Ashley Massaro NCIS file confirms inappropriate medical exam, key affidavit detail
The NCIS file is not an easy read, and it brings new context to both what Massaro alleged and how WWE responded when she first went public in 2016.
Content Warning: This article contains both specific descriptions and broader discussion of sexual assault, as well as the role that consent plays in intimate medical examinations such as pelvic and prostate exams. If that may be triggering or otherwise upsetting to you, then please proceed with caution.
On Friday evening, shortly after the close of business on the east coast, at least five reporters that I know of, myself included, got emails alerting them to the fact that they had Freedom of Information Act responses awaiting them. Specifically, the requests pertained to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigation of rape allegation against a U.S. serviceman that former WWE performer Ashley Massaro made in a 2017 sworn affidavit. (It was made public by her lawyer after her May 2019 death by suicide.) Not counting the response letter but including blank pages that note redactions of an entire page or range of pages, the document clocks in at 79 pages. And outside of Massaro’s name, all names in the file — both witnesses and investigators — are redacted. But the file does bring forth some new information, including corroborating details shared by both Massaro and WWE when she first made the allegations in court in 2016 and 2017.
Note: At the moment, I’m electing not to upload and link the PDF of the FOIA response because I spotted at least one witness interview where NCIS did not do a good job redacting personally identifying information and I was easily able to figure out who they were. Combine that with how I have concerns, based on how two other reporters who got the records have handled the information thus far, I’m electing to summarize the key takeaways now without posting the file. I could redact the additional identifying information myself, but given the possibility that I might have missed similar non-redactions about other witnesses , I’d rather be safe than sorry.
The relatively short version of what was already public about the allegation is this: In November 2016, Ashley Massaro alleged in a civil complaint that WWE urged her not to report “an incident while she was on a WWE Middle East tour, in which she was sexually assaulted on a military base in Kuwait.” WWE responded in a subsequent filing by saying that she had not reported such an assault to WWE, but that “[a]s best WWE can determine, Massaro became ill while there, was treated by a military doctor, and was later heard telling others that she believed that the doctor had done an inappropriate pelvic exam.”
Because the lawsuit officially dealt with allegations of negligence in hiding the dangers of concussions and the various plaintiffs’ lawyer was not following federal pleading standards, the judge made the attorney secure affidavits from every single plaintiff attesting to everything alleged in the complaint. At the time, these were delivered directly to the judge and not filed publicly, but as noted above, Massaro’s lawyer made her November 2017 affidavit public after her May 2019 death. That affidavit laid out a detailed, horrific ordeal on a USO tour where Massaro, complaining of menstrual cramps, was brought to a military medical center to be treated for dehydration by some very insistent military chaperones. After waiting for hours to see a doctor while receiving IV fluids, she wrote, a man in street clothes representing himself to be a military doctor injected a paralytic agent of some kind into her IV line and raped her while a woman in fatigues guarded the door.
This led to WWE issuing another denial. As recent reporting from Tim Marchman for Vice and Isobel Thompson for Audible revealed, though, then-WWE physician Dr. Ferdinand Rios and then-WWE head of talent relations John Laurinaitis — with Laurinaitis speaking for management more broadly — both knew about Massaro’s allegations at the time. It was Marchman’s reporting that also revealed that NCIS had investigated the allegations in 2019 and 2020, with a spokesperson adding that a FOIA request would be necessary to get more information. And that’s how we got here.
Contrary to what tweets from the first person to publicly surface portions of the NCIS file implied, it was never in dispute that Massaro was brought to a medical treatment center at a U.S. military base in Kuwait. That’s because Jimmy Hart’s WWE.com blog covering that day of the USO tour (archive here) said as much. The most important new information in the NCIS file doesn’t come until a little more than halfway in, when we get up to a summary of the NCIS interview with the man named in Massaro’s medical record as the physician assistant who treated her.
“[Redacted] stated he recalled MASSARO complained of abdominal and pelvic pain,” reads the interview summary. “[Redacted] recalled that MASSARO was accompanied by a male civilian that he did not recognize, but he recalled someone in the clinic saying it was [redacted]. [Redacted] stated [redacted] seemed to be acting skittish and strange. [Redacted] described [redacted] as a [redacted] male, in his thirties, [redacted] hair, perhaps had a mustache, and was well built.” This does not describe anyone in the WWE entourage, which consisted of Maria Kanellis, Ron Simmons, Jimmy Hart, public relations chief Gary Davis, and New York Daily News photographer Henry DiRocco. All of the men in that group would have been noticeably older than “thirties” at the time.
