himself on her as well. That paragraph is the thing the entire question of his comeback ultimately runs through. When a promoter books him, that is what they are booking around.²⁰

The complaint also does not treat that June 2021 assault as a single episode. It alleges that on multiple later occasions Laurinaitis called Grant into his office, locked the door, and instructed her to perform oral sex, and that this continued even after his wife, Kathy Colace (the Bella Twins’ mother), had relocated across the country to be with him.²⁰

The job itself became the leverage

The complaint frames all of this as a job as much as an assault. It alleges a badge lock was eventually installed on the outside of Grant’s office door, and that Laurinaitis tied her workload to her compliance: the less she engaged with him, the less work she was given, and he took to belittling her in front of colleagues. When she asked whether he still supported the Vice President promotion she had been promised, it alleges, he deflected and changed the subject. Reward for going along, punishment for pulling back, administered by her own boss.²⁰

Who knew

When McMahon pushed Grant to sign a $3 million NDA on her way out in early 2022, the complaint alleges she tried to name, in a schedule attached to the agreement, the people aware of the relationship whom she would still have to deal with afterward, listing Nick Khan, Brad Blum, and John Laurinaitis among them. WWE rejected the addition and reverted to its own draft. Her own contemporaneous list of who knew put Laurinaitis on it.

Two months later, the complaint alleges, McMahon’s own lawyer flagged an anonymous email describing the relationship “between Ms. Grant and McMahon and Laurinaitis,” his name once again traveling alongside McMahon’s. The complaint also places him in the executive suite: it alleges Laurinaitis personally brought Grant into an Executive Committee meeting, a room an entry-level coordinator had no business being in, where Khan acknowledged her presence without comment.²⁰

What John Laurinaitis is actually sued for

It is worth being precise about what all of this amounts to in legal terms, because the precision cuts both ways. Grant’s suit is a civil case, not a criminal prosecution, and it brings three counts specifically against Laurinaitis: sex trafficking under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, civil battery, and intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The trafficking count alleges that he and McMahon recruited and maintained her for sex on the promise of a job, security, and advancement, using coercion, while controlling her employment, with McMahon alleged to have flown Laurinaitis in from Arizona to Connecticut for the purpose. The battery and emotional-distress counts cover the office assaults and their toll, and on the trafficking count she seeks compensatory and punitive damages.

He has denied all of it. But those are the actual claims, not vague “controversy,” that a promoter now chooses to stand beside. And one small detail captures how airless the whole arrangement was: the NDA’s single concession to Grant, a favorable job reference, would by its own terms have come from Laurinaitis himself.²⁰

The wrinkle: his own lawyer once called him a victim too

There is one genuinely revealing wrinkle in how the complaint turns Laurinaitis’s own defense to its advantage. Its very first paragraph frames Grant as a victim “as both federal investigators and counsel for John Laurinaitis confirm,” a pointed callback to the moment his own lawyer told VICE that his client, like Grant, was a victim of McMahon rather than a predator.

Strip away the legal maneuvering and the awkwardness is plain: before he swung back to McMahon’s side, and long before he settled with Grant, Laurinaitis’s own attorney had gone on the record casting his client as a fellow victim of McMahon, conceding the very predatory dynamic that sits at the center of Grant’s account.^{20 12}

What has actually been proven so far

Almost none of this has been tested in a courtroom, which is precisely why the denials and the dismissal deserve their weight. But one piece has already hardened into settled fact. In January 2025 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged McMahon over failing to disclose two settlement agreements worth $10.5 million, one of them Grant’s NDA, and McMahon consented to an order finding he had circumvented WWE’s internal accounting controls.

Read the fine print, though, because it matters: that is a securities-and-accounting finding about how the money was hidden, not a court’s judgment on the abuse itself. It confirms the payments and the secrecy were real. It does not, on its own, prove what the money was for.²¹

How the case ended

Here is the development that makes the accountability question sharper, not softer. In July 2026, Grant, McMahon, and WWE jointly filed to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, with the parties preserving their right to take the dispute into the private, sealed arbitration that McMahon had pushed for from the very start. Important: Dismissed with prejudice is not the same as disproven.

It means the parties agreed to end the public court fight, not that a court weighed the allegations and rejected them. The likeliest outcome now is that the case that produced this 101-page public record finishes behind closed doors, with no trial, no jury, and no verdict anyone outside the room will ever see. And none of it changes Laurinaitis’s position, because he had already left the case more than a year earlier, dropped after agreeing to cooperate. The public accounting, such as it was, is winding down. The bookings are not.²²

Where Is John Laurinaitis Now?

You would think a man fired in a hush-money scandal and then named in a federal sex trafficking lawsuit might, at minimum, keep a low profile. For a while, he did. He vanished from public life and from social media entirely.

