AJ Lee was holding WWE gold and looked like she had made it — but behind the scenes, she says things were going completely in the opposite direction.
During her conversation with iHeart Women’s Sports, the former Divas Champion looked back at the lowest point of her first WWE run and revealed it came during her final year with the company. Injuries were starting to pile up, but AJ said the bigger problem was all the emotional baggage she had never stopped to deal with.
“I mean, as an athlete, I was so um just uneducated and like in how to gain muscle and how to, you know, take care of myself and um learned that along the way, which is insane now that I look back at it.”
When AJ was asked about the lowest point of that journey, she zeroed in on the end of her WWE run. AJ said there was a lot going on emotionally that she had never properly confronted, and eventually everything hit at once.
“I mean lowest low is probably, you know, maybe around my last year, I it was started to be uh I started to get hurt a lot and so much like inner work I hadn’t done and like I’m a kid who like I literally came off the street and went on TV.”
“So, there was a lot I didn’t deal with emotionally and it was just kind of a perfect storm of a lot of bad stuff happening in one year.”
Once her body started physically breaking down, AJ said she was forced to finally look at what was happening internally too.
“And um once the outside of my body like once my body was physically hurt, I had to start paying attention to like the inner hurt and it was I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It was just I it was just everything all at once.”
The wild part is that fans looking at AJ from the outside would have seen someone sitting on top of WWE’s women’s division. She was champion, successful and had seemingly reached everything she had fought for. AJ says the reality couldn’t have been more different. At that point, keeping the career going wasn’t the biggest concern anymore.
“And so that that was the lowest moment was, you know, it looked like the highest moment. I was champion and I like had everything in the world, but I was just so falling apart.”
“I needed to make sure I was still here to enjoy everything.”
AJ eventually walked away from WWE at just 28 years old, ending a run that looked incredibly successful from the outside. Years later, she can now explain just how much was happening behind that championship picture fans were seeing every week.
AJ Lee had the championship, the television time and the career she had spent years chasing, but none of it meant much if she was falling apart behind the curtain. Sometimes the biggest win isn’t hanging onto the title — it’s knowing when you need to walk away from it.
What do you make of AJ Lee revealing that one of the lowest points of her life came while she was WWE champion? Let us know what you think and leave your feedback in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