“[Redacted] stated that when he first saw MASSARO[,] he believed she was drowsy but she was not falling asleep during conversation or slurring her words,” the interview summary continues. “[redacted] recalled someone else working in the facility may have said that 'she was high' but [redacted] was uncertain. [Redacted[ stated he had little experience with people on drugs or alcohol so he was not sure.” This is no a surprise: Massaro had opened up about her drug addiction in the past, including in the aforementioned affidavit, but it takes on a different significance based on other information in the interview.
“[Redacted] stated MASSARO was talking, moving and seemed lucid at this time and was dressed in her street clothes,” the summary continues. [Redacted] stated after he finished speaking to her, he exited the room and returned some time later with a female Corpsman and he conducted an exam to include a pelvic exam, which MASSARO agreed to. [Redacted] could not recall when MASSARO disrobed and put on a hospital gown.”
There’s been a major shift in consensus in recent years over the distressingly common practice of medical professionals — often medical students learning on the job — performing pelvic exams on unconscious patients. (This was probably outlined most memorably in a February 2020 New York Times feature.) As of November, half of the 50 states in the U.S. have explicitly banned the practice, but in mid-2000s, when Massaro went to Kuwait, this was not the case. A University of Oklahoma study published in August 2005 found that “a large majority of respondents” to their survey of third and fourth year medical students “reported having performed pelvic exams on anesthetized gynecologic surgery patients.” In addition, “[n]early three-quarters” of those responses said that they were under the impression “that these patients had not specifically consented to undergo exams by students during their surgical procedures.”
Even when a woman fully consents to a pelvic exam, it can still be a traumatic experience. (If you’re a man who somehow can’t grasp the reasons for this after reading about it, then there’s an incredibly bizarre and contrived episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. that you can watch where the teenaged title character’s mother explains it to him.) That we’re now talking about a pelvic exam on a woman who may have been too intoxicated to consent — and where at least one person around her, presumably a medical professional, had specifically remarked to the treating PA that she was “high” — is significant. If there was still any dispute as to if Massaro went through something traumatic in Kuwait, then this should lay those disputes to rest.
Your mileage may vary as to whether or not the PA’s comment about how “he had little experience with people on drugs or alcohol so he was not sure” that Massaro was intoxicated reads as credible or not. For the investigators’ part, the NCIS file does not connect the dots of the “she was high” comment and the pelvic exam. Regardless, the treating PA still admitted that he had reason to believe his patient who he performed a pelvic exam on was intoxicated. because “he believed she was drowsy” when he first met her and another medical professional asserted that “she was high.” We’re not here to make a legal judgment as to whether that would be considered a sexual assault in criminal or civil terms as much as look at how this weighs on Massaro’s own story as she experienced it. Regardless, the ethical concerns here should be clear.
“You or anyone cannot give informed consent to any procedure [when you are] high,” explained Dr. Arthur Caplan, PhD, an NYU medical ethics professor, when I reached him by email on Saturday morning. “You need a surrogate decision maker outside of an emergency. Or just wait til u detox and then [obtain] consent. And especially [for] a pelvic exam[,] which is likely not an emergency.” Caplan also included links to his own work on the topic: A March 2022 YouTube video for Medscape, a March 2021 Connecticut Mirror op-ed that he co-authored with bioethicist Lori Bruce, and a 2020 HEC Forum paper by Bruce about consent in pelvic and prostate exams that cited a May 2018 Caplan video (with included transcript) on Medscape’s website. In the 2018 VIDEO, he noted that he had, until recently, thought that the practice of medical students learning how to do pelvic exams on anesthetized women had long since been eradicated.
Regardless of the specific details she recounted of being assaulted, it’s not really in dispute at this point that Ashley Massaro told various people in 2006 that she had been sexually assaulted in some form on WWE’s USO tour of Kuwait. Not just Dr. Rios and WWE management, but also friends and then-boyfriend Paul London, who were interviewed on the aforementioned Audible podcast. That’s the important part, more so than what she described in 2017. As described in the podcast, late in Massaro’s life, brain trauma had impacted her mental health to the point that she was hearing voices. Taken together, the new information in the NCIS file also re-contextualizes the 2016 WWE claim that Massaro was heard complaining in 2006 of an inappropriate pelvic exam. That could easily be a traumatizing experience in and of itself, and it could just as easily be classified as a sexual assault if she did not or could not consent. However, the interview with the PA who treated Massaro also saw him confirm a key detail from her 2017 affidavit that described a deliberate, carefully planned rape.