Then, in early 2026, John Laurinaitis started getting booked. A small Ohio-based promotion, World Classic Professional Big Time Wrestling, announced him for an appearance in Chillicothe on March 14, a signing, meet-and-greets, the whole autograph-table circuit, tied to their “March Mayhem” show. He came back to social media for the first time in years specifically to promote it.

A New Jersey convention, 80s Wrestling Con, has also booked him for an upcoming Halloween edition of their event, alongside a lineup of genuine wrestling legends, selling autographs and photo ops and “unforgettable memories.”^{15 17}

And here is the part that curdles in your stomach if you have been paying attention. Asked about his return, Laurinaitis did not talk about signing headshots. He talked about developing young talent.

He said his “one love” is to help “develop and groom young talent,” spoke warmly about wanting to build “the stars of tomorrow,” and noted that he ran WWE’s developmental system, his number, for twenty years. A man accused of sexual assault, publicly and in federal court, describing his life’s passion as mentoring young people who need something from him. I would love to tell you that is a cheap-shot juxtaposition I have engineered for effect. It is not. It is just the two facts, sitting next to each other, exactly as he offered them.¹⁶

Why This Matters Even If You Have Never Watched a Match

Let me say the quiet part plainly, because this was never really only about wrestling.

There is a machine, in wrestling, yes, but also in comedy, in tech, in restaurants, in film, in your own industry, probably, for laundering men back into public life. It runs on a few reliable engines. There is the thankless-job defense (he was just the one who had to deliver bad news).

There is the technicality-as-exoneration move (dropped from the suit, so surely cleared). There is the sheer passage of time, which everyone is counting on, because the machine’s true fuel is your exhaustion. And there is the small promoter in a small town who figures a few hundred people will pay for a photo, and that outrage is somebody else’s problem.

None of those engines require anyone to decide he did not do it. They only require everyone to decide it is not worth the trouble to keep saying he might have.

Look at how carefully even the people closest to him hedged. When Laurinaitis was named in Grant’s lawsuit, his stepdaughters, Nikki and Brie Garcia, put out a short statement condemning the allegations against, in their words, “members of the WWE,” and adding that they wanted women to feel safe at work. What the statement never once did was say his name.

It drew immediate criticism for exactly that: for the tidy distance of “members of the WWE” when one of those members was the man who had married their mother, with some readers calling the whole thing misleading. And that is the entire problem in miniature. When even a statement meant to condemn the allegations cannot bring itself to name him, you can see how effortlessly everyone further away gets to look the other way.^{18 19}

That is the whole ask here, and it is a small one. Not a mob. Not a conviction we do not have. Just the refusal to let “that was a while ago” quietly become “so it is fine now.”

Because the wrestling world is telling on itself right now. Every time a promoter prints his name on a poster, they are making a bet: that the crowd has forgotten, or never knew, or does not care. The only way that bet stops paying off is if it stops being true.

So consider this me, doing my small part to make it not true.

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Resources

1. John Laurinaitis (biography), Wikipedia
2. Bella Twins’ mother & John Laurinaitis engaged, WWE.com
3. Why Jim Cornette left WWE in 2005, explained, The Sportster
4. This Day in Wrestling History: CM Punk’s Pipebomb, Cageside Seats
5. Jim Ross shoots on John Laurinaitis, Grillin’ JR
6. Teddy Long accuses John Laurinaitis of racism, Cageside Seats
7. Kevin Nash on Laurinaitis’ backstage role, Wrestling Inc.
8. Teddy Long / Ronda Rousey memoir comments, Sportskeeda
9. Bob Orton, Hepatitis C, and the Hell in a Cell match, Bleacher Report
10. Matt Hardy on his respect for John Laurinaitis, Wrestling Inc.
11. John Laurinaitis fired by WWE, Cageside Seats
12. Co-defendant says he was a victim too, VICE News
13. Laurinaitis agrees to help accuser / confidential settlement, NBC News
14. Laurinaitis’ allegiances seem to shift again (2026), Cageside Seats
15. Laurinaitis announced for Big Time Wrestling appearance, F4W / Wrestling Observer
16. Laurinaitis on wanting to “groom young talent”, TPWW
17. 80s Wrestling Con, event site
18. Bella Twins break silence on stepdad, Fox Sports / iHeart
19. Bella Twins’ statement drew criticism for not naming the accused, RealityTea
20. First Amended Complaint, Grant v. World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., McMahon & Laurinaitis, No. 3:24-cv-00090 (D. Conn., filed May 7, 2025), via CourtListener
21. SEC Cease-and-Desist Order re Vincent K. McMahon, Exchange Act Release No. 102143 (Jan. 2025), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
22. Voluntary dismissal of Janel Grant’s lawsuit against McMahon and WWE (case moving to arbitration), POST Wrestling