Victoria Crawford spent years making fans believe Alicia Fox was completely unhinged in WWE, but the character eventually followed her home in a way she never expected. The former Divas Champion says people became so used to seeing her as “crazy” on television that even when she was being herself, they still treated her like she was playing Alicia Fox.
While speaking with David Otunga on Wednesday Hang, Crawford explained that the problem became especially noticeable whenever she tried to express a real opinion. Instead of hearing what she was actually saying, she felt people would immediately fall back on the character they knew from WWE.
“When my character Alicia Fox was playing that crazy person, I felt like I couldn’t be anything. I felt people really didn’t see me as anything other than crazy. So when I was still opinionated and still wanted to share truth and information, it was, ‘Oh, you’re just being crazy.’ It was a quick dismissive. It was a quick exit for people.”
That wasn’t something Crawford could simply switch off once the cameras stopped rolling. After spending so many years as Alicia Fox, she admitted the lines between the television character and Victoria Crawford became messy enough that she eventually had to figure out exactly who she was without WWE defining her.
“I just really had a long time working through that identity. I had an identity crisis because I was Alicia Fox, and then I was crazy.”
Crawford said she eventually realized she had started believing some of the things other people thought about her. Without much adult life outside WWE to compare it to, separating the character from the woman underneath became its own process.
“There were other things that, in this real world, I just believed what everyone had said. I believed my own. I was too scared to get out of that dynamic. I didn’t have another experience of my own personal yet.”
Eventually, Crawford came to a much simpler conclusion. Victoria Crawford isn’t Alicia Fox, and being passionate or animated doesn’t mean she’s the “crazy” character fans watched throwing drinks and losing control on WWE television.
“What I realized is, you know what? I’m not crazy. I’m crazy by character, but I think I have a lot of passion and I’m very animated. So if people take myself, my personality, and the honesty I’m trying to share about our industry as crazy, I’m good with that. But I resisted it to the point of complete insanity.”
She also admitted the perception genuinely hurt her. Crawford said it took years to process why people continued viewing her through the Alicia Fox lens even when she wasn’t performing.
“I’m still human, and that was a really difficult time for me. It hurt my feelings when people were like, ‘Oh, you’re whatever,’ if they want to call me crazy. But again, I just want to say that took a long time for me to process.”
Crawford eventually had to start sorting through what was actually true about herself and what had been created after years of playing such an exaggerated character.
“I figured out how to get inside my head or inside myself somewhere and talk it out. Be like, ‘Okay, now what’s true? What am I making false? What is fiction?’ And again, I went pretty hard playing crazy. I was committed to throwing drinks. I was committed. But when I was living my life, it was a lot to decode.”
Then Crawford took the conversation one step further. For her, there was also a racial stereotype attached to the entire thing, and she admitted being viewed as the “crazy Black woman” made the situation even harder to deal with.
“This is just a stereotype, but it was hard for me to be a crazy Black woman. You know what I’m saying? Women don’t want that title. They don’t want that vibe.”
That left Crawford asking a question that went well beyond wrestling: who exactly was Victoria Crawford after spending so much of her adult life being Alicia Fox?
“This was what I was going to have to experience: Who are you, Victoria? Like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. It’s like, ‘Well, who are you?’ I’m like, ‘Good question.’”
Crawford said she used to spend a lot of energy trying to convince people that the woman behind Alicia Fox had something real to say, but she has since accepted that changing everybody else’s opinion isn’t something she can control.
“With my audience, I was always very vocal about, ‘I don’t want to be crazy. I’m not crazy. I mean, I play crazy, but no, really, I have something to say.’ And I just remember spending a lot of time trying to change the opinion of others. That’s never going to happen.”
Crawford isn’t trying to erase Alicia Fox or pretend the character wasn’t a huge piece of her wrestling career. She’s simply reached a point where Alicia Fox can be the wild character fans remember without Victoria Crawford having to spend the rest of her life proving that isn’t who she really is.
What do you think about Victoria Crawford saying the Alicia Fox character eventually caused an identity crisis and left people viewing her as the “crazy Black woman” stereotype? Did WWE take the Alicia Fox character too far, or was this an unavoidable downside of playing the gimmick so convincingly? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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