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“Obtaining discovery into the merger process has been a tooth-pulling exercise,” the shareholder plaintiffs in the WWE merger lawsuit wrote. In a filing that was made public on Tuesday, the plaintiffs asked the Delaware Chancery Court to extend the window for gathering evidence, as we reported last week.

The plaintiffs, led by an Ohio labor union pension fund, claim that the gathering of evidence so far, “confirms that WWE executive chair and controlling stockholder, Vince McMahon, faced material conflicts with respect to the merger, and that Endeavor’s principals [including current top TKO executives Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro] exploited those conflicts to induce McMahon to clandestinely pre-wire a deal while nominally running an open sale process.”

The claim is consistent with the plaintiffs’ overall theory that McMahon predetermined the sale process to assure he stayed with the company afterward, despite sexual misconduct allegations made against him. McMahon has denied the allegations made by the shareholders in this case as well as the related sexual misconduct claims.

In the newly unsealed court filing, which contains many redactions, the plaintiffs argue that attorneys from Latham & Watkins — who represent the defendants, and non-party TKO executives, TKO CEO Ari Emanuel and President Mark Shapiro — are dragging out the process by withholding documents and scheduling depositions at the last possible moment.

The motion filed Friday also states that federal authorities seized McMahon’s mobile device in mid-2023. The device was returned to him recently in October, and the plaintiffs say McMahon cooperated to produce about 6,500 “documents” from that device on Oct. 31. The filing doesn’t explain what those records consist of or whether 6,500 is largely a count of individual text messages.

WWE President Nick Khan, along with Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque and former WWE board members George Barrios and Michelle Wilson, are the defendants in the case, along with McMahon. McMahon is represented by separate counsel from Kirkland & Ellis.

McMahon was scheduled to sit for a deposition on Monday and is presumed to have done so. Statements from depositions, conducted under oath, are not made public immediately, but they may become part of the case as it progresses. Many other executives, including Levesque, have been deposed already as well.

Depositions of Khan, Emanuel, and Shapiro are among the final ones, with dates set throughout December. Those dates fall after the deadline for requesting documents, which passed last Friday, the day the plaintiffs filed their motion. They argue that this timing undermines their ability to prepare their case and reflects a broader pattern of resistance by the defendants to turn over key information.

Representatives at WWE and TKO did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

Read the plaintiffs’ motion embedded at the bottom of this article.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of WWE shareholders, challenges the company’s 2023 merger as Endeavor spun off the world’s leading MMA company, UFC. Plaintiffs say they began requesting deposition dates over the summer, but were given only a few options late in the year: December 2 for Emanuel, December 8 for Shapiro, and December 18 for Khan. The plaintiffs say this “backloading” of the schedule is “highly prejudicial,” meaning they believe the delay is unfairly harming their ability to build their legal case.

In an effort to support their argument, the plaintiffs’ attorneys quoted from a 2024 legal article co-written by the judge overseeing this case, J. Travis Laster: “Information is power, so not producing documents deprives an adversary of power,” Laster and his co-author wrote. “Time is another precious resource, so backloading the discovery schedule when producing documents or witnesses deprives the adversary of time.”

In addition to scheduling issues, the shareholders describe long delays and gaps in document production. They say Khan and others have not fully responded to requests for information, including communications records with federal investigators from 2022 to early 2024, when those agencies were investigating McMahon’s alleged misconduct.

WWE’s 2023 regulatory filings from the time describe an early framework for the eventual TKO deal in which Endeavor and WWE discussed a 57%-43% all-stock merger in Endeavor’s favor. Possibly running counter to the plaintiffs’ narrative, the final agreement was a 51%-49% split that increased WWE’s share, conditioned on McMahon remaining with the company. On the day the TKO deal was announced, Emanuel told CNBC that he insisted McMahon stay.

WWE’s 2023 disclosures also outline three alternative offers the company considered. All were cash proposals: one for $95 to $100 per share, another for $90 to $97.50 per share, and a third for $76.83 per share. The plaintiffs argue that each of these options would have removed McMahon from the company. They cite letters included in WWE’s SEC filings that show McMahon pushing to return while the board unanimously rejected that idea, a standoff that ended in January 2023 when he used his controlling voting power to reinstate himself, remove certain directors, and install former top executives Barrios and Wilson in their place. The lawsuit claims that Barrios, Wilson, Khan, and Levesque cooperated with McMahon and breached their fiduciary duties by failing to pursue the best available outcome for shareholders.

McMahon later resigned for the second time in January 2024, days after former employee Janel Grant filed a sex trafficking lawsuit against him and WWE.

Plaintiffs contend that extending fact discovery to January 8 will let them resolve outstanding disputes and prepare for upcoming depositions without delaying the trial date. The defendants representing Khan, Levesque, Barrios, and Wilson have opposed the seven-week extension and offered a compromise to extend two additional weeks, but under the condition that no new discovery requests be made during that period.

Tentatively, the case is set for trial from June 8 to 12, 2026.

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Shareholders pressing their case over WWE’s 2023 merger with the UFC are seeking access to records tied to federal investigations into Vince McMahon’s conduct, according to a new filing in Delaware Chancery Court.

The motion was submitted on Friday under seal, but the proposed order is public. It asks the judge, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster, to order WWE, TKO, President Nick Khan, Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, and former board members George Barrios and Michelle Wilson, to turn over materials that were previously provided to the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The proposed order shows plaintiffs want the production to include every document provided to federal investigators between January 2022 and January 2024, “in connection with their respective investigations of McMahon’s alleged sexual misconduct and associated payments,” as well as all related communications with the federal agencies.

The request encompasses the period when federal authorities investigated allegations of sexual misconduct and related nondisclosure payments involving McMahon and women formerly employed by WWE. McMahon is also a defendant in the shareholder case, along with Khan, Levesque, Barrios, and Wilson.

McMahon has not been charged with any crimes related to the sexual misconduct allegations that became public in 2022. According to statements from his representatives last February, prosecutors dropped their investigation by that time. Additionally, McMahon has denied the sexual misconduct allegations made against him by as many as seven different women.

The shareholder plaintiffs’ new motion isn’t public, but the filing suggests a dispute with the defendants that they couldn’t resolve on their own. The defendants will have a chance to respond before Laster decides whether to order them to produce any of the requested documents.

An inquiry sent to communications representatives for WWE and TKO wasn’t immediately responded to.

The plaintiffs also raised concerns earlier this week about the defendants’ use of the Signal messaging app that may have resulted in the executives not preserving communications properly while the M&A process was underway. The defendants say those concerns are overstated.

McMahon is scheduled to be deposed on Monday as part of the ongoing discovery phase of the case.

In January 2025, the SEC fined McMahon $400,000 and required him to repay $1.3 million to WWE. It was part of a settlement with the agency in which McMahon did not admit to wrongdoing and did not deny the SEC’s findings.

McMahon signed multi-million dollar NDAs, including a $3 million agreement with former employee Janel Grant and another worth $7.5 million with an unidentified former WWE talent. The NDAs weren’t disclosed to the company or the public until 2022, which required WWE to issue corrections to its financial statements.

Unlike the shareholder suit and Janel Grant’s federal case against McMahon and WWE, the federal investigations have produced little public information.

Earlier this year, McMahon tried to limit the plaintiffs’ ability to request materials related to the sexual misconduct allegations, arguing the discovery demands were an attempt to harass and pressure him.

The shareholder litigation, now in its second year, argues that McMahon pushed the process toward Endeavor’s UFC because he believed Ari Emanuel was the only bidder who would keep him in place amid the misconduct scandal. McMahon has denied that’s the case.

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New filings in the WWE shareholder lawsuit over the TKO merger show plaintiffs asking the court for more time in the phase of the case where each side gathers evidence. The request arrived as attorneys for the shareholders raised new concerns about how key executives communicated during the lead-up to WWE’s 2023 merger with Endeavor’s UFC.

In emails between attorneys filed in new exhibits, the plaintiffs say Vince McMahon, Nick Khan, Paul Levesque, Stephanie McMahon, Brad Blum, and current TKO CEO Ari Emanuel all used the encrypted messaging app Signal during the period they were required to preserve documents as the WWE M&A process was ongoing.

Plaintiffs say each of them turned on Signal’s auto-delete function in at least one chat, and they separately assert that WWE President Khan deleted text messages during the time frame, according to the filings reviewed by Wrestlenomics.

The defendants in the case are Vince McMahon, Khan, Levesque, and former executives George Barrios and Michelle Wilson. Vince McMahon has separate counsel from the rest of the defendants.

The shareholders’ lawyers asked opposing attorneys from Latham & Watkins, who represent the non-Vince defendants, to investigate whether any relevant code-named Signal group chats existed, including one possibly named “Stunner.” They asked them to specifically check any devices belonging to Khan, Levesque, Emanuel, and Blum that have ever had Signal downloaded to them.

The filings don’t explain how the plaintiffs came to suspect that such group chats exist. Many documents have already been turned over and several witnesses have already been deposed, including Stephanie McMahon (on Oct. 24) and Paul Levesque (last Tuesday). The depositions aren’t automatically made public.

Responding to the shareholders’ counsel, the defendants’ attorneys disputed the plaintiffs’ claims about missing messages and their use of Signal. “Your attempt to recast the record on supposed ‘text message and Signal-related deletion issues,’ privilege log disputes, and deposition scheduling is inaccurate and improper,” an attorney for the defendants wrote back.

In the series of emails sent this month and filed as exhibits, counsel for Khan, Levesque, Barrios, and Wilson say they’ve worked in good faith to respond to the plaintiffs’ repeated discovery requests. They note that in October the plaintiffs served “a dozen overbroad interrogatories,” lists of questions they want Khan to answer. The attorneys representing the WWE board members argued that the plaintiffs are now seeking to extend the discovery window simply because they might become dissatisfied with answers from witnesses like Khan, whose depositions haven’t been conducted yet.

Lawyers for the shareholders noted in one of the emails between counsel that, “Stephanie McMahon Levesque also testified at her deposition that she communicated frequently through Signal with Nick Khan — ‘perhaps a couple of times a day’ — on ‘really important’ and ‘pressing’ matters, and that she and [her husband] Paul Levesque regularly used Signal to communicate.”

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using Signal, it raises questions for the plaintiffs about whether written communications were being properly preserved at a time when executives were required to keep important messages because of potential litigation around the merger. The concern is that some executives may have used Signal’s auto-delete feature during a period when they were supposed to save their communications instead of letting them disappear.

Stephanie McMahon and Khan, notably, served as co-CEOs for the five months between Vince McMahon’s first resignation in July 2022 and his return the following January, soon after which Stephanie resigned.

The plaintiffs’ email to the defendants’ counsel went on to state, “Each of Blum, Emanuel, Khan, McMahon, and McMahon Levesque communicated via Signal with one or more others.”

The shareholder class, which is led by a pension fund for an Ohio labor union, has asked the court to extend several upcoming deadlines and proposed holding a four-day trial in June 2026. The motion itself was filed under seal on Friday, but the proposed order and some supporting exhibits appeared on the public docket on Monday.

The motion came after the plaintiffs’ attorneys tried to resolve the matter directly with the defendants.

“It would be unfortunate for Plaintiffs to have to move to extend the fact discovery cutoff and/or to compel on various issues to preserve our rights,” a lawyer for the shareholders wrote to defense counsel last week, “and we do not think the Court will look kindly on Defendants’ tactics if we are forced to file those motions.”

The plaintiffs say they can’t finish collecting all the relevant evidence under the current schedule because several major depositions are set to happen after the discovery deadline, including upcoming testimony from Khan, TKO President Mark Shapiro, and Emanuel, each of whom are scheduled to be deposed in December.

Barrios and Wilson, who had served as executives and board members before Vince McMahon fired them in 2020, were added back to the board when he returned in January 2023. Levesque and Khan were also board members during the period in which WWE began exploring a merger or sale. The lawsuit alleges that those directors allowed McMahon to control the M&A process to ensure WWE merged with UFC rather than genuinely exploring other bids that might have required McMahon to leave the company. McMahon has denied the allegations in a filed answer. The other defendants’ answer has been filed under seal without a public version.

One name that’s reemerged in the case is Blum, Vince McMahon’s longtime chief of staff at WWE and now, after leaving WWE in 2024, the president of McMahon’s post-WWE venture, 14TH&I. The former WWE chief of staff and chief operating officer was likely deposed in this case on Friday, according to a filing with a Florida court showing his deposition was scheduled for that date. He is also among the executives mentioned in the separate lawsuit filed by former employee Janel Grant, whose allegations of misconduct against McMahon triggered the board investigation that eventually led to McMahon’s resignation.

The back-and-forth over Signal and possible deleted text messages connects to the central claim in the case that McMahon predetermined a merger with Endeavor because of his relationship with Emanuel and his alleged expectation that only Emanuel could assure that McMahon would stay with WWE after closing the deal. The plaintiffs believe that private communications among key executives and directors may reveal how decisions were made and whether the sale process actually served shareholders’ interests or whether McMahon put his personal interests first, with cooperation from the director defendants.

The judge, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster, hasn’t ruled yet on the plaintiffs’ request to extend discovery or any of the disputes raised recently related to Signal or possibly deleted text messages.

Requests for comments for this report sent to the plaintiffs’ attorneys and separately to communications representatives for WWE and TKO were not returned.

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WWE Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque was scheduled to be deposed on Tuesday at 11 a.m., according to court filings reviewed by Wrestlenomics, as part of the ongoing WWE shareholder lawsuit over the company’s merger with UFC.

Depositions don’t automatically become public record. Transcript excerpts from them may be used in future exhibits in the case.

The shareholder lawsuit accuses McMahon and other former board members of breaching their fiduciary duties in approving WWE’s merger with Endeavor’s UFC in a process the plaintiffs allege was pre-selected to assure McMahon would remain with the company post-transaction, despite sexual misconduct allegations against him. In a filing last year, McMahon broadly denied the allegations. The other defendants, who are Levesque and WWE President Nick Khan and former company executives George Barrios and Michelle Wilson, filed an answer which is sealed from public view.

The plaintiffs, who represent a class of shareholders, also subpoenaed a phone carrier for evidence related to a phone number we believe is associated with TKO COO Mark Shapiro, based on that phone number appearing on regulatory filings associated with him. Similar requests have been made for phone numbers believed to be related to Vince McMahon, TKO CEO Ari Emanuel, Khan, Levesque, Stephanie McMahon, and others.

The plaintiffs themselves as well as various firms that advised WWE and Endeavor on the merger are also being deposed and subpoenaed.

The case is being litigated in Delaware Chancery Court. McMahon is represented by his own set of attorneys, separate from the other defendants.

Former executives and board members Stephanie McMahon, Frank Riddick, Wilson, and Barrios were scheduled to be (and presumably were) deposed in October. McMahon, Khan, Shapiro, and Emanuel are all scheduled to be deposed before the end of the year. 

Questioning in these depositions likely focused on how the deal was evaluated, what information directors relied on, and what role McMahon played as the transaction moved forward.