Samantha Irvin Addresses Backlash from Fans Over Controversial Ring Announcing Remarks

Samantha Irvin might have been one of WWE’s most beloved ring announcers, but she’s making it clear—she never wanted the job in the first place.

During an interview on Busted Open, Irvin admitted that ring announcing was never her passion and was simply a way to get her foot in the door at WWE. After leaving the company in fall 2024, she responded to fan comments online, revealing that she actually didn’t like ring announcing and wanted to do more.

“I just wanted the opportunity to challenge that notion. Give me a chance to see if maybe it’s just Samantha. Put me in some other positions,” Irvin explained. “We really are in the locker room together. We really are helping each other out… Let me be in a backstage [role], let me speak, you know? I never spoke, not one time.”

Her comments caught fans off guard, and she admits she didn’t understand why people were so upset until recently.

“It just hit me. I said, ‘That’s like me saying I don’t like announcing.’ That’s like Key and Peele not being friends,” she said. “And I really do feel bad for anybody that I upset with sharing that. I actually thought we were all, like, really close. I thought people knew. I thought for sure they were like, ‘Oh, she definitely… this b*tch thinks she’s Paul Heyman.’ I thought people already knew. But yes, I really loved my time there.”

Despite her frustrations, Irvin insists she loved her time in WWE but was always thinking about how to move beyond ring announcing. “For me, Samantha Irvin always had a plan, she always was thinking about how she was gonna get out of that chair and get on the other side of things.”

Samantha Irvin isn’t sugarcoating anything—she was never in WWE to be a lifelong ring announcer, and she’s not afraid to say it. While some fans might be shocked by her honesty, she’s standing by the fact that she had bigger ambitions from the start. Love her or hate her for it, one thing is clear: Samantha Irvin was always playing the long game.