Excerpt
‘Abuse, Grooming, Drugs, and Sexual Coercion’: The Scandal Wrestling Buried
This excerpt from the new book ‘Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America’ tells the story of Tom Cole, the young WWF ring boy whose allegations could have shaken the world of wrestling.
On a Sunday in March of 1992, World Wrestling Federation chairman Vince McMahon marched into a suite of law offices at 500 Fifth Avenue, a soaring prewar skyscraper just up the street from the New York Public Library. He was there for a meeting with a young man about whom he knew virtually nothing.
Vince arrived in the office of the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Firm, accompanied by his longtime lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, and his wife, Linda, who was the WWF’s CEO. When he reached the conference room where the meeting would take place, he saw the young man for the first time.
Tom Cole was just 21 and possessed striking good looks. He had a mop of black hair, a square jaw, a gaze both confident and vulnerable. He was a big fellow, too: broad-shouldered and tall. He was somewhat infamous among his family and friends for his ability to smile and charm his way into anyone’s heart.
But, for Vince, Tom represented a huge problem.
Tom Cole had been a ring boy. This was a longstanding role in the wrestling world: Whenever a traveling promotion came to town, it would hire a few local kids — teenage boys, mostly. They would be put to work setting up and taking down the ring (a dangerous job that could end in broken fingers or crushed toes), running errands, and any number of other miscellaneous tasks. In the 1980s, when Tom Cole was recruited, the going rate for a ring boy was generally about eighty bucks, plus bragging rights and photos with the superstars.
At 13, Tom had fit the profile of most of the kids who became ring boys: a minor who didn’t have a lot of adult supervision.
But at 21, he was very different from other former ring boys: he was the first who had come forward with allegations of years of abuse, grooming, drugs, and sexual coercion within the ring boy program. These accusations had the potential to tear down everything Vince had built.
AT THIRTEEN, THE YEAR TOM had become a ring boy, he’d run away from his mother’s Westchester, New York, home. Tom was always looking for more: more affection, more attention. He was an unusually beautiful boy — girls fawned over him.
It had been easy for Mel Phillips, a ring announcer and head of the ring crew, to spot him as a good prospect when they met at a local WWF show. And it had been easy for Tom to soak up the fatherly care Phillips offered him.
Tom had started out working shows whenever the WWF was in Westchester County. But soon he was working shows in Manhattan, too. Then Phillips started taking Tom with him on a regional circuit of wrestling shows: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and so on.
“I’d go from New York to Philly, and he’d have young kids waiting for him, boys, at the shows,” Tom would say in a 1999 interview published in a wrestling newsletter. “Mostly it was kids with a broken home with no father. Just a drunk mother, alcoholic, drug addict, whatever. That’s pretty much the type of kid that Mel was geared toward.”
Phillips would encourage Tom to invite his friends along.
“So Tom started taking his friends and bringing them to Mel,” Lee, Tom’s older brother, tells me. (Tom died in 2021.) “But these guys were a little more street-smart than Tom. They said, ‘Tom, this guy’s creepy, I don’t like him.’ But Tom loved wrestling so much that he’s like, ‘Wow, I’m at these wrestling shows for nothing!’”
Sometimes, the friends would stick around long enough for Phillips to ask them for time alone.
“From there, it got weird,” Lee says, “when he started playing with their feet and shit.”
Years later, in a draft of a legal complaint, Tom’s lawyer would claim that Phillips “would frequently caress plaintiff’s feet and would rub them against [Phillips’s] own genital area.” Other ring boys would go on to say Phillips did similar things to them.
“The other guys would say, ‘Tom, this guy ain’t right, he’s playing with my toes, and putting them up against his crotch and stuff,’ ” Lee says. “I guess Tom was willing to overlook that part as long as [Phillips] didn’t touch anything else.”
Phillips’s boss, the WWF staffer in charge of the ring boy program, was a man named Terry Garvin. Garvin (born Terry Joyal) was a veteran wrestler from Quebec, a friend of WWF exec Pat Patterson, and, like Patterson, one of the first openly gay men in the squared circle. By the time Tom entered the WWF’s orbit, Patterson was not only Garvin’s boss, but he was Vince’s right-hand man.
