Victoria Crawford has no problem giving Total Divas its flowers, but she definitely doesn’t love everything the cameras caught. The former Alicia Fox says she was still growing up and figuring herself out during that run, and looking back now, there are parts of her life she wishes WWE never put on television.
Crawford opened up about it during David Otunga’s Wednesday Hang while explaining how much of her adult life was tied to WWE and the Alicia Fox character. Her recent TNA run helped get her comfortable being in front of wrestling fans again, but it also forced her to stop thinking she needed to return as some upgraded version of her old WWE persona.
“I’ve had some fun with TNA. It was different, but it was short. I knew it was going to be short. I didn’t know how it was going to unfold. And that opportunity gave me the courage to get back into the public-facing part of wrestling, which I really, in my spirit, needed.”
For a while, Crawford thought life after WWE meant proving she could somehow become “better” than Alicia Fox. She eventually realized that was the wrong game to play. She didn’t need another version of Alicia Fox — she needed to figure out Victoria Crawford.
“I thought, ‘Oh, after WWE, I’m going to be better than Alicia Fox.’ I had all these expectations, and I caught a loop coming in where I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to recreate or fix. I’m not trying to be a better person for people. I’m trying to be myself.’”
That realization even changed how she feels about wrestling under her real name. Crawford said someone recently asked her to sign “Victoria Crawford,” and it hit her that getting in the ring as herself carries a completely different feeling after spending years performing as Alicia Fox.
“The chance to wrestle as Victoria, it didn’t really occur to me until recently when someone asked me to sign ‘Victoria Crawford.’ I kind of thought about it, and I’m like, for me, I’ve got a couple of things still on my wrestling bucket list, but I guess it’s a pretty empowering thing to wrestle as yourself.”
Crawford then got into the tougher part. She loved growing up alongside the WWE crew, but eventually she needed to leave that bubble and experience life without everything happening in front of an audience. That made looking back at Total Divas a little rougher than fans might expect.
“I was really enjoying growing up with everybody. So I just knew eventually I’m going to have to leave the nest because there was something about falling with grace that I just had to experience by myself and without the public-facing.”
Then came the line that really says it all. Crawford isn’t trashing Total Divas and she made it clear she enjoyed filming the show. She just looks back at some of that footage now and sees a young woman going through stuff she would’ve rather handled without a TV camera sitting there recording it.
“One thing about Total Divas is I did really enjoy filming and everything, but what I perceive in that, I’m like, ‘Whoa, I was really in a stage of life that I wish wasn’t on TV.’ But that’s my judgment on it.”
And Crawford isn’t pretending Total Divas was bad for wrestling either. She credited the show with giving WWE’s women more visibility and bringing in female fans who may not have been watching wrestling before. The problem wasn’t the show itself — it was having her own growing pains turned into television while she was still living through them.
Crawford can look back now without trying to erase any of it. Total Divas helped make Alicia Fox a bigger name and opened wrestling up to a whole different audience, but it also froze some very personal years of Victoria Crawford’s life on camera forever. She can appreciate what the show did for her career while still admitting that, given the choice today, some of those moments would’ve stayed private.
What do you think about Victoria Crawford wishing parts of her Total Divas years had stayed off television? Did the show cross the line with how much of the wrestlers’ real lives it exposed, or was that exactly what made fans care about it? Leave your feedback in the comments.
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