Memo to Courant's Rick Green: Four Questions for Linda McMahon

Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green is meeting Tuesday with Linda McMahon. He says so in a blog post last Friday, “Linda McMahon, Retard Jokes and the WWE Soap Opera,” http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2010/02/it-may-be-all-overthetop.html.

I would have headlined the item “Linda McMahon’s ‘Retard’ Problem – And Ours.” It’s a generally wise takeout, especially where Green writes, “She very well may be the next U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Which makes it all the more important to ask a few more questions about this button-downed-CEO’s judgment.”

Where I think the piece falls short is where just about everyone else does. Playing “gotcha” with YouTube clips won’t get it done in the game of pseudo-populist jiu-jitsu.

On Friday afternoon I talked with a politico on the ground in Connecticut, who expressed amazement that the footage of the humiliation of WWE character Nick “Eugene” Dinsmore didn’t seem to be sticking to Linda. My response was that, after decades of following McMahon family wrestling’s race to the bottom, whatever does or doesn’t move the outrage needle has ceased to surprise me.

Now, as Lincoln and Douglas once again flop around in their graves like mackerels, Rick Green prepares to confront Linda McMahon. Oh to be a fly on the wall for that tete-a-tete.

Here, free of charge, are a few questions I hope Green asks.

======

CONCUSSIONS

Linda [Rick Green should say], state legislation has been introduced to protect high school athletes from what research is showing to be long-term brain trauma from improperly treated concussions. I have written about this issue both in my column and on my blog.

One of the pioneers in the research on sports-related brain trauma, Dr. Bennet Omalu, has studied the brains of dead WWE wrestlers Chris Benoit and Andrew Martin and concluded that they suffered from severe, occupation-caused brain damage.

WWE has tried to discredit and dodge that research. Why?

At best, your company sits at approximately the same stage of the denial-and-action cycle that the National Football League occupied five years ago. You even hired as your medical director Dr. Joseph Maroon, also an NFL consultant, who has been far from the most enthusiastic advocate of embracing the findings of Dr. Omalu and others in this field.

Worse, WWE – which has dominant market power in the wrestling industry and thus could promote safer standards with much less inconvenience than the NFL – continues to build around hard-core gimmicks like “tables, ladders, and chairs” matches. A promo for a recent WWE pay-per-view show hyping “TLC” matches showed animated cuckoo birds encircling the head of wrestler Chris Jericho after he took a chair shot. (And it should also be noted that Jericho recently has been involved in two publicly embarrassing outside-the-ring incidents.)

Even worse than that was WWE’s statement to ESPN that it had sought and been denied access to Omalu’s Benoit brain research – a statement that turned out to be based (depending on your interpretation) on either aggressive hairsplitting or an out-and-out lie. In fact, WWE medical director Maroon met with Omalu and others at a West Virginia brain research institute in 2008 and was given full access to the Benoit studies. [See “Jerry McDevitt, Lawyer for Linda McMahon’s WWE, Gets Mad at Me Again (Part 3),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/jerry-mcdevitt-lawyer-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-gets-mad-at-me-again-part-3/.]

So, Linda: Are you proud of WWE’s record of foot-dragging, which has allowed it to continue and expand the completely unnecessary practice of chair and weapons shots, in a choreographed entertainment that could easily thrive without that element?

***

SPEAKING OF “RETARD” JOKES …

Linda, the two controversies last week over forms of the word “retarded,”indirectly related to you, overshadowed a more substantive third one, directly involving you.

In an interview about the Chris Benoit murder-suicide on ABC’s Good Morning America on June 28, 2007, you stated: “[T]he focus of this is really turning more to the tension that must have been happening between a husband and wife over, you know, the management and the schooling and the rearing of this child who had the mental retardation.”

What an appalling display of bullspin. The report that 7-year-old Daniel Benoit had Fragile X Syndrome was just a rumor that WWE stoked to deflect attention from the company’s deeply embedded culture of drugs and early death, of which the Benoit case was just the most dramatic example. WWE withdrew this innuendo a day later, but the damage was done.