Tom said he had unwanted interactions with Patterson.“He’d look at you when he was talking to you, he’d look right at your crotch and he’d, like, lick his lips and shit,” Tom said in a 1999 newsletter interview. “He’d make sexual gestures by looking at you like that. He’d put his hand on your ass and squeeze your ass and stuff like that.”
According to Lee, once Tom turned 16, Garvin took an interest in him. During a 1988 car trip the two were taking from New York to Massachusetts, Garvin allegedly offered the teen drugs and alcohol, which Tom says he rejected. The draft legal complaint says Garvin made an “unwelcome homosexual solicitation” for Tom to “engage in immediate sexual activity with him,” which Tom said he refused.
Whatever happened, Tom stopped getting ring boy work shortly afterward.
Then, in 1990, Tom got a surprising call from Garvin: the WWF wanted him back. Garvin allegedly offered 19-year-old Tom a warehouse job that Garvin said could lead to bigger things with the WWF. Tom eagerly accepted — he said he wanted to be a ring announcer, like Phillips. Garvin said they could discuss the matter at the Garvin family home. Tom went. They were alone.
Garvin allegedly asked if he could perform oral sex on Tom. Tom said no. Garvin dropped the matter. Garvin wouldn’t drive Tom home, so Tom slept in Garvin’s garage. The next day, Garvin drove the young man to the warehouse.
It was there, a few hours later, that Mel Phillips allegedly gave Tom some news: Garvin had changed his mind about the job. Tom was fired.
“There’s laws against this,” Tom recalled saying to Phillips. “You can’t just do this shit to people. What am I going to do, man? I should fucking go to the paper. I should go to Vince McMahon or something.”
He’d done nothing then. But now, the brothers decided they wanted to take Tom’s story public.
IN OCTOBER OF 1991, with no lawyer or publicist at his side, Lee got in touch with journalists he thought might be sympathetic, based on their critical coverage of the WWF. One of them was New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick.
Lee spoke with Mushnick at length. “Phil said, ‘You guys are in the position where you better just get a lawyer already,’ ” Lee recalls.
When I ask Mushnick if he told the men to find a lawyer, he says, “No. I remember just trying to tell them to be careful, that these are treacherous people.”
The Coles, he recalls, struck him as “essentially grown kids. Vulnerable, vulnerable, vulnerable fans.”
The Coles found an attorney through the Yellow Pages. They sought other ring boys to join them and found one named Chris Loss — he had a similar story of being recruited by Phillips at a young age and having his feet sexually fondled. They talked to reporters. They prepared a legal filing about Tom’s experiences.
On February 26, 1992, the Post published a Mushnick column: “WWF to Face Suit Alleging Child Sex Abuse.”
“According to several highly placed sources,” Mushnick wrote, “a lawsuit will be filed soon alleging that male WWF administrative employees and executives sexually harassed and abused underage teenage boys who were engaged as ring assistants in the mid- and late-1980s.” These boys went unnamed in the piece.
“TERRY GARVIN? ALL THOSE stories are true,” veteran wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer tells me. “The stories about Mel Phillips? True.
“I always found Tom Cole honest,” he adds.
Like most people in the wrestling press, Meltzer had never heard of Tom Cole before Mushnick’s story dropped. He’d been busy following leads on other scandals in the WWF: in addition to an ongoing meltdown of wrestling’s public reputation due to revelations about drug and steroid use, a wrestler named Barry Orton had just gone on a wrestling radio show to say that male-on-male sexual harassment was rampant under Vince and Patterson, and that Terry Garvin had once propositioned him (albeit before either of them were at the WWF). On top of that, a new announcer for Vince’s World Bodybuilding Federation (and, briefly, the WWF) named Murray Hodgson had threatened a wrongful-termination suit against the WWF that alleged sexual harassment by Patterson.
At the time, Meltzer didn’t think any of the accusations were going to amount to anything.
“Vince has gotten away with so much stuff,” Meltzer says, “because, for the most part the sports people don’t wanna discuss morality with Vince McMahon, and the entertainment people don’t even wanna think he’s part of their world, and politicians don’t wanna be laughed at for looking at something that’s fake.”
Vince made defensive maneuvers: In response to the Post story, the WWF issued a statement saying it did not “tolerate illegal or improper behavior by any of our employees at any time” and that it would “take responsible action regarding any legitimate claims filed through lawful channels.” And on Monday, March 2, 1992, Patterson, Garvin, and Phillips tendered their resignations.
