As the entire professional wrestling world reels over the decision by WWE to release Mandy Rose, Dave Meltzer took to his podcast with Bryan Alvarez, Wrestling Observer Radio, to detail Shawm Michaels' thought process, as explained to him from his sources.
“What happened was I guess there was a meeting and Matt Bloom brought to Shawn Michaels, told him what some of the stuff that she's been putting on her subscription service,” Meltzer said. “She does not have an OnlyFans, it is a subscription service. [Bloom] told Shawn what was there and Shawn's immediate thing was, ‘we have to get the title off of her immediately.' Switched around the whole show, got the title off of her. Right after they got the title from her, then they fired her.”
“She's had the subscription service and it got popular and lucrative. She went further and further and the feeling was that she way, way, way crossed the line. They believe that they had absolutely no choice but to get rid of her in that situation. Again, everyone's situation is different. They promised sponsors a cleaner product as far as who the people are.”
Considering some of the storylines WWE themselves put Rose through during her first run on the main roster, most notoriously of all her attempt to seduce a married Jimmy Uso in order to break up his marriage to Naomi/Trinity Fatu, firing the third-longest running NXT Women's Champion for extracurricular activities that financially benefited her instead of the company is incredibly telling in all of the worst ways.
WOR: Dave Meltzer speaks about why WWE chose to release Mandy Rose after she lost the NXT Women's Championship.https://t.co/mYdKSjV7fm pic.twitter.com/ogTj6l4WJL
— Wrestling Observer (@WONF4W) December 15, 2022
Booker T has a bizarre take on Mandy Rose's release from WWE.
Booker T, too, commented on Roses's release from NXT–as a professional commentator should–on his Hall of Fame podcast, and needless to say, the WWE employee was far more biased in his musings, as transcribed by Fightful.
“It's a bad situation, the company being put in a situation where they had to do something about it, Mandy Rose putting herself in a situation. ‘Put yourself in a situation,' I say that all the time. That's real. You put yourself in a situation and something happens. That's exactly what happened here. I've been around Mandy Rose since the beginning, since Tough Enough. I watched her work so hard to win, she didn't win, but she impressed me to the point where I was like, ‘Give her a contract, put her in the game.' Things didn't work out on the main roster, she went back to NXT and has been banging for the past 413 days as champion and created one of the most awesome runs for a female that we've seen in decades,” Booker T said.
“She put herself in a great position to be looked at as a major superstar like Trish Stratus. People are going to remember Trish forever from WWE and what she's done in the ring. Trust me, Trish Stratus, now, is able to do all of that, OnlyFans or whatever else, and is going to be able to make more money from being a WWE Superstar for so many years. What I'm saying is, I hate it because that money was going to always be there for Mandy Rose. It was like money in the bank. She didn't even need it right now. It was money in the bank for Mandy Rose. I could be wrong, maybe she does need it right now. I don't know. What I'm saying is, the bigger her star would have risen in the WWE, the more money she would have been able to demand going forward in life. Out of sight, out of mind. Being on TV is so important to being relevant. These days, they say, ‘We don't need TV, we can do our own thing,' of course you can, but your star is not going to shine as bright.”
After making a very strange analogy about how no one would watch Gilligan's Island if you could see one of the show's stars, Ginger Rodgers, naked elsewhere, Booker warned Rose against working with other promoters who would try to capitalize on her physical appeal, you know, like WWE has over the past half-decade, even in NXT.
“I was one of the first ones that said AEW took Jeff Hardy immediately after he was having problems. They wanted to look past that. This right here is a problem more than anything. I don't think someone should just jump in and think about ‘let's make some money off of Mandy Rose and her sex appeal,' and, let's put it out there, use her. I don't want Mandy Rose to be used by any of these other so-called wannabe promoters.”
Is Booker right? No, as many have pointed out, WWE has never had a problem promoting the bodies of their performers when they can make a buck off of it, but when one of their independent contractors go out on their own and try to make some supplementary income, that's when the problems arise. Fortunately, every promotion does have that same mindset, and one would assume that AEW, or even Impact would be far more accepting of every aspect of Rose, even if they don't make money off of her outside-the-ring efforts.
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