No one in his right mind thinks that Daniel Benoit’s medical condition, whatever it was, had a tenth as much to do with this tragedy as the heavy doses of steroids, growth hormone, and prescription painkillers and antidepressants that Chris Benoit had chronically ingested. The toxicology report would show that Chris had a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of 59-to-1! Yet your sound bites that week emphasized that he had “passed” his WWE drug tests. That turned out to mean not that the tests showed anything in the neighborhood of normal drug levels, but that he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of a WWE “therapeutic use exemption.”

Linda, are you proud of your little PR swerve about Daniel Benoit’s “retardation”? He was a real person, not a fictional TV character who you could rather outlandishly claim was “inspirational.”

And is this the template for how you intend to manage crises in Washington?

In your answer, please don’t advise me to read the website poop sheet on the “Wellness Policy.” It’s a meaningless document because your consultants are just clerks or administrators; your husband Vince alone, and not an independent authority, interprets the tests and metes out or withholds talent discipline. One of your contractors, Dr. Tracy Ray, admitted to Congressional investigators, “There is shadiness in almost every case….”

***

CONGRESSMAN WAXMAN’S PROPOSAL

In January 2009, Congressman Henry Waxman, then chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a lengthy letter, with attachments, to the President’s Office of Drug Control Policy. The letter sharply criticized the WWE Wellness Program. The congressman asked this White House office to “examine the systematic deficiencies in the testing policies and practices of professional wrestling” uncovered by the committee’s investigation.

Linda, if you are elected to the Senate, will you ask President Obama to follow through on Waxman’s letter?

***

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR REFORM

One feature of President Obama’s newly released budget is what he has termed the misclassification of regular employees as independent contractors. The president estimates that his proposal in this area would reduce the federal budget deficit by an annual $7 billion.

WWE performers are, controversially, classified as independent contractors. This means both that the company does not pay payroll taxes on them and that wrestlers get no vacation, health insurance, or retirement benefits.

Linda, what is your position on the administration’s proposal for independent-contractor reform?


Over the last month and a half, Rick Green has had a lot of fun with my efforts to publicize my book CHRIS & NANCY. And I’ve had fun with his fun. But I think Green and I agree on what is no laughing matter in all this: the prospect of Linda Edwards McMahon moving her office from East Main Street in Stamford to Constitution Avenue on Capitol Hill.

If Green doesn’t choose to ask the questions above, I hope he is armed with a pocketful of even better ones.


Irv Muchnick

Great Moments in Email, Part 4

From Gilbert Anthony Navarro II:

“Mr. Muchnick I know you’ve done a lot of good, but this vendetta is getting insane.”

'CHRIS & NANCY' Author Muchnick's Connecticut Borders Tour Concludes in Farmington, March 27

Contacts:

Simon Ware, simon@ecwpress.com,(416) 694-3348

or Irvin Muchnick, info@muchnick.net


CHRIS & NANCY – the book about the murder-suicide of superstar pro wrestler Chris Benoit, which has landed in the middle of a closely watched U.S. Senate race – will be featured at a book-signing event with author Irvin Muchnick at Borders Books & Music in Farmington, Connecticut, 1600 South East Road (next to the West Farms Mall), on Saturday, March 27, at 1:00 p.m.

This will conclude Muchnick’s statewide media and bookstore tour during the week before WrestleMania, and at a moment when the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), Linda McMahon, is campaigning for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat. WWE is headquartered in Stamford (where Muchnick will be appearing Thursday evening, March 25, at the Borders, 1041 High Ridge Road).

“We’re delighted that Borders is hosting Irv’s important book in two important markets of a state that all of America is watching,” said Simon Ware, publicity director of ECW Press.

Matthew Kelly, sales manager of Borders in Farmington, added, “There is no better time and place to be featuring CHRIS & NANCY than the eve of WrestleMania and in the Greater Hartford area.”

