The three anonymous emails were sent to various WWE board members on March 30, April 11, and April 14, 2022. They described alleged sexual misconduct by Vince McMahon and former WWE executive John Laurinaitis. These emails have since been included in exhibits that are part of the WWE merger lawsuit, which reportedly reached a settlement in principle recently.

The exact email address the messages were sent from is redacted in the court exhibits, but the emails appear to have been sent from a ProtonMail user with the handle “drosen77”. The person sending the emails represents themselves as a friend of Grant.

The first email was sent on March 30, 2022, at 8:46 am, just days before that year’s WrestleMania events. The message used the subject line “vince mcmahon chief chairman behavior.” Containing many spelling and grammar errors, the first email reads:

To Whom it May Concern, My friend worked at WWE. She is [REDACTED] and we live homeless for a while on percs etc. Etc. We went to get cleaned up together and she met chief chairman Vince McMahon not too long after that. Vince McMahon gave her a job and paid her one hundred thousand dollars every year until he started fucking her then he paid her two hundred thousand dollar a year he is 80 years old and took my friends soul just because he could. Vince McMahon gave her like a toy his friend John who works at WWE to John is 70 and her boss to. My friend was so scared so she quit after Vince McMahon and lawyer Jerry paid her millions of dollars to shut up I am going to the media as well I don’t want anything from from I just want the world to know the truth about this pervert.

Grant explicitly denied these claims in her Instagram post, stating she never lived on the street nor had an addiction to Percocet. “There is no person who knew me in life pre-dating 2019 who could write this,” Grant wrote in a note posted to Instagram on Wednesday. She added, “Reading these for the first time took a sledgehammer to my mental health. I feel like a Taylor Swift lyric and wonder if someone caged me just to call me crazy.”

Grant responded directly to the assertions within this email in her Instagram post, clarifying, “What never happened: No living on the street. No addictions to ‘percs.’ No rehab.” She further addressed the implied connection and situation: “The spin: A friend? I see a trick to steer public perception. Homeless? I shared my background at work. Rehab? I shared my experience with grief counseling at work. Addiction? I shared that quitting nicotine lozenges wasn’t fun at work.”

The reference to “lawyer Jerry” in the email apparently refers to longtime WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt. The next email makes it more apparent that the “John” referred to is talent relations executive John Laurinaitis. However, factual discrepancies exist in the email's details: Laurinaitis was 59 years old at the time the emails were sent, not 70, and McMahon was 76 years old, not 80.

The second of the three emails was sent twelve days later, on April 11, 2022, at 11:08 pm. It refers to John Laurinaitis as 'johnny Laronitis' and states that 'WWE paid for her silence':

The board of directors for major company like wwe does not care that the old founder and his old sidekick johnny Laronitis took advantage of a [REDACTED] who only worked hard? She would be angry that I wrote this but I want no money. I am sending this out to your stock holders tomorrow and to all lawyers my friend worked with. The lawyers knows of the settlements investigate and you will see WWE paid for her silence. [REDCATED] is her name. Very good lady. Treated like an animal by Vince Mcmahon and Johnny Loronitis.

The last of the three messages was sent three days later and seems to refer to interactions the emailer was purportedly having with media outlet Deadspin. The text stated:

Deadspin is surprised that board of directors has not checked vince mcmahon s phone which will show all of his hurtful pictures back and forth to [REDACTED] these include pictures of his privates to a 25 year old employee and them in sex together and with Johnny in sex acts with her. Gross old men abusing a 25 year old.

Deadspin isn’t known to have broken information about this story at the time, and it remains unknown if the emailer actually contacted the outlet. Grant was 41 years old at the time of these emails, rather than 25, as the third email states. Grant addressed the implications of this particular email in her Instagram post on Wednesday, writing, “I’m pretty sick over whether this is implying a revenge porn situation and whether it extends to Deadspin,” and “I’m sick over whether this is implying I was being filmed and didn’t know it. I’m sick over whatever it is that I don’t know.”

In the months after the anonymous emails were sent, The Wall Street Journal broke the story in June 2022 that WWE’s board was investigating alleged misconduct and a related $3 million nondisclosure agreement McMahon made with an employee, now known to be Janel Grant. The Journal referenced portions of the anonymous emails in its reporting. Subsequent reporting by The Wall Street Journal in 2022 uncovered three additional NDAs and millions more in payments that should have been recorded in WWE’s financial reporting filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The emails themselves are partly redacted, including apparent uses of Grant’s name, though she has since been public with her allegations. Identifying information of NDA counterparties was broadly protected in the merger case, and the identities of other women who agreed to settlements with McMahon are not known to the public.

Janel Grant is currently the plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit in federal court in Connecticut, alleging she was sex trafficked and sexually abused by McMahon, allegations which he denies.

In a second Instagram post published on the same day, Grant shared excerpts of transcripts from depositions with WWE President Nick Khan and former executive Frank Riddick. Their testimony was provided as part of the merger case. Nick Khan, who was an executive and a member of the company’s board of directors at the time the emails were received, testified about the internal reaction to them. Khan's deposition, which occurred last December (December 2023) is a publicly filed exhibit in the merger case.

WWE is occasionally named as a defendant in lawsuits written by the plaintiffs themselves, which often appear to make incomprehensible or erratic claims. Regarding the first anonymous email, Khan testified:

The reaction to this one [the first email, received on March 30, 2022], there’s a lot of passionate wrestling fans out there, and we get e-mails that are, you know, sort of a little erratic all the time, sometimes threatening to, you know, myself or colleagues,”