This account is backed up by another woman who was trained by Moolah that we’re about to talk about, Mad Maxine, who had this to say about her time at Moolah’s compound:

In "Meeting Moolah," the first chapter of a book she'll publish once she signs with a literary agent, Mjoseth writes about her arrival at Lillian Ellison's compound, where she was greeted by the perennial women's champion and diminutive wrestling star Diamond Lil, who Moolah referred to as "my damned midget.”

… Mjoseth was deeply troubled by the system Moolah established at her compound to keep her students under her control. The trainees were isolated and exploited. Moolah charged them both rent to live in the barracks at her compound, as well as training fees, which Mjoseth says amounted to $1,500. "The girls went into debt to her and she controlled their lives," Mjoseth recalls. "I made sure I had a job so I could have a phone and a car. The others were kind of marooned. It was an environment ripe for abuse."

There is no way I can explain how awful my life was for a very long time. When it was all going on, it seemed like an eternity. But in a way, I owe Moolah and my mother a lot, because they were both very controlling and made my life a living hell... and that in turn made me the person I am today. I have worked very hard to not be like either of them.

I could never do to anyone the things that they did to me, and still today I wonder why they did it! Why did my mother seem to hate me so much? I know now why Moolah did what she did: I was one of her meal tickets, and she had to control me as long as she could.

She took 30% of everything we all made before anything else came out of our money. Then she took out our travel expenses, then food, then rent because we all... or most of us... lived on her property, and so we had to pay her rent. And she added the utilities, so I always ended up owing her more money than I made. I worked my ass off for her for almost two years before I ever had money coming to me, and the first time she paid me, I got $125.00 and I thought I was rich!

The women who worked for her made her a very wealthy person. It wasn't her talent that earned her what she had, but the talents of all of the women that worked for her. I wasn't the only one treated badly, but I think I am the only one that is willing to tell the complete truth.

The fact is that she was a user of anyone who worked for her. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the truth is the truth. She was a bitch, plain and simple. She was one of the worst people I have ever known.

The Moolah Compound

Moolah liked to maintain a stranglehold on wrestling. Thanks to her status in the industry, The Fabulous Moolah managed to corner the market of women’s wrestling and became the only booker in town for women looking to break in the industry. Though Moolah obviously didn't train every woman in North America, Moolah became the top booker for women and demanded that any women looking for a job would have to sign an exclusive contract with her and allow Moolah to book for them and have any paychecks sent to her before anyone else. Another thing Moolah required these girls to do to ensure that they could not surpass her was that she demanded that the trainees at her camp rent a duplex on her property and live on her “compound”. There are plenty of first hand accounts of life on “The Moolah Compound”, but the one that I’m going to bring up is from Debbie Johnson, who trained under Moolah in Kentucky.

That's easy. Moolah... first of all, she was just plain evil. Never trusted her or liked her very much. She took advantage of all who worked for her, in many ways. People think it was all glamorous... Moolah managed to make a lot of people think she was some kind of goddess... but nothing could be further from the truth.

I feel it's way past time for the real truth to come out. I am not saying that everyone was treated the way I was. In fact, some were treated very well. I think part of it was because I was so young, and they thought I would always do what I was told to do. And I did for a long time, but when I saw others being treated differently from the way I was treated, it really pissed me off.

I guess that's when I started to fight back. I felt like a slave and I was treated as one. I wasn't allowed to leave the compound unless someone was with me. I was not allowed to have company on the compound, but no one else was, either. It was like a small fortress, an iron gate at the entrance, and they watched me like hawks.

I wasn't allowed to have any friends except for the other girls who were there, and I couldn't trust any of them. If I told someone something in confidence, it always got back to Moolah, and I would be dealt with for it. If I pissed her off too much, she wouldn't let me work, and that meant starving, so I had to walk on egg shells for a long time.

