Janel Grant has filed a new motion asking the court to strike a preliminary statement by Vince McMahon regarding the lawsuit she filed against him.
Earlier this week, McMahon filed a response to the lawsuit filed against himself, John Laurinaitis and WWE in January alleging that Grant was abused and sexually exploited by McMahon. In McMahon’s response, he accused Grant of violating a binding contract to arbitrate any issues with their NDA and asked that the suit be moved to arbitration.
McMahon also claims that Grant’s claims of “dealing with profound grief” over her parents’ passing and “struggling financially” when they met were false. He claims her father passed away in April of 2017 and that her mother had died before then.
In a new filing, Grant’s lawyers filed a motion to strike McMahon’s preliminary statement. The filing reads as follows,
“Even for Vince McMahon, the baseless, irrelevant, and false statements in the Motion’s “Preliminary Statement”—designed solely to harass and intimidate his longtime victim, Janel Grant are a new low. For instance, McMahon’s unsupported assertions that Janel was “absent in her” dying parents’ lives and engaged to a wealthy attorney when she met McMahon are not only falsehoods conceived by McMahon to intimidate Janel into submission—as he has done countless times before—but have nothing to do with the legal arguments raised by the Motion. McMahon’s lies are easily disproven. In truth, while Janel’s father was in in-home hospice care during his final days, Janel continued to provide him with around-the-clock care. At the same time, Janel had also cared for her blind, wheelchair bound mother until her death.
“Moreover, Janel was not dating, let alone engaged to, her ex-fiancé in 2019. To the contrary, Janel’s ex-fiancé generously allowed Janel to stay in his apartment as she rebuilt her life following her parents’ passing. During this time, Janel had no job or other financial support aside from the friendship and generosity of her ex. Consistent with his past behavior, McMahon twists these truths to fit his own fictional narrative, much like the fantasy world of professional wrestling from where he came.
“Yet even if McMahon’s falsities concerning Janel’s private life were true (they are not), these statements have no bearing on the merits of Janel’s claims, let alone the Motion. McMahon’s statements have no place in the Motion, which should be concerned solely with whether this dispute must be submitted to arbitration. It was not necessary, reasonable, or responsible to use a public filing to impugn Janel’s moral character. Indeed, McMahon’s desperate attempt to distract from the legal substance of the Motion highlight its weakness and the weakness of his overall case. This Court has inherent power to strike a party’s filings. The Court should use that power to strike the Motion’s “Preliminary Statement” in its entirety and admonish McMahon and his counsel that such statements have no place in civil litigation.”
McMahon’s PR team also sent us the following statement from Jessica Rosenberg of Kasowitz Benson Torres:
“Plaintiff had no right to bring this case in a public court but did so anyway. Now that she chose this public forum to falsely accuse Mr. McMahon, she wants to silence his ability to respond. She can’t have it both ways.”
