Vince McMahon, the co-founder and former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, agreed on Friday to settle with federal securities regulators over allegations that he failed to disclose multimillion-dollar settlements he had reached with two women when he led the W.W.E.
Mr. McMahon, one of professional wrestling’s best-known personalities, agreed to pay a $400,000 fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission and reimburse $1.3 million to the W.W.E.
Mr. McMahon, 79, agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying the charges in an order made public by the regulator.
The S.E.C. said that while the W.W.E. was listed as a party to the confidential settlements with the women, Mr. McMahon had not disclosed those agreements to the company’s board, lawyers or accountants. His failure to do so meant that the W.W.E. could not evaluate the risk of the settlements to the company or properly account for them.
In 2019, Mr. McMahon agreed to pay $7.5 million to a woman who had worked for the W.W.E. and accused him of assaulting her after she refused to have sex with him. Three years later, he reached a $3 million settlement with a female employee to keep secret their “personal relationship.” Mr. McMahon also told the woman to resign from her job with the W.W.E., according to the order.
In a statement, Mr. McMahon said the settlement resolved the matter. He said the dispute with the S.E.C. was over nothing more than “minor accounting errors with regard to some personal payments.” He added, “I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”
The W.W.E.’s board became aware of the settlements in April 2022 and opened an investigation. Mr. McMahon resigned from the company in June of that year.
The board’s investigation found that Mr. McMahon had spent $14.6 million from 2006 to 2022 on payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. The investigation also found that Mr. McMahon had made additional payments totaling $5 million to two other women.
Mr. McMahon made a comeback of sorts by helping to engineer the September 2023 merger of the W.W.E. with the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Competition and another company. The combined companies rebranded themselves TKO Group, and Mr. McMahon served as executive chairman.
But in January 2024, Mr. McMahon resigned from his post at TKO after Janel Grant, a former W.W.E. employee, sued him in federal court and accused him of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
Ann Callis, a lawyer for Ms. Grant, said that the S.E.C. settlement supported Ms. Grant’s claim that she had been “coerced” into signing a nondisclosure agreement with Mr. McMahon that violated the law.
The S.E.C. said that during the time that Mr. McMahon had failed to disclose his settlements with the two women, he was W.W.E.’s controlling shareholder, owning about 80 percent of its stock. In September, he reported owning eight million shares of TKO.
Mr. McMahon’s wife, Linda McMahon, who was a top executive at the W.W.E. from 1980 to 2009, is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to serve as the next secretary of the Department of Education. Ms. McMahon, now a director at Trump Media & Technology Group, is not mentioned in the S.E.C. order. The couple are separated.
