Indi Hartwell was among those released by WWE last November, and she's now broken her silence on what was, for her, an unexpected departure from the company.
Likening the experience to a "roller coaster," the Australian wrestler, who now competes for TNA, admitted that she went from feeling "gratitude" to being "frustrated and mad" and eventually "sad." While she's in a far more positive place now, it still came as a blow to the former NXT Women's Champion.
"I didn’t honestly feel like it was coming, especially when it happened," she shared. "My whole time at WWE, I was always scared of getting released. And add another factor to is that I’m an international so people don’t really understand, like, visas, green cards... that was something that was like always in the back of my mind, like being scared of being fired."
"But it wasn’t till my last two weeks at WWE, I finally felt like comfortable. I did the Netflix shoot and then, and then I got released," Hartwell continued. "Fun fact, I missed the call when they called me to release me, so I made the call to get fired."
Her final match saw Hartwell team with Candice LeRae to take on Bayley and Naomi, and it aired on the day she was released. Reflecting on that, she said, "Some people didn’t know that that Smackdown was taped the week before, so they thought that I got released and then had to, like, go out that night and wrestle. Could you imagine?"
Complicating things for Hartwell was the fact that she "sold" her wrestling name to WWE. "I think I had a dark match at NXT. And I just asked Road Dogg, like, 'Can I be Indi