Muchnick previously authored the popular ECW Press book WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. He is also the lead respondent in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, a landmark case for freelance writers’ rights, which is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Web: http://muchnick.net

Blog: http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

Twitter: @irvmuch

YouTube: http://youtube.com/WrestlingBabylon

#####

For Linda McMahon's WWE, Depraved Is As Depraved Does

A couple of days ago I noticed that there was a research breakthrough for Fragile X, a genetic disorder that is a leading cause of mental retardation, autism, and other defects. It was an opportunity for me to review for Connecticut blog readers the sleazy story of how Linda McMahon, as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, tried to exploit reports that Chris Benoit’s son had Fragile X while she was managing the fallout of the Benoit murder-suicide in an interview on Good Morning America on June 28, 2007. I did a five-part series with the full background, the interview transcript, and a burr to politicos to go find this damning video.

But little did I know that my comparatively high-minded citation of McMahon’s disgusting use of the word “retardation” would get immediately buried in the fury over yet another tasteless old WWE television clip on YouTube. Indeed, mine was, at best, the third-most-resonant example in the last 48 hours of variations of “retardation” in damaging stories associated with perhaps the weirdest major Senate candidate in the history of the Republic.

First, Sarah Palin called out Rahm Emanuel – to whose Congressional campaigns the McMahon family has contributed – for saying liberal activists were “fucking retarded.”

Then, with the warp speed familiar to contemporary attack politics, the video quickly surfaced of Linda’s son-in-law, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, destroying a mentally handicapped character named “Eugene” in a 2004 WWE steel-cage match.

I wonder if Kevin Rennie is readying his next Hartford Courant column on the ruthlessly efficient war room of McMahon’s Republican primary opponent, Rob Simmons. Last week Rennie called the McMahon machine’s market research scary-good. Rennie was half-right.

In future posts I’ll be breaking down, from my perspective, the roles of Rahm Emanuel and of Mr. Family Values himself, Joe Lieberman. For me, this is not a partisan issue. In Connecticut today, and throughout the country, there is plenty of sleaze to go around.

And I’ll be trying to return everyone’s focus to the real Linda McMahon scandal: the public-health nuisance that professional wrestling has turned into on her watch.

Meanwhile, for McMahon, the lesson is clear: She can run from her WWE past, whose mega-profits are underwriting her $50 million campaign – but she can’t hide.

Or as Forrest Gump might have said, “Depraved is as depraved does.”


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon's Despicable June 2007 'Good Morning America' Interview

In the kind of move that has led the Hartford Courant’s Rick Green to label your humble blogger “unpredictable,” I took a detour yesterday with a five-part series focusing on World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon’s performance on Good Morning America on June 28, 2007.

In the interview, McMahon desperately – and, largely, with success – diverted attention from drugs and death in pro wrestling in the days after the umpteenth drugged-up wrestler, Chris Benoit, died young – and in this case took out his wife and their 7-year-old son along with him.

McMahon said, “[T]he focus of this is really turning more to the tension that must have been happening between a husband and wife over, you know, the management and the schooling and the rearing of this child who had the mental retardation.”

The interview transcript is at http://muchnick.net/lindaongma.pdf. The video should be unearthed and broadcast alongside McMahon’s expensive TV commercials for her Connecticut U.S. Senate campaign. It is despicable: Linda’s female soft-shoe to husband Vince’s male tap-dance sound bite the same week that no one could have foretold that Chris Benoit was “a monster.”

Perhaps that is what Linda McMahon meant when she bragged recently on Face the State about her success “in a business that is very testsosterone-loaded.”

***

An email from a blog reader whose opinions I respect (but who asked not to be identified) points out that my book CHRIS & NANCY does not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Daniel Benoit had Fragile X Syndrome. The majority opinion of my mind is that Daniel did have a serious medical condition, perhaps Fragile X; this reader is more inclined to believe that the Vancouver woman who said her late husband had talked to Chris about becoming a Canadian spokesperson for Fragile X research engineered a hoax.

At a minimum, the reader said, the Vancouver woman could have been aware of Daniel’s condition only if someone some years earlier had unethically breached the confidentiality of his medical records.

The reader is quite right that we don’t know the full and accurate story on Daniel, and may never.

The reader concedes that this does not matter much in the narrative of Linda McMahon’s scurrilous exploitation of the rumor on Good Morning America.

