Cassie Lee has returned to wrestling.
The former WWE and TNA Knockouts Tag Team Champion is back! The world of wrestling was quite business last week, especially with everyone buzzing about the shocking John Cena heel turn. In the midst of that was Cassie Lee aka Peyton Royce of the IIconics competing at Smash Pro Wrestling against Alexia Nicole. This was Cassie’s first match since October 2023.
It’s clearly not a one time appearance either as Lee called out the Smash Women’s Champion Jody Threat for a match in April. The challenge was accepted and Lee even hinted at bringing back Jessie McKay with her.
Lee is married to Ronnie Arneill aka Shawn Spears. The couple recently had two kids together. The former WWE star has been out taking care of their children. Following her release from WWE in 2021, Lee and McKay went over to TNA/Impact and won the Knockouts Tag Team titles. The duo held the belts for 133 days; successfully defending them against Decay (Rosemary & Havok), but dropped them to The Influence (Madison Rayne & Tenille Dashwood) at Sacrifice 2022.
Both women left the company in early 2022. Lee went solo for a bit in World Series Wrestling until she took some time off from the business to focus on her personal life. Her return isn’t much of a surprise as Spears strongly indicated during his interview with Chris Van Vliet last September that his wife always planned to get back into the ring.
“She watches it a lot. She watches it more than I do,” Shawn Spears said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t watch wrestling, it just means I’m busy a lot. I’m around, I can see a lot of stuff. Yeah, she keeps up on it. She still loves watching a lot of her friends, and she’s still getting the itch. So she’s already weight training, she’s doing all that kind of stuff. She’s getting back into the mix and things like that. When she feels 100% good to go there’s a ring close by, so she plans on getting back into it.
“She doesn’t know to what capacity, meaning no one said anything, no one said hey, when you ready, come on back. Like, not Impact, not anything, but with the working relationship. Who’s to say that that’s not a possibility? But yeah, she still misses it. I think she still has a little bit of an itch.”
Could Lee make her return to TNA or WWE? She was backstage at the recent NXT show, thought it was likely to support her husband winning the NXT North American Championship. The IIconics would help bolster either company’s tag team division, though WWE did test the waters by showcasing Lee as a singles star before her release. I’ll be fun to see where Cassie Lee ends up next.