Meltzer and Mushnick both promptly published stories that included comments from Vince.
Mushnick claims Vince called him. He scooped Meltzer’s weekly newsletter cycle by printing a March 4 item: Patterson and Garvin had resigned “on the heels of a proliferation of reports that the WWF is headed for an enormously damaging sex and drugs scandal.”
A few days went by without any major articles. But the industry was abuzz. “The Post story will soon be joined by other mainstream newspaper stories focused on the WWF in the coming weeks,” warned a leading wrestling newsletter called Pro Wrestling Torch on March 5.
Vince “denied all of the charges against both Patterson and Garvin,” Meltzer reported in the March 9 edition of the Wrestling Observer.
Trouble was brewing in another news medium, as well.
The Cole brothers’ lives had been thrown into chaos. A producer for TV personality Geraldo Rivera, host of Now It Can Be Told and The Geraldo Rivera Show, caught wind of the Coles’ conversations with other reporters and found Lee’s home phone number. She called to ask if Tom would sit for an interview; Lee says she threatened to ambush him with cameras at his house unless he acquiesced. Tom and Lee went from Lee’s home in Utica to New York City to film the interview.
“That’s what started the whole journey, the insanity,” Lee says, “because we decided to go down there.”
After filming the interview with Tom — Lee was still staying out of the public eye — the producer suggested that the Coles hire a “big-time city lawyer,” in Lee’s recollection. Her recommendation led them to Alan Fuchsberg, the son of a prominent trial lawyer and judge.
Meanwhile, Vince had been running frantic defense. According to Mushnick, Vince made a “pour-his-heart-out phone call” to Mushnick. Apparently fearing that Mel Phillips would soon become part of the public scandal, Vince told him “that he had let Phillips go four years ago [in 1988] because Phillips’ relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural,” Mushnick recalled. “McMahon said he rehired Phillips a few months after that with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.”
“McMahon told me that it was his great regard for children, his own personal regard for children, that made him get rid of Mel Phillips,” Mushnick would later say in a deposition. “Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the organization with the caveat that Mel steer clear of underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids.”
Vince allegedly said he’d brought Phillips back because the man “really missed the wrestling” and “really missed the scene,” but that he was gone for good this time.
Vince would go on to sue Mushnick and the Post for defamation, but notably never disputed Mushnick’s account of the call. Similarly, when reporter David Bixenspan contacted McDevitt, the McMahons’ attorney, during a reevaluation of the scandal in 2020, McDevitt “noted that Cole said in a deposition that he never saw Phillips masturbate, but [McDevitt] did not address claims that Phillips rubbed boys’ feet against his crotch. Nor did he address Mushnick’s and Meltzer’s claims that Vince McMahon told them he was aware of allegations against Phillips as early as 1988.”
Meltzer claims he got a similar call from Vince around the same time as Mushnick, in March 1992. “He didn’t say Terry Garvin and Mel Phillips were guilty, ” Meltzer recalls. “He just goes, ‘There was an innocent person here: Patterson.’ He didn’t say the others.”
The morning of March 11, 1992, brought a San Diego Union-Tribune article by Jeff Savage — another journalist Lee Cole had contacted — headlined “Sleaze No Illusion in World of Wrestling: Sex, Drug Abuse Seen in Industry of ‘Heroes.’ ” It featured a long summary of the ongoing scandal over steroid use in wrestling, as well as the allegations from a wrestler and a former announcer about unwanted advances at the WWF. Savage waited until the very end of the feature to mention the ring boys — and to finally name them.
“Boys are getting propositioned and played with all the time,” fellow accuser Chris Loss told Savage. “You sort of put up with it because you can make a lot of money.”
“I know if I would’ve slept with those guys, I’d probably be rich right now,” Tom said. “It was really sleazy.”
As it turned out, the Union-Tribune had prepared a full week’s worth of exposés about the WWF; the story for the next day, March 12, was about the psychological effects of steroids and so-called roid rage. That same day, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about the WWF’s scandals, as did various newswires. That night, Entertainment Tonight gave Orton the floor to denounce the WWF. Later on in the night, on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson compared WWF wrestlers to pop-music fraudsters Milli Vanilli. All in one day.
