Former WWE Writer Discusses What It Was Like To Work W/ Stephanie McMahon & Talks Vince McMahon’s Extramarital Affairs

As has already been reported, Stephanie McMahon has resigned from her post as co-CEO of WWE. This news came very shortly after news broke that Vince McMahon returned to the company after stepping away this summer.

Vince was reelected as Executive Chairman of the Board and although there is a lot of speculation surrounding the specific reasons behind all of this, the fact that the company lost Stephanie is a pretty hard blow for many. She had accomplished a lot in her years with the company that date back to the nineties, and she was responsible for many of the advancements made by said company, which was started by her great grandfather in its original form.

Of course Vince only turned what both Jess and Vince Sr. built and took it to the stratosphere, but the reasons for her leaving are still in fact a mystery, which only add to the uneasiness about the whole deal.

While we have no answers, we do have some insight from a former WWE writer and producer (Robert Karpeles) who worked with Stephanie closely. He had quite a bit to say about her while he sat down with Wrestling Inc.’s Nick Hausman:

“So she was overseeing the creative team. All of our scripts, our pitches, our ideas, any of that got filtered up to her, and then she was very much the Vince whisperer. Vince was the person who had to stamp everything at the end. The idea was we’d meet with her; we’d pitch everything to Stephanie. Once she understands it gets on board with it, then ultimately when we do get that limited window of time with Vince, we can pitch it to him and we know that she has our full support on it…

She’s a very important person in the company, obviously, but at the same time, it is someone you’ve seen on TV, you’ve played as a video game character. It’s a recognizable figure. And within about a minute and a half, two minutes, she becomes an incredibly relatable, very, very nice person. We were arguing over who had the worst dorm room in college…

So it was very weird. She was a fantastic boss who caught a lot of flack unnecessarily. I think just the nature of being in that role and that idea of, ‘Well, your last name is your last name and if you weren’t here it would be,’ fill-in-the-blank. It would be Jim Cornette, it would be Paul Heyman; it would be Pat Patterson, whoever it is. She earned it and she worked very hard in that role…”

The issue of Vince’s departure from the company was undoubtedly big news…sexual misconduct on a large scale. Payouts were made to women…this was considered hush money for services rendered so to speak, and of course this brought up the topic of McMahon’s betrayal of his wife, Linda, Stephanie’s mother.

Despite this though, Stephanie showed support to her father when he stepped down in the summer…something that many would argue wasn’t at all reciprocated after he made his return just recently….allowing his daughter to step down. Again we have no answers as to exactly what happened, but it’s safe to say it all looks very bad from the surface.

Robert Karpeles went into the accusations made about Vince McMahon during the aforementioned interview with Wrestling Inc.’s Nick Hausman and even spoke to McMahon’s infidelity:  

“He was always open about extramarital affairs. It was a storyline multiple times that Jim Ross brought up on air when his character, talking about flaunting your affairs in Playboy. The onscreen stuff with Sable, the onscreen stuff that we did with Torrie Wilson and Candice Michelle, where it was kind of implied that there was something going on there…

The stuff with Vince and Trish Stratus on air. He was never hiding any of it. So if he was having a legitimate extramarital affair with employees … that may not, in and of itself, have been grounds to say he needs to be removed as CEO, or Chairman of the Board…

When it came out that he was paying them money to remain quiet, if that was his private money and he was having them sign NDAs … that in and of itself might not be enough. If it was taking corporate money to pay those people, if it was promoting those people into higher, into better roles or giving them more money or anything like that, that’s a level of quid pro quo that when you are an executive, yeah, the ceiling’s going to come down on you…

I didn’t know what it was, unless it was, ‘Boy, there must be something really bad,’ like the other shoe was going to drop and this is going to end disastrously. And that other shoe never dropped. And I think him sitting at home stewing over it, he was probably legitimately upset. This was, in his mind, taken from him. He doesn’t see he did anything necessarily wrong…

That can be debated. I think that they investigated him and shareholders brought suits against him to reimburse for that investigation. And I think that lawsuit is going to hang over his head for a while because now there’s other things being attached to that lawsuit as recently as today, so … It’s going to be troubling to see what winds up happening here. Him coming back in any capacity did not surprise me at all…”

NEXT: Ex-WWE Writer Details What’s Both Good & Bad About Vince McMahon’s Return To Power