Politics

WWE diva’s fetish movies make for awkward moments in Linda McMahon’s campaign

Jonathan Strong Jonathan Strong, 27, is a reporter for the Daily Caller covering Congress. Previously, he was a reporter for Inside EPA where he wrote about environmental regulation in great detail, and before that a staffer for Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA). Strong graduated from Wheaton College (IL) with a degree in political science in 2006. He is a huge fan of and season ticket holder to the Washington Capitals hockey team. Strong and his wife reside in Arlington.
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Linda McMahon, co-founder with husband Vince of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) wrestling league, wants you to think she’s as boring as the U.S. Senate she is running for.

She’s telling voters in Connecticut she wants to “stop the dividend tax rate from going up” because it would “reduce the after-tax return on capital.” She’s weighing in on inside-the-beltway skirmishes like Obama’s “czars” and what hour of the night the manager’s amendment on the Waxman-Markey bill was released (3:00 a.m. the day of the vote, if you care to know).

Reading her Web site, you might almost forget it was only a few years ago that McMahon, reduced to a near-comatose state by her husband Vince’s public affair with WWE diva Trish Stratus, rose up from her wheelchair on Wrestlemania 17 to kick Vince in the balls.

Now that McMahon wants a seat in the staid Senate, all we hear about from her campaign and allies is her role on the business side of WWE, where she was a wildly successful female executive, negotiating TV deals and generally earning the WWE heaps of money. Her staff neglects to mention that in 2005 she again entered the wrestling ring to fire WWE commentator Jim Ross by, yes, delivering another low blow.

As serious as McMahon is acting these days, WWE is back in the news because her chief Republican rival, Rob Simmons, has a low blow of his own.

In the midst of their brutal primary campaign, Simmons is drawing attention to just how racy WWE really was.

The wrestling league has always drawn fire from conservative critics who saw cartoon-like entertainment being marketed to kids that also happened to include two lady wrestlers locking lips, the unveiling of Playboy covers at wrestling matches, and segments flirting with bondage themes and necrophilia. The WWE’s era of explicit programming climaxed with an infamous romp under the covers in the middle of a wrestling ring.

McMahon has stuck up for her wrestlers, who she’s claimed are good role models for children, citing their charity work. She took a stand in the face of two federal investigations into wrestlers’ steroid use and a boycott campaign from social conservatives.

But unknown until now – even, they say, to her campaign and top WWE officials, are dozens of sexual fetish movies starring a popular WWE diva released over several years the diva was under the employ of McMahon’s WWE.

The titles of these movies include classics like “Bare Breasted Bondage Girls,” “Tied, Gagged and Frightened!,” “Girls Will Chloroform Girls!” and “Dirty Soled Dolls.”

The WWE diva who appeared in those films, Candice Michelle, starred in 58 fetish movies between 2002 and 2006, mostly under the name Mackenzie Montgomery.

Michelle wants you to know that none of these movies are pornography. “I have never, ever done porn in my life,” Michelle told The Daily Caller. “The most I ever did in any of these is topless … You will never see insertion into any orifice of my body or you will never see a penis actually touching any orifice of my body … I guess I feel like I’m a great actor because man you guys really think I did porn for some reason! I must have done something good in those films. It’s not porn at all.”

Not porn, just some fetish movies Michelle did to make ends meet when she was young and needed the money. “I was trying to discover myself and trying to make it and survive out in L.A. … No, I don’t regret it. Is it something I’d put on my résumé to show a Hollywood producer? No. This is what I did to make it to where I am.”

Still, the movies and their titillating titles might make McMahon a little anxious up in Connecticut. “I would be on set and if it was for my feet, like, I would be sitting on a patio and they would just film my feet. It’s so simple that it’s almost hard to believe it’s that simple. I think once in a while we did do, like, with the tie-up ones, there might be some kind of a corny story of some other girl coming and tickling you while I’m tied up because tickling is a fetish,” Michelle said.

According to Michelle and top WWE officials, neither WWE — and certainly not McMahon! — knew about the movies while Michelle was climbing up the WWE ladder from on-screen makeup artist to champion wrestler.

“During [McMahon’s] tenure with the company her job was always the business side. Never at any point of her time with WWE was she involved in content or creative or talent selection. And she certainly wasn’t aware of the situation with Candice Michelle,” WWE’s Michelle Wilson said. (WWE is taking this matter as seriously as if you called their wrestling fake).

Neither is that sort of thing permitted any more at WWE which, as of about two years ago, embraced a “PG” standard in response to the criticism it was getting. WWE now conducts an extensive “background check” on potential divas to screen them for a kinky movie past, Wilson said.

Before the “PG era,” as WWE wrestlers and executives call it, they didn’t take this thing so seriously. When WWE was alerted to another movie of Michelle’s, a late-night cable skin flick, they ignored it because Michelle said it was shot before her contract with WWE was signed in 2003. Michelle also says all 58 fetish movies were shot before her WWE contract as well.

Besides, she said the cable skin flick was just an accident. “The other film that is probably on there that gets you guys curious or whatever you want to call it is – I think it’s called ‘Hotel Erotica’ … I call it a ‘skinimax’ movie … To me at the time, I think I was 19, I thought: ‘Oh, this is a great opportunity. I have nine scenes in a movie and then one is the sex scene it all cultivates [sic] to.’ My mistake was not reading the entire script. When you read the entire script there’s two or three other girls that have two other sex scenes in there and then before you know it it’s actually a ‘skinimax’ movie and not an HBO movie.”

Michelle, if you were wondering, would “absolutely” vote for McMahon, whom she calls “prim and proper … she’s the sweetest lady you will ever meet.”

Also appearing in the greatest hits of awkward moments for Linda McMahon’s campaign is an episode in 2002 when another WWE diva, Nicole Bass, left the wrestling league after only four months, turning on her old employer with a sexual harassment lawsuit.

The WWE, seeking to illuminate Bass’s character, tried to introduce a porno film as evidence in the trial. (A sample Bass flick: “I Love To Hurt You!”) But the judge disallowed the film, and also dismissed Bass’s claim.

And yet! In Connecticut, social conservatives appear to be backing McMahon, not Simmons.

Recently, local politician T.R. Rowe, a conservative Catholic, gave McMahon his blessing. And Simmons is in trouble of his own with pro-life Republicans because when asked about overpopulation he wrote in a constituent letter, “It just seems that we do not have the resources to support our current population and yet the babies keep coming.”

McMahon’s spokesman said Simmons’s attention on the WWE is a desperate, last-ditch effort to salvage his campaign. “Rob Simmons has lost 38 points to Linda. He now trails her in public polling. Voters are rejecting him on both economic and social positions,” McMahon’s spokesman said, “on the social issues conservatives are breaking overwhelmingly to Linda because of his extreme positions on abortion and population control.”

The Family Research Council’s PAC director said both McMahon and Simmons are both so socially liberal, “they’re not worth wasting time on.”