***

One of the odd aspects of my interpretation of the Fragile X story is that, for once, it puts me in the same camp as WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt.

After the family of Nancy (Benoit) Toffoloni complained, Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard retracted the suggestion that there had been something wrong with Daniel.

WWE flack Gary Davis then said, “I think we have to go with what the district attorney has said as being the best up-to-date information available right now.” Davis added that “we were just as caught up as everyone else” in the idea that Daniel had Fragile X.

But McDevitt, playing the role of bad cop as only he can, continued to insist to People magazine and others that “we believe the evidence will show” that “the situation with Daniel was a source of tension in the relationship between Chris and Nancy.” The day before she was murdered, Nancy had spoken on the phone with the family physician, Dr. Phil Astin (now serving a ten-year federal prison for overprescribing drugs to, among others, Chris, Nancy, and two other now-dead wrestlers), about what McDevitt termed “the needs of the child and how they would be met.”


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon and 'Fragile X Syndrome' (Part 5)

PREVIOUS POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Introduction

Chris Benoit’s Son’s Medical Condition Sets Off a Media Frenzy

Linda McMahon Goes on “Good Morning America”

Let’s Go to the Videotape


THE DA AND WWE BACK OFF; WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

With the current state of the public record, it is impossible to say for certain whether young Daniel Benoit had Fragile X Syndrome. In CHRIS & NANCY, I suggest that he probably did – a conclusion that has not exactly earned me brownie points with the Benoit family survivors, most especially his in-laws.

It just doesn’t make sense to me that the woman in Vancouver would make up the story about her late husband talking to Chris Benoit about becoming a Fragile X spokesman. Benoit’s turndown of that request is consistent with the consensus portrait of him as ultra-private. Possible secrecy about his son’s condition, including shielding the information from close family members and friends, is also common in the whole heartbreaking dynamic of how parents try to cope with the disorder.

For me, the clinchers are:

(a) DA Scott Ballard may have been loose-lipped but I don’t think he’s nuts.

(b) Daniel, at age 7, had just graduated kindergarten. I have not heard a good explanation as to why he would have been in kindergarten at 7; most kids do it at 5.

(c) Nancy Benoit’s friend and next-door neighbor confirmed that they had conversations about some unspecified medical condition of Daniel’s.

So I don’t think Linda McMahon and WWE planted this story.

I do, however, believe they covered themselves in disgrace by furiously and haphazardly exploiting it to direct attention to everything but the elephant in the room: the tremendous stash of drugs in the Benoit home and the tremendous quantity of drugs in Chris Benoit’s body. The latter already had been found in WWE “Wellness Policy” drug tests, which were trumped by a “therapeutic use exemption,” and soon would be confirmed in post-mortem toxicology reports.

Did the spinmeisting by Linda McMahon in her Good Morning America interview – half-baked assertions, almost immediately withdrawn but not until they had served as a temporary but important diversion – add up to the skills and qualities the people of Connecticut would like to see in their next United States senator? We’re about to find out.

END OF SERIES


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon and 'Fragile X Syndrome' (Part 4)

PREVIOUS POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Introduction

Chris Benoit’s Son’s Medical Condition Sets Off a Media Frenzy

Linda McMahon Goes on “Good Morning America”


LET’S GO TO THE VIDEOTAPE

The audio of an interview Linda McMahon did for the ABC News Good Morning America website on June 28, 2008, can be heard at http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=3326657. In the interview, McMahon uses many of the same talking points in her television interview the same day with Robin Roberts, but this one does not have the exact language on TV referring to”the management and the schooling and the rearing of this child who had the mental retardation.”

I can no longer find the Robin Roberts TV interview online. Surely the video still exists, and if someone has it and can pass it along to me (tips@muchnick.net) or put it up on YouTube, that will be another valuable record for the 2010 Senate campaign. There is no point in my trying David Westin, the president of ABC News; Westin did not respond to my queries about the doctoring of the website transcript of a recent interview with McMahon promoting the piece that ABC’s Kate Snow did about her for weekend World News Tonight.

NEXT: The DA and WWE Back Off; What Does It All Mean?


Irv Muchnick