With Paige’s WWE contact expiring, she published a “goodbye letter” on theplayerstribune.com and here is an excerpt:
“The truth is, it was easy enough for WWE to get behind me in those early days. I was a young woman who could wrestle at a high level and cut good promos and move loads of merch — I was probably one of their top assets, you know what I mean? And you don’t learn much about people from how they treat you when you’re on top.
You learn about people’s true nature, I’ve found, from how they treat you when you’re closer to the bottom.
And a few years ago I got pretty close to the bottom.
It was like, almost overnight, so many things changed: Suddenly my neck was fucked and I couldn’t wrestle. I popped a drug test. My sex tape leaked. I got depressed. I started drinking. And I became less of an asset to WWE, and more of a liability, for a long time. I’m sure of it.
But they never lost faith in me — they never once threw me off to the side. They got me the help I needed when I needed help, and they gave me the time and space I needed when I needed time and space.
They even gave me a full segment on Raw to announce my in-ring retirement. I’ll cherish that for the rest of my life. Not just getting to make the announcement like I did, but also the respect it showed on WWE’s part, that they viewed me as worthy of that kind of treatment — the kind normally reserved for an Edge, or a Daniel Bryan, or an HBK, or a Hunter.
That they viewed me as someone who’d built a legacy of her own.”
