Shawn Michaels Addresses Mandy Rose WWE Departure, Says He Didn’t Fire Her

WWE

Mandy Rose’s 400+ day NXT Women’s Championship reign came to a rather sudden end on the December 13 episode of NXT.

Mandy abruptly lost the title to women’s Iron Survivor Challenge winner Roxanne Perez in the show’s main event, before being fired the following day.

WWE Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative Shawn Michaels held a media call ahead of NXT Vengeance Day today, where he discussed Mandy’s departure from the company.

Michaels detailed the shift in plans following the situation, before saying that he wasn’t the one who fired her.

He said:

“Obviously, not the ideal situation. I will say, if I’m allowed to say it for the record, I didn’t fire her. I can’t fire anybody. Only thing correct about any of that is that I handle creative. It was unfortunate.

“I think Mandy was fantastic for us. I absolutely enjoyed working with her. She was a phenomenal champion. We would have loved things to have gone different and been able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was put in a position to where I had to make a call creatively, and so we did that. It’s one of the things that I’ve learned, doing this job, nothing comes before the brand. We have to put those things forward and that’s what we did.

“Roxanne was certainly where we were going regardless, we just went a few weeks earlier than we expected to. The great thing is, now we’re right back on course and I will say, honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose, she was nothing but phenomenal with us, we’ll miss her, but we’re thrilled about Roxanne Perez being the NXT Women’s Champion and taking us into the future.”

Her release came soon after the company found out about the type of content she was posting on her FanTime subscription page.

WWE believed they had ‘absolutely no choice’ but to release her and she ‘way, way, way crossed the line’ of what was acceptable.

It’s worth reiterating a misconception – WWE didn’t fire Rose just because of the fact she had a subscription service, but reportedly more so because of the nature of what she was posting on there, which, per Meltzer, the company thought ‘way, way, way crossed the line’.

Fightful Select previously reported that Rose had indicated to people in recent months that she did realize what she was posting could get her in trouble with WWE management.

It has since been revealed that Rose has made more than $1 million on FanTime since committing herself fully to her account.

transcription via Fightful

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