“[Redacted] stated that during the exam with the female Corpsman in the room, [redacted] banged on the door and was calling MASSARO's name and asking her if everything was okay,” the summary continues. “[Redacted] stated he had to stop the exam briefly so that MASSARO could respond. “[Redacted] stated that MASSARO responded and said that everything was fine and she was having an exam done. [Redacted] stated that MASSARO seemed nonchalant when she said everything was fine and the manager stopped banging on the door and did not knock again.”
This reads conspicuously on its face, but that’s doubly so if you’ve read Massaro’s affidavit. “Finally, Gary [Davis] returned and was banging on the door,” wrote Massaro in her narrative of the assault. “The man and woman yelled ‘one minute’ and threw a dirty quilt on me as I was lying naked on the table, and when Gary entered the room he attempted to ask them what was going on but they immediately stormed out. At the time, my body was still limp and my speech impaired, so Gary wrapped me in the quilt and carried me out to the Humvee outside and took me back to my hotel room and then put me in my bed, as I needed to sleep. Gary said to call when I woke up and that he, or one of the others we were traveling with, would come back to get me.”
The treating PA confirmed the one of two things that Ashley asserted about what happened in the exam room that someone who wasn’t in the room could corroborate: Gary Davis urgently banging on the door. (The other would be that Davis found her naked and wrapped in a quilt.) Despite this detail about Davis in particular, and despite the obvious relevance to the investigation, it doesn’t look like NCIS ever interviewed anyone who was on the USO tour as part of the WWE contingent. Though an argument could be made that, for NCIS’s purposes, there was no need to interview most of the entourage, who would be able to potentially corroborate Massaro’s outcry, general movements that day, and little more, that argument doesn’t apply to Davis. And it especially doesn’t apply after NCIS interviewed the PA and he corroborated the detail about Davis being alarmed enough to bang on the exam room door and ask if Massaro was OK.
A few of other things in the FOIA response jump out as notable and/or odd.
One of the former is that investigators mentioned meeting with an attorney for WWE at K&L Gates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s the firm that long represented WWE with the now-retired Jerry McDevitt as the lead of the team devoted to WWE-related matters, but it’s not clear if the lawyer interviewed was McDevitt or a colleague. The lawyer claimed that Jimmy Hart’s blog contradicted Massaro’s assertion that, after being retrieved by Davis, she stayed in bed in her hotel room until it was time to leave for the next stop on the tour, instead joining the crew on a photo shoot on the base. He also provided NCIS “with 10 photographs he stated were from the event as well as a photo array of the 10 photographs with file names that indicate they were taken on 03Jul06.” This doesn’t necessarily contradict Massaro, though, because Hart’s blog suggests this photo shoot took place as they were leaving the base in question.
More conspicuous is that the officer in charge of the clinic at the time of the trip refused to be interviewed even after being told he was not a suspect, telling NCIS to talk to his lawyer. That attorney also refused to coordinate an interview, but agreed to "facilitate presenting a list of written questions in an effort to elicit pertinent information relevant to the investigation." However, after NCIS relayed those questions, the officer in charge still refused to provide any information about the case. Based on what’s in the FOIA response, it looks like he was the only person that NCIS reached out to who refused to answer any questions.
Most curiously, though, a notation on Massaro’s medical record indicates that she was treated at Camp Patriot, Aerial Port of Demarcation, Troop Medical Clinic. The NCIS records describe this clinic as "a separate location approximately a one and a half hour drive to the south on the east coast of Kuwait,” but provides no explanation as to this discrepancy. Jimmy Hart’s WWE.com blog, which places that leg of the trip at Ali Al Salem Air Base, does not mention Camp Patriot or otherwise allow for Massaro being transported 90 minutes away during the period she was separated from the WWE group. Neither does Massaro’s affidavit. Your guess as to the significance of this is as good as mine.
That’s about it as far as the major things that jump out from the NCIS file. There are notes about the Army and Air Force’s investigative arms starting their own investigations, but with the caveat that NCIS soon took lead and we won’t know much about them until the Air Force responds to the FOIA referral for its records that were redacted from the NCIS file since they originated with a different agency.
Hopefully, whether it’s from me or someone else, there will be follow-up reporting in the coming days, weeks, months, or even years expanding on what we received on Friday evening. (Like making further attempts to contact the identifiable witnesses who were interviewed.) For now, though, I felt it was best to make it clear what the main revelations were in the released documents while providing as much context as possible from the historical record and Dr. Caplan’s expert opinion on the issue of consent to pelvic exams.