A federal judge has rejected Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon’s bid to force the ring boy plaintiffs to litigate their case under their real names, ruling Thursday that the seven plaintiffs may continue using “John Doe” pseudonyms through the pretrial phase of the lawsuit.
Judge James K. Bredar of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland handed down the ruling on Thursday. The decision keeps the plaintiffs’ identities known to the defendants, who have had them since early in the case, but blocks public disclosure for the duration of pretrial.
Per Brandon Thurston of POST Wrestling, the operative outcome of the ruling is that the McMahons keep their existing access to the plaintiffs’ identities while the public does not.
“The ruling means the ring boys’ names will remain known to the defendants, to whom those identities have been disclosed since early on in the case, but unknown to the public through the pretrial phase.”
The plaintiffs allege that they were abused as minors by the late WWF ring announcer Mel Phillips while working for the company in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Phillips died in 2012. The plaintiffs are now in their 50s. The defendants, including the McMahons, WWE, and TKO, are facing negligence claims for what the plaintiffs say was knowing failure to intervene.
Judge Bredar applied the five-factor James test for anonymity and found that two factors weighed most heavily in the plaintiffs’ favor. The first was the subject matter of the case.
“[Allegations of childhood sexual abuse] are particularly sensitive and personal even beyond other allegations of sexual abuse.”
The second was the risk of harm to the plaintiffs from public disclosure. Bredar was persuaded by the argument that public disclosure would risk re-traumatization given the permanent nature of internet-based searches.
“There is a significant risk of subjecting Plaintiffs to re-traumatization if they are forced to publicly reveal their identities, making them permanently available on the Internet.”
The McMahons had argued that the plaintiffs themselves were responsible for some of the media attention surrounding the case and that anonymity would unfairly hinder their ability to defend against the allegations in discovery. Bredar rejected the framing.
“Defendants complain that Plaintiffs themselves have generated some of [the widespread] media attention [this case has received], but the Court finds that this is not the sole explanation [for that attention]. Defendants are public figures, whose counsel, like Plaintiffs’ counsel, have made statements about the case to press.”
Bredar also accepted the plaintiffs’ framing that the case sits inside a broader public conversation about sexual misconduct against minors, which the plaintiffs’ counsel had cited as a public interest factor.
The lawsuit, originally filed in October 2024, was allowed to move into discovery in December 2025 after Judge Bredar denied the bulk of the defendants’ motions to dismiss. Seven of the eight original plaintiffs are proceeding, with two of them (John Doe 2 and John Doe 6) specifically pursuing claims against Linda McMahon. TKO was kept in the case as a defendant after the judge found the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged TKO assumed WWE’s pre-merger liabilities. A John Doe 7 claim dating back to the 1970s was dismissed without prejudice for failure to plead WWE knowledge with adequate specificity.
The plaintiffs allege a specific incident in the early 1980s where Phillips was caught abusing a child and brought before Vince McMahon, with Phillips kept on staff afterward. Per public filings, Phillips was fired by WWF in 1988 and rehired weeks later, conduct that Bredar wrote could be viewed as WWE ratifying his behavior.
