A former lawyer for pro-wrestling impresario Vince McMahon was wrong to withhold some documents from a federal grand jury as it investigated how the former WWE boss handled multimillion-dollar settlement agreements with two female employees who accused him of sexual abuse, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
Three judges on the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court ruling that said the documents were not protected by attorney-client privilege because of an exception for “crime or fraud.”
The appeals court said the lower court judge found prosecutors had reasonable grounds to believe that McMahon and his lawyer illegally “circumvented” the WWE's internal controls and created false records when they concealed the employees' claims and settlement agreements from the company, and that they made false and misleading statements to the company's auditors — even though McMahon paid the settlements with funds that did not come from the company.
The appellate panel said that while McMahon's lawyer submitted many materials in response to a grand jury subpoena, they also submitted a log of 208 documents that were being withheld under assertions of attorney-client privilege.
Though the identities of the parties were not disclosed in the appeals court opinion, a person familiar with the matter confirmed the unnamed “former Chief Executive Officer of a ”publicly traded company" was McMahon. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public.
The status of the grand jury investigation was not immediately clear. The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has declined to comment when asked about the investigation, which it has not publicly disclosed.
Representatives for McMahon, who has denied wrongdoing, said they had no immediate comment on the court ruling. McMahon has previously suggested that he was no longer under investigation.
In January, McMahon said in a statement that “nearly three years of investigation by different governmental agencies” into his actions had ended. The statement came as the federal Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had settled charges against McMahon over his failure to disclose the settlement agreements with the two now-former employees to WWE officials.
“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," the statement said. “I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”
The appeals court, however, said in Monday's ruling that the case “concerns proceedings currently before a grand jury. At present, no indictments have been issued.”
The opinion disclosed some new details of the grand jury probe.
Representatives for one of the former employees who got a settlement agreement from McMahon, Janel Grant, declined to comment Monday.
McMahon resigned from WWE’s parent company in January 2024 after Grant filed a federal lawsuit accusing him and another former executive of serious sexual misconduct. At the time, McMahon stepped down from his position as executive chair of the board of directors at WWE’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings. He continued to deny wrongdoing following the filing of the lawsuit.
McMahon stepped down as WWE’s CEO in 2022 amid a company investigation into allegations that match those in the lawsuit.
Grant has said she was pressured into leaving her job with the WWE and signing a $3 million nondisclosure agreement. The lawsuit, which alleges sexual battery and trafficking, also seeks to have the agreement declared invalid, saying McMahon breached the deal by giving her $1 million and failing to pay the rest.
The $3 million settlement is mentioned in Monday's appellate court ruling, along with another $7.5 million settlement McMahon made with another former employee.
The Associated Press does not normally name people who make sexual assault allegations unless they come forward publicly, which Grant did.
Prosecutors served subpoenas on McMahon's lawyer, who is unnamed in court documents, and the attorney's firm in September 2023, seeking all communications between McMahon, his attorney and the law firm regarding the two former employees, according to the appellate court. The lawyer helped McMahon negotiate the settlements, the court said.
When the lawyer withheld some of the documents claiming attorney-client privilege, prosecutors asked the lower court to compel production of the records — leading to the appeal decided Monday.
The appellate judges wrote, “Because the settlement agreements resolving the Victims’ claims were ‘structured and negotiated ... to keep them hidden from (the Company),' the district court found that ’all communications about the claims and settlement agreements were made in furtherance of the criminal scheme to keep (the Company) and its auditors unaware of the allegations.'”
Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
FILE - WWE chairman and CEO Vince McMahon speaks to an audience during a fan appreciation event, Oct. 30, 2010, in Hartford, Conn. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
ROME (AP) — The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin's school of English, told The Associated Press.
What's more, she said, the poem was within the main body of Latin text: "It was extraordinary.”
Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, "Caedmon’s Hymn" appears within some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. His history is one of the most widely reproduced texts from the Middle Ages, with almost 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti's colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity.
He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the start of English literature.
The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts — translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin by later scribes or appended but not within the text's main body, according to the researchers.
The discovery sheds light on the English language's wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had traveled to view the text in person for the first time.
“Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century,” Faulkner said.
And it's something of a miracle they uncovered it at all.
Caedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a feast began reciting poems, Faulkner said.
“Embarrassed that he didn’t know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed," he said. "A figure then appeared to him in his dreams telling him to sing about creation, which Caedmon miraculously did, producing the nine-line hymn."
Some 1,400 years later, this copy of his poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library — but not before crossing the Atlantic Ocean at least twice and changing hands even more times.
Monks transcribed this copy of Bede's history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centers during the Middle Ages, located near modern-day Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome's National Central Library.
In the 17th century, as the abbey's importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was shifted to another abbey in Rome, then moved to the Vatican and finally on to a small church.
Along the way, some of the texts went missing, only to emerge in the early 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Longo said.
This copy of Bede's history went to renowned English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps. He fell on hard times, selling off bits and pieces of his collection, and Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer secured the book. From there, somehow, it arrived in New York City, in the trove of Austrian-born rare bookseller H.P. Kraus during the 20th century.
Italy's culture ministry was scouring the world for the Nonantola abbey's missing manuscripts, snapping them up in auctions and from collectors around the world. It bought the copy of Bede's history from Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and since then the illustrious text has remained in Rome's library — but received scant notice.
Enter Magnanti, who had spent over four years studying Bede’s history and was compiling a catalog of extant copies.
“I knew that the book was listed in the library’s catalog, so I was almost certain that the book was, in fact, still here," she said. “I realized that, because of the very complex history of this book, no Bede scholar had really looked at it. So it had been virtually unstudied."
She emailed the library, which confirmed the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the entire manuscript.
Nupue. sciulun. herga. hefunricaes. puard. metudaes. maechti. and his.
mod geðanc. puerc. puldur. fadur. suæhepundragiaes
ecidrichtin or astalde. he aeristscoop eor dubearnū hefento
hrofe halig. sceppend. ða. middū. geard. moncinnes peard eci
drichtin. aefter. tia de. firū. on foldu. frea. allmechtig.
Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom,
the might of the creator and his intention,
the work of the father of glory, in that he of each wonder,
eternal lord, established the beginning.
He first created the earth for men,
heaven as a roof, the holy creator,
then the middle earth, the guardian of mankind,
the eternal lord, afterwards created
for men on earth, the almighty lord.
The library has digitized the entire Nonantolan collection and it is freely accessible through the website, Longo said.
It's part of a massive project by the library to make thousands of rare books and manuscripts available to researchers around the world, according to Andrea Cappa, the library's head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room.
“The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this,” Cappa said.
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An earlier version of the story mistakenly quoted Elisabetta Magnanti as saying that “no big scholar had really looked” at the book before. She said “no Bede scholar had really looked at it”.
The 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is seen at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of a page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
From left, Elisabetta Magnanti, Mark Faulkner of Dublin's Trinity College, Andrea Cappa and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library examine a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
From left, Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Dublin's Trinity College and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library look at a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn, the first poem ever to be written down in Old English, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)
A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of the left page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)null
