World Wrestling Entertainment, the company where Connecticut Republican Senate hopeful Linda McMahon served as CEO for years, once teamed up with the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ enterprise for a pay-per-view event featuring the raunchy, partly-nude show and some of the WWE’s wrestling personalities.
The 2003 event is another chapter in WWE’s checkered history that has raised eyebrows as McMahon has pursued her self-funded campaign against Democratic nominee Richard Blumenthal, a contest that the latest polls have shown in a dead heat.
McMahon has cited her tenure as CEO of the company as one of her qualifiers for elected office, but has spent time answering questions about some of the more lurid aspects of the business she’s downplayed as a soap opera.
McMahon spokesman Ed Patru, asked for comment about the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ event, referred comment to the WWE, saying he doesn’t work for them.
WWE spokesman Robert Zimmerman told POLITICO that the event was a one-time occurrence, for mature audiences, and that the firm has since gone from a TV-14 rating to a TV-PG one.
He provided a statement explaining why the company made the switch.
“Like other Hollywood studios, WWE is a global brand that creates entertainment programming,” the statement says. “WWE continues to evolve and reinvent itself. As of June 2008, ALL of WWE’s programming became TV-PG, as rated by the Standards & Practices departments of our network partners. In the past, much like many other shows at the time, WWE engaged in what was known as sensationalized TV in a TV-14 environment. Since then, WWE has made a full transition to TV-PG content and storylines, while nearly half of all programming on television remains TV-14 between 9-11pm on general entertainment networks.”
At the time of the event, it was touted as an exciting cross-promotional endeavor.
“We have an incredible partnership with the WWE,” Joe Francis, who founded the production company behind Girls Gone Wild and who spent time in jail on charges that he and the company didn’t properly document the ages of some of the young girls who exposed themselves in their videos, was quoted saying in the Hollywood Reporter in February 2003. “They own the pay-per-view space, so there's no better people to be in business with.”
A WWE spokesman was also quoted in that story saying, "This would be the first time in a long time we are collaborating with a third party on a PPV event. We have experience to make sure this event takes shape."
There was an eye, by both outfits, toward reaching a younger male audience that had started to drift, according to published reports at the time.
The idea was to have a live special in March of that year, and a press release from Mantra Entertainment, the company behind Girls, issued a month before it was scheduled to occur said the WWE had already started using some storylines from the video series—which typically features young women exposing themselves—in its own programming.
Francis has said he he’d personally played a character on one of the WWE shows, Raw, along with McMahon’s husband, Vince.
“It's real girls and there's nothing else like it. I like girls and I really like them naked and I thought other guys would, too,” Francis was quoted telling the Monitor of South Texas.
The promoters were set to go to Panama City, Fla., and two other locations. But the mayor of Panama City, just before the event, threatened to arrest everyone involved if the pay-per-view extravaganza went on.
They ended up moving the festivities to South Padre Island, Texas, noting the controversy simply helped ratings.
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