The next day, March 13, Fuchsberg faxed McDevitt a courtesy copy of the lawsuit text, a move that’s not unusual, but certainly was not obligatory — and one that gave the WWF a head start on its strategy. Tom hadn’t filed the complaint yet, but the text outlined Tom’s allegations and his demand for more than $3.5 million in restitution.
A few hours later, Lee got a call from Fuchsberg: Vince was ready to negotiate with Tom. They would have an in-person meeting in two days, on Sunday, March 15. It would prove to be a turning point in the lives of everyone present.
But Lee wasn’t invited.
Fuchsberg and his sister, who was also working on the case, “decided to keep me out of the meeting,” Lee says.
Lee agreed to stay in a motel room while the meeting happened. Lee told Fuchsberg to make an ultimatum. “I said,‘Alan, this is the offer: $750,000. If they don’t pay, tell them no, and that we’ll see them on TV,’ ” Lee recalls.
“That’s what I told him,” Lee says. “He didn’t do that.”
On Sunday, Vince arrived. He came to Fuchsberg’s Fifth Avenue law office along with McDevitt and Linda. Tom and Alan sat opposite them at a table. It was the first time Tom and the McMahons had ever met in person.
Here is a reconstruction of what happened, according to the accounts of Tom, Lee, and Fuchsberg.
“I told [Vince] everything that happened to me,” Tom would later recall in an interview for a wrestling newsletter. “He looked disgusted and upset about it.”
“Well, you know, Tom, this is a terrible thing that happened to you,” Vince said. “I want to make it right. This isn’t the type of company that we run. These people have left the company.”
Fuchsberg raised the possibility of a big-ticket settlement.
“Well, that’s a lot of money that we’re talking about,” Vince said.
“Listen, I’m not looking for money,” Tom blurted out.
“It was probably the stupidest thing I ever said,” Tom would later lament in that newsletter interview. “I believed what [Vince] was saying.”
Fuchsberg “kept walking out of the room and leaving me in there for 15, 20 minutes at a time with Vince McMahon and his wife,” Tom said. “He’d go on walks with [McDevitt] and leave me in the room. And McMahon would talk to me and say, ‘It’s terrible what happened to you and ba-ba-ba. We want you to come back and work for us,’ and this and that. But what they really wanted was to find out any other kids’ names and any other people who were involved.”
Eventually, Fuchsberg and Vince started arguing. Vince’s words grew frightening: “I’m like a rat,” the boss said. “I’ll go for the throat if I have to. I won’t be backed into a corner.”
Vince got up to leave, and Linda and McDevitt joined him. Tom panicked.
“No, no, don’t go!” Tom yelled to the departing McMahons. “I just want my job back!”
There was a stunned silence.
“I loved wrestling,” Tom would later say to justify what he did next. “I loved working for the business. It’s what I wanted to do my whole life. There was never a better feeling than going into an arena or going to a wrestling show and meeting people and stuff like that. It felt so good inside. You were so happy to be there. It was the best feeling in the world.”
Fuchsberg left the room again. Tom was alone with the McMahons and their attorney. “I’ve told this story to people and they just don’t get it,” Lee says. “He left this kid, this 21-year-old man who’s a street kid without an education, alone with Vince McMahon.”
“He was very shrewd,” Tom would say of Vince, “and I was very young.” What did Vince tell Tom in that moment of intimacy?
“Mr. McMahon explained to Tom that he had a difficult childhood himself,” is how Fuchsberg would describe it to a reporter shortly afterward.
Lee puts it more bluntly: “Vince McMahon started telling him, ‘Tom, I was molested also when I was a kid.’ ”
“I want to start on a clean slate with you,” Vince said. “I want to take care of everything. How would you feel about that?”
“Tom got a good feeling that Mr. McMahon really cared,” Fuchsberg said. “[Vince] shook hands with Tom and offered him his job back.”
“I thought that was the right thing to do,” Tom would say of accepting the offer. “I thought, Let me give it a chance. Maybe this guy didn’t know anything that happened.”
Fuchsberg was called back in. Tom agreed to accept $55,000 in back pay and a job in the WWF’s crew department. The $750,000 was never mentioned again. The lawsuit was dropped.
“I was in no league for Vince McMahon,” Tom said. “The guy’s methodical.”
“Vince McMahon,” Lee tells me with grim confidence, “can get you to do anything.”
Excerpted from Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Copyright © 2023 by Abraham Josephine Riesman. Published by arrangement with Simon and Schuster.
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