In deposition, WWE President described search warrants containing sex trafficking language sent by McMahon’s lawyers to WWE’s lawyers
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Sworn deposition testimony from WWE President Nick Khan states that the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation involving Vince McMahon included possible violations of sex trafficking statutes. Although no charges related to the investigation were filed against McMahon, Khan’s statements under oath undermine his former boss’s January 2025 claim, asserting that the federal inquiry was nothing more than a matter of “minor accounting errors.”
Khan’s testimony was taken in December 2025 as part of the
ongoing shareholder merger lawsuit against former WWE board members in the Delaware Chancery Court.
McMahon negotiated several NDAs in which he agreed to pay millions to women who formerly worked for WWE across many years and who accused him of sexual misconduct. McMahon signed at least some of those agreements on behalf of both himself and the company. After the scandal
made headlines in 2022, WWE had to correct its financial reporting filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to account for the payments that also provided protections for the company.
In January 2025, following
a settlement with the SEC, in which he was ordered to pay a $400,000 penalty and repay WWE $1.3 million, McMahon issued a statement that read:
“Today ends nearly three years of investigation by different governmental agencies. There has been a great deal of speculation about what exactly the government was investigating and what the outcome would be. As today’s resolution shows, much of that speculation was misguided and misleading.”
McMahon added: “In the end, there was never anything more to this than minor accounting errors with regard to some personal payments that I made several years ago while I was CEO of WWE. I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”
Khan’s testimony stands in contrast to that statement.
What Nick Khan testified to
An attorney for the shareholder plaintiffs asked Khan when he became aware that the DOJ was looking into matters beyond accounting issues.
“When the search warrants for the devices were served upon Vince, Brad Blum, and Vince’s personal assistant and when those warrants were sent from Vince’s lawyers to WWE’s lawyers, and they were read to me and it included sex trafficking is when I was aware of it,” Khan responded while under oath in a Los Angeles law office last December.
Above: A portion of Nick Khan’s deposition transcript, filed publicly in the WWE merger shareholder lawsuit. “A” precedes testimony from Khan. Highlights added by POST Wrestling.
A search warrant in this context is a court order allowing law enforcement to seize specific items.
One was executed on McMahon on July 17, 2023, according to a WWE securities disclosure filed soon after. Federal authorities had possession of a phone belonging to McMahon until last year, according to court filings in the merger suit, in which the plaintiffs allege McMahon preselected Endeavor as his deal partner in the sale process that led to the creation of TKO. Khan and others who were WWE board members at the time are co-defendants along with McMahon, all of whom deny the suit’s key allegations.
Former employee Janel Grant
sued McMahon and WWE in an ongoing civil case, submitted in January 2024, alleging she was sexually assaulted by McMahon as well as sex trafficked to former executive John Laurinaitis. She claims that at McMahon’s behest, she sent sexually explicit images to Brock Lesnar amid his WWE talent contract negotiation. McMahon has denied Grant’s allegations.
Khan affirmed in multiple instances across his day-long deposition that he was aware sex trafficking was among the statutes the government was examining.
The deposition was among materials made public last month after this reporter initiated a process to challenge the confidential treatment of certain materials in the case, under a court rule that allows any person to do so.
Khan also confirmed that DOJ prosecutors asked him about “sex crimes” during his own government interview, in addition to questions about the recording of payments.
In the deposition related to the TKO merger, the plaintiff attorney, Edward Timlin, asked Khan whether a grand jury subpoena — received by WWE sometime after Sept. 2, 2022, before the later warrants — also referenced sex trafficking. Khan initially said he didn’t recall, but after Timlin described the subpoena as containing sex trafficking statutes, Khan said: “In hearing you say it, I do recall when I read the grand jury subpoena that it said something about trafficking in there.”
Above: Portions of Nick Khan’s deposition transcript, filed publicly in the WWE merger shareholder lawsuit. “A” precedes testimony from Khan. Highlights added by POST Wrestling.
A grand jury subpoena is a demand for evidence to help those jurors decide if a person should be charged with a crime. Grand jury proceedings are confidential. Because McMahon was never indicted, most details about the investigation have never been made public, though
the Wall Street Journal reported in February 2024 that McMahon was being investigated for sex trafficking and sexual assault allegations.
Earlier in his deposition in the merger case, Timlin showed Khan a document and told him that the grand jury subpoena contained “both security statutes and sex trafficking statutes.” Khan confirmed he subsequently learned that sex trafficking statutes were among the violations under investigation.
“I certainly did learn that that was the case,” Khan said, according to the transcript.
Above: A portion of Nick Khan’s deposition transcript, filed publicly in the WWE merger shareholder lawsuit. “A” and “THE WITNESS” precede testimony from Khan. Highlights added by POST Wrestling.
McMahon’s representatives said in early 2025 that the investigation had concluded without any charges. The former WWE CEO and Chairman has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct made against him.
Khan: Warrants were sent from Vince’s lawyers to WWE’s lawyers
One part of Khan’s testimony speaks to McMahon’s legal team’s awareness of the subject matter of the DOJ inquiry.
Khan testified that search warrants, which indicated sex trafficking was under consideration, were “sent from Vince’s lawyers to WWE’s lawyers.” If accurate, that means McMahon’s own attorneys, from white-shoe law firm Kirkland & Ellis, had that documentation from the government — years before McMahon’s January 2025 statement characterizing the entire matter as involving only accounting concerns.
This week, POST Wrestling sent a detailed inquiry to McMahon’s current public relations representatives, presenting them with Khan’s testimony. We asked specifically if it was McMahon’s position that he was never investigated for sex trafficking or other sexual misconduct allegations. We did not receive a response or any other comments from them for this story despite multiple attempts to reach the representatives.
In June 2024, federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — the office that was investigating McMahon’s conduct — intervened in Grant’s civil suit, asking for
a six-month stay of the case, a step commonly taken to prevent evidence requests in a civil lawsuit from interfering with a simultaneous criminal investigation.
Soon after the request for the stay, in June 2024, POST Wrestling received the following characterization from a source close to the situation, which we did not publish:
“The federal investigation that prompted the government to seek a six-month stay in the civil lawsuit brought by Ms. Grant against Vince McMahon is focused exclusively on disclosure and accounting issues at WWE surrounding NDAs,” the source told us. “There is no mention of sex-trafficking in any of the government’s papers filed with the court.”
The “government’s papers filed with the court” referred specifically to filings submitted by SDNY related to the stay request in the Grant case, including two sealed documents. The search warrants and subpoenas discussed earlier in this article aren’t necessarily filed with any court, and it’s possible that whatever SDNY attorneys filed into the Grant case, along with their stay request, did not describe the full scope of the investigation.
We did not publish the 2024 characterization from the source because we had concerns that the comment would mislead readers about whether sex trafficking was being investigated at all. We communicated those concerns at the time and asked the source directly to reconcile or dispute the Wall Street Journal’s February 2024 report that allegations of sex trafficking and sexual assault against McMahon were being investigated by federal authorities. Those questions weren’t answered. We followed up with that source again this week, but we were not provided with an explanation.
Later, in February 2025, after
a Second Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed a ruling in a sealed matter from SDNY that a person familiar with the case confirmed involved McMahon, one of his attorneys, Robert W. Allen of Kirkland & Ellis, provided a statement asserting the investigation “has definitively concluded and will not result in charges.” Allen’s statement addressed the DOJ inquiry’s outcome but not its subject matter.
Janel Grant’s messages from the FBI
Separately from Khan’s testimony,
Grant recently posted to Instagram an image of what appears to be a letter addressed to her from the FBI’s Victim Notification System, dated May 23, 2023, identifying her as a “possible victim of a crime” in an active federal investigation being conducted by the FBI’s New York office. The text accompanying Grant’s post states she received multiple similar letters between May 2023 and December 2025. POST Wrestling sent an email to the FBI New York requesting that the press office verify the authenticity of the letter that appears in Grant’s post. The office did not respond.
We did confirm that Grant’s Instagram account, which was created in recent weeks and is her first known presence on social media, is legitimately controlled by her, according to a person familiar with that matter.
On Thursday, Grant
posted a screenshot of what appears to be part of another message addressed to her from FBI New York addressed to her: an email dated May 30, 2025.
The FBI’s Victim Notification System was created by the government to fulfill a legal mandate to notify possible victims of crimes of developments in related investigations. Grant’s public allegations against McMahon relate primarily to sexual misconduct. If the letter is authentic, it’s consistent with the FBI notifying Grant of her status as a possible victim of a sexual misconduct inquiry. It does not establish that any charges were filed, and McMahon was not indicted for any crime related to the investigation involving him, which spanned from approximately 2022 to 2025.
