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A passcode on a pole match might be the only way to settle the latest dispute between XFL founder Vince McMahon and former commissioner Oliver Luck.
The two parties are in a battle over Luck’s phone in which he is refusing to give out the passcode, The Athletic reported Monday.
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McMahon fired Luck in April as the coronavirus pandemic shut down the season and put any future plans of the league starting up play again – at least until Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Dany Garcia bought the league before it went on the auction block. Luck, in turn, filed a lawsuit against McMahon seeking the remaining $23.8 million remaining on his $35 million contract, The Athletic reported.
The WWE chairman and his company Alpha Entertainment argued that Luck was fired for cause for allegedly using his company iPhone for personal purposes as well as ignoring player misconduct, among other things. While the litigation was put on hold during the sale of the league, the suit is reportedly back on and going after the passcode is the first order of business.
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“The full contents of Alpha’s iPhone are relevant to showing that Luck was properly terminated for cause under his Employment Contract because he grossly neglected his duties after March 13, 2020 — when Luck effectively abandoned his responsibilities as XFL Commissioner and CEO and returned home to Indiana despite the existential threat to the league posed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the lawsuit states, via The Athletic. “Examination of the data on the iPhone will show Luck’s activities during this critical time period when he was not in the office and demonstrate that he failed to ‘devote substantially all of his business time to the performance of his duties to the XFL’ as required by his Employment Contract.”
Alpha Entertainment, in its suit, cited a Connecticut law that allows employers to access data on company phones and obtain the passcodes for those phones. However, Luck reportedly argues that he is not an employee of McMahon or Alpha Entertainment and therefore the state statute is moot.
Luck’s team reportedly hired its own technical forensics to look at the phone and provided findings to Alpha Entertainment, but McMahon wants his own team to look at it. Luck was alleged to have created the phone policy and admitted in court he used the phone for personal use but wasn’t a cause of termination.
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It’s unclear how a Connecticut judge would rule in this case. A match in the WWE Thunderdome might not be totally out of the question.
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