Parker made her debut in the early ‘70s and was advised that if she wanted to go farther in the business she should seek out Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah. Parker took the advice and went down to South Carolina, likening the experience to "a camp for women wrestlers."

Parker does not mince words when it comes to discussing the late Ellison's business manner.

"If you didn't do things her way, then you didn't do it all," she reveals. "It was as simple as that."

The experience was a positive one at first. She says Ellison was very attentive and encouraging about her career and the trailers on Ellison's property that provided accommodation for the women were pretty good. But Parker's outlook changed after six or seven months. She felt ripped off by the fact that Ellison, not the women themselves, would receive their wrestling cheques first, she would then take her cut and only then pass the remaining funds on to the women. Opportunities were also granted to those who were on Ellison's good side.

"Everybody knew that if you weren't on Lillian's good side, you got crappy bookings," comments Parker. "I wasn't on her good side because I wouldn't do what she wanted me to do. That was one of the reasons I never worked Madison Square Garden because every time the bookings came up, I'd be on her bad side. As far as I am concerned I could wrestle just as good as Toni Rose, Donna Christenello or anyone of those girls (who were on Ellison's good side)."

Parker says that Ellison also interfered with her personal life. Despite Ellison's knowledge that Parker was gay she often suggested to her that she should go out with one of her nephews. As part of her number of rules, Ellison also told Parker she was not to go to any gay bars. These tactics enraged Parker.

Sandy Parker: The First Black Women’s World Champion

Parker was angered at finding out that Moolah was pocketing most of her pay and further put off when Moolah would try and push her on the other men that Moolah was prone to do to secure bookings – Parker, herself, was a lesbian (something Moolah full well knew) and apart from trying to hook her up with men, she also forbade Parker from attending any gay bars on her downtime. Finally enough was enough and Parker left Moolah’s camp and joined up with her rival, Mildred Burke.

With Moolah holding an iron fist monopoly on North American women’s wrestling, Burke sent Parker overseas to Japan. When Burke had separated from her husband Billy Wolfe (another notorious abuser who held the monopoly prior to Moolah), she herself headed to Japan and started up women’s wrestling over there. Burke became a legend as big as any other American to influence the sport. It was in Japan that Sandy Parker would find her greatest success.

Wrestling Sheet posted the following statement from former trainee of the Fabulous Moolah, Jeannine Mjoseth, better known as Mad Maxine and Lady Maxine:

The Fabulous Moolah was a real-life heel. A lot of women paid to train at her school and then went out on the road. They risked life and limb in their matches and she repaid them with the worst kinds of abuses. She skimmed their money, she ignored women who were badly hurt, she pimped women out to creepy men and on and on. She was not a mother figure. She was more like Kali, the Indian Goddess of Destruction. I met her in my early 20s and I had never met such a monstrous person.

I was smart enough to get the hell away from her and start my own independent career in Tampa as part of the Championship Wrestling from Florida. Luna Vachon, Peggy Fowler and I all left together, which I hope put a serious dent in her confidence, if not wallet.

I understand why Moolah was so grotesque. Her family was dirt poor and she determined that she was never going to be hungry again. But it doesn’t excuse her dog-eat-dog behavior. I’d much rather see WWE establish a named match for outstanding wrestlers (and decent human beings) like Susan ‘Tex’ Green, Beverly Shade, Leilani Kai, Wendi Richter, Princess Victoria or Joyce Grable. They all put their hearts and souls into wrestling for decades and helped others along the way.

But wrestling isn’t PC. It’s about generating heat. And you can’t draw more heat than naming a match for The Fabulous Moolah. May she be the last of her kind.

An article from 2006 about allegations against Moolah was cited as reference to some of the claims made against the WWE Hall Of Famer. The article features the family of former Moolah student Sweet Georgia Brown making claims that Moolah threatened to beat Brown if she didn’t have sex with men sent to her hotel room, as well as being drugged, raped and having money stolen from her by Moolah.

Sweet Georgia Brown did make those claims before she died and her son documented it, telling of her story of how hard her life was growing up and how he and his mum coped living in tough conditions on little pay from Moolah and how his mum was treated poorly.

Luna Vachon
Luna Vachon always wanted to carry on the family’s wrestling legacy and, at age 16, began training under her aunt, Vivian, and The Fabulous Moolah. Luna didn’t stay with Moolah for long, as the industry was starting to change and Moolah’s grasp of it was starting to weaken, and in 1993 she signed a contract with WWF. Luna had a turbulent career with WWF, usually because of personal demons and backstage outbursts, but she still managed to find success in a WWF that didn’t revolve around The Fabulous Moolah.

In 2003, Luna Vachon and her then husband, Gangrel, had a shoot interview where one of the topics brought up was The Fabulous Moolah. The pair didn’t have any nice things to say about Moolah, and, instead, Luna opened up about how Moolah was everything wrong with wrestling at the time, with even Luna’s aunt seeing firsthand just how much Moolah took advantage of her students.

Fabulous Moolah- According to Luna’s Aunt Vivian, Moolah is indeed a lesbian. Moolah was a big drinker while Vivian was training and that Moolah would sleep with the girls at that time. When Luna started training, she never saw any of that. However, Moolah DID send Luna out west at age 16 to pose for pictures taken by a prominent cardiologist. The pictures were all with clothes on, but it was bullshit to send young kids out there to be taken advantage of when they thought they were going to learn how to wrestle. Moolah didn’t take advantage of Luna much longer because Luna left the camp shortly after that.

It’s worth noting that during this shoot interview, the moment Moolah was brought up, Gangrel interrupted the host to say that Moolah was “basically a pimp” and expressed his contempt that Luna had to go to “that douchebag Moolah’s camp”.

Though she remained mostly clothed in the photoshoot, Luna stated that she felt like she was taken advantage of, and said that her case was just one of many within Moolah’s camp.

South Carolina’s Susie Mae McCoy was a bright eyed girl with dreams of becoming a big time wrestling star when the 19-year old started training with The Fabulous Moolah and her then husband Buddy Lee in 1957. Moolah was one of the biggest female stars in America at the time and had started a stranglehold on booking women within the NWA and other territories following the decline of Billy Wolfe‘s monopoly. Renamed as Sweet Georgia Brown, McCoy made her pro wrestling debut a year later, in 1958, at the age of 20. Sweet Georgia Brown was Moolah’s first African-American student in her school and Moolah and Lee had high hopes for the emerging fad in pro wrestling “Negro Women Wrestlers”.

But despite her fame and rise on the women’s wrestling circuit, Sweet Georgia Brown lived in fear for much of career. At first, it was from the rampant racism of the south – at some venues, she was smuggled in in the trunk of a car so that the KKK or other extremists wouldn’t be tipped off to a black women entering the arenas or hotel rooms.

But sadly, the most real terror was the clear and present danger of her trainer and manager, Moolah and Buddy Lee. Moolah and Lee would take a whopping 25% of their booking fees off the top (sometimes even more), often pocketing much more, leaving the wrestlers with barely enough to survive. In order to secure better booking for herself (or her girls to get better pay for herself), she would systematically prostitute her trainees to other promoters or even wrestlers. Sweet Georgia Brown was not immune to these heinous practices.

But in October of 1963, Sweet Georgia Brown beat blonde haired Nell Stewart for the NWA Texas Women’s title, becoming the first African-American woman to win a singles title. It wasn’t a World title, but it was a major singles title in one of the NWA’s largest territories.

Sweet Georgia Brown, tired and broken from years of abuse and being away from her family, retired in 1972. She passed away from breast cancer in 1989 at the age of 51.

No one is part of any group, it’s all a bunch of self individuals discussing the topic at hand. You have a problem with that then you shouldn’t be on a forum period.