With the Janel Grant lawsuit against Vince McMahon and WWE headed to private arbitration, attention has turned to what the former WWE chairman does next. JBL does not believe the answer is nothing.
Speaking on Something to Wrestle, JBL was upfront about where he stands and what he does not know.
“I like Vince, and I had no idea of the veracity of the case. I didn’t hear any of this when I was there. That does not mean that all of it might not be true. I have no idea of the truth of what is true, what isn’t,” JBL said. “I just know Vince is a friend of mine, and this doesn’t sound anything like him. People are obviously going to take me to task over that. That’s fine.”
He was equally clear elsewhere in the conversation that he is not dismissing what has been alleged.
“There are a lot of people who are going to believe the allegations against him, and that’s certainly their right. Those allegations may be true. I have no idea,” JBL said.
What he is certain of is that McMahon will not sit still.
“I just can’t believe that a guy that worked 24 hours a day for so long can simply retire and go tour around Italy. I don’t think that’s in the DNA,” JBL said. “So I’m excited to see what he does next.”
He does not see McMahon walking back into any of WWE’s top jobs.
“He’s not going to replace Nick Khan. Nick Khan is one of the best negotiators I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s no reason to replace a rainmaker even with another rainmaker,” JBL said. “As far as Triple H, I don’t think that is either. Vince is not going to be part of creative.”
The reason, in JBL’s view, is temperament.
“He is such an overwhelming personality. Vince has always been the boss, and for him to come in, I just don’t see how he can play that well with others as somebody that’s underneath somebody,” JBL said. “Vince steamrolls people. He doesn’t mean to. People have told Vince before, you intimidate people, and Vince is like, why? Why do I do that?”
Where JBL does see a fit is at the strategic level, either on the TKO board or in a role that never becomes public.
“You might not even put him on the board. You might create a spot there for him that is not a public spot,” JBL said. “If you’ve got a resource like Vince McMahon, I think if you don’t try to use that, I think that’s crazy. This is a guy who took a Northeast regional territory and turned it into a global power. He took a company he bought from his father and sold it for $9.3 billion.”
JBL said what made McMahon valuable in a room was the ability to strip a problem down.
“Vince is the one guy who would ask questions that when you’d ask it, it’s kind of like a great engineer compared to a good engineer,” JBL said. “Vince could boil things down to simplicity. He would ask questions in meetings, and when he asked them, you go, why didn’t I ask that? That’s the question. That’s too valuable a resource for any company to not bring him in.”
He also expects a deliberate public relations effort before any of that happens, and says he has watched McMahon run the same playbook for decades.
“I’ve seen Vince handle a lot of crises, including with me, and the game plan is always the same. You just lay low and let it kind of burn out,” JBL said. “I know when Vince was handling a crisis, he goes, look, this is going to be a big deal for about five or six months, then we’re going to come back, we’ll put a PR campaign together, we’ll push it aside. That’s exactly what happened.”
He believes the same thing is coming now.
“When all this kind of goes under the rug, I think you are going to see a PR campaign here. I’ve seen this movie many, many times,” JBL said. “You’re going to see a complete rebranding of Vince McMahon. Now, is that going to work with everybody? No. But I think it’s going to be thought through. It’s going to be a detailed plan that is going to come out and is going to work to rebrand the Vince McMahon story, because he doesn’t want to go down as the guy that was pushed out and ostracized.”
Grant filed her suit in January 2024, and McMahon resigned from all positions with WWE and TKO days later. This week, attorneys for all parties filed a joint status report in Connecticut confirming an agreement to move to private arbitration, with the suit set to be dismissed with prejudice. The claims and defenses will still be pursued privately rather than in open court.
