Vince McMahon "Death" May Have Legal ImplicationsDarren Rovell of CNBC believes that Vince McMahon's faked death could potentially attract lawsuits from shareholders. The WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) continues to insist that McMahon is presumed dead and the organization has engaged in a rather lengthy mourning process.
Following the self-proclaimed "Vince McMahon Appreciation Night" in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, McMahon was reported to be acting out of character and prophetically revealed to his audience of millions that a "dark cloud" was in his future.
Stepping into his limo, the vehicle blew apart. From there, the big question on everybody's mind (and we do mean everybody) was: Is Vince McMahon Dead?
"By the time we arrived on the scene, the entire automobile was on fire," explained a Wilkes-Barre firefighter. "It was like an inferno, and our guys were doing whatever they could to contain it as quickly as possible. In my 27 years with the fire department, I've never seen anything like that."
Of course that quote came from the WWE website and PR machine.
But the local newspaper, The Times Leader, claimed the explosion actually occurred nights prior.
Supervised by Zenith Pyrotechnology, the footage of the burning hulk taped Sunday night and the whole mess spliced together, said Andy Kratz, the township’s zoning officer.
“They did it, I believe, at 11 o’clock at night until 3 a.m. so no one would be around,” he said, adding that it was done in a section generally blocked from public view by the building and surrounding land features.
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The pyrotechnics company had to get permits, which Kratz said they did about a week ago. “We have pyrotechnics shows in the arena all the time” for wrestling and ice skating, among other things, he said. “They say they do this quite a bit,” but usually not outside.
Rovell, like many, have been shocked by the amount of attention this story is receiving.
"I have to admit, I thought it would never work. Maybe you could have done this 15 years ago when the Internet wasn't around, I reasoned, when you couldn't confirm that one major newspaper was reporting his death. But now you can do that.
"Now you can go to the local paper where the event happened--the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader--and see that despite the limo explosion no emergency vehicles were called, that the blowing up was actually filmed by a pyrotechnics company two days before in the middle of the night and they had permits to conduct the act. And despite the fact that the WWE said the FBI is investigating the accident, the paper also reported that the FBI was never involved.
"But I was "dead" wrong. The total page views for June 12, the day after McMahon's "death" were 36.8 million with two million daily unique visitors. Now compare that to the WWE.com three month average of 14.3 million page views and one million unique visitors."
In just two weeks alone, nearly 100,000 unique visitors have read the Gambling911.com piece on Vince McMahon's apparent "fate". Searches related to this article continue to outpace all others by a long shot with the notable exception this week of our Kimbo
Slice and BJPenn.com pieces.
But Rovell predicts there could be legal implications for all of this just around the corner. The WWE is publicly traded and as such, cannot engage in any type of "questionable" behavior. Obviously, faking the death of a company's CEO falls under the category of "questionable".
And while Rovell admits the WWE stock price hasn't been affected much by all of this - unlike the explosive web traffic generated, there are grounds for legal action nonetheless.
"(But) I still think there's a possibility the organization could be sued by a shareholder. By announcing that he is "presumed dead" on their official Web site, they could be charged with misleading stockholders. There's no evidence that a slew of people bought the McMahon news on Wall Street. As of Monday's (June 18th) close, WWE stock is down only 1.8 percent since the "accident." You'd think if McMahon really died, the thing would plummet. That being said, I think there could still be a claim."
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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com
Originally published June 25, 2007 10:09 pm ET
