Vince McMahon Claims He Owns Real Names of WWE Wrestlers Who Aren’t Even Employees of the Company

Ahh, Vince McMahon. The man’s best idea was to make himself the biggest heel in wrestling, and it worked because behind the scenes he’s actually a huge asshole. Like, if you saw Wrestling with Shadows, the climax of that movie, the “Montreal Screwjob,” turned out to be the least-bad thing Vince did to the Hart family.

Vince is back on his bullshit with Wrestling, Inc. reporting Vince informed WWE superstars that they can’t use platforms like Twitch or Cameo or YouTube because he owns their real names, not just their wrestling personas.

WWE held a call with talent last Sunday regarding the reinvention of the product. During the call, it was said that WWE owns the real names of talent, not just their character names.

McMahon followed up by sending a letter on Thursday. McMahon wrote that it was imperative that they promote and protect the brand in every conceivable way, and that talent have 30 days to stop engaging with third parties.

“Some of you are engaged with outside third parties using your name and likeness in ways that are detrimental to our company,” McMahon wrote. “It is imperative that these activities be terminated within the next 30 days (by Friday October 2). Continued violations will result in fines, suspension, or termination at WWE’s discretion.”

This is like Disney claiming to own the name Robert Downey, Jr. because he played Iron Man. Which honestly, I could see happening.

The interesting thing to me is that WWE claims they don’t actually employ their wrestlers, calling them “independent contractors,” which lets them avoid certain obligations they would have to employees. Normally one of the trade-offs to that is that independent contractors can have multiple clients.

I’ll bet AEW will let you use Cameo. Just sayin’.