Rita Chatterton, the first female WWE referee, says Vince McMahon raped her. She spoke with abrahamjoseph
Rita Chatterton said Vince McMahon told her that if she “wanted a half-a-million-dollar-a-year contract,” she would have “to satisfy him.” Photo: Courtesy the International Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
That’s starting to change. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that McMahon had paid millions of dollars of his own cash to silence women he had sexual relationships with while they worked for him. In the wake of the report, McMahon stepped down as chairman and CEO of the company, letting his daughter, Stephanie, replace him in the interim — although it’s unclear how much power he has actually ceded.
According to Inzitari, in that summer of 1986, he found Chatterton standing alone near the wrestling ring a few hours before a WWF show. “She looks at me and bursts out in tears,” Inzitari recalls. “And she grabbed me, and I go, ‘Rita, what happened?’”Before she could continue, Inzitari let out an involuntary, “Oh, no.”
Sure enough, he was right: The WWF stopped calling Chatterton for referee appearances, starting that summer. Chatterton disappeared from the public eye immediately after she made her accusation against McMahon on Geraldo Rivera’s television show in 1992. She has given no interviews about the alleged incident, nor about the trailblazing life and career that it disrupted. Chatterton has been silent — until now.Born Rita Filicoski in Albany on January 22, 1957, she was raised in the nearby town of Mechanicville.
Chatterton with Hulk Hogan. Photo: Courtesy the International Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Her father came to visit her in recovery at the hospital. Wrestling happened to be on the TV in the room. “All of a sudden, this lightbulb went on,” Chatterton recalls. “I said to my dad, ‘I can’t be a wrestler, but I can be a referee.’ I’d still be honoring my brother, but wouldn’t get beat up the way the wrestlers do.
McMahon said he’d heard good things about her. “I’d like you on television soon,” he said. “How about Saturday night? Can you make it to Madison Square Garden?” Her boss at Frito-Lay eventually gave her an ultimatum: Either she could keep her steady job as a driver or she could commit to wrestling. “You have been accomplishing things that, certainly, women have never accomplished before,” he said with a smile. “I mean, you weigh approximately 120 to 130 pounds — not getting personal, somewhere in there. And for you to step into the ring with the giants, I mean, you realize what can happen to you, do you not?”
They left the building, McMahon got into his limousine, and Chatterton was getting into her car when he rolled down his window. “Vince continued to, you know, ‘If you want a half-a-million-dollar contract, you’re going to have to satisfy me, and this is the way things have to go,’” she continued. “Vince grabbed my hand, kept trying to put my hand on him. I was scared. At the end, my wrist was all purple, black, and blue. Things just didn’t … He just … God, he just didn’t stop. This man just didn’t stop.”
The next day, she says, she called a lawyer whose ads she’d seen on local television. “He was willing to take the case, but he knew it would be an uphill battle,” she says. “It came down that it was my word against McMahon’s, because I took a shower and didn’t go to the hospital.” Chatterton’s mother died in 1991 and her father died in 1992. Her restraints were gone. “I wanted to tell the world what a scumbag McMahon was,” she says.
She finally decided to give up on wrestling when Andre the Giant died in early 1993. She and Roussimoff had remained close, and she attended a memorial service at Roussimoff’s estate in rural North Carolina on February 24, 1993.“Vince walked up to me,” Chatterton recalls, “and said, ‘It’s nice to meet you.’”
That was it for Rita’s time in the public record for a very long time. She trained to be a youth counselor and worked in that field for many years, only retiring in 2018 when she sustained nerve damage after slipping on some ice. In those decades, she stayed as far away from wrestling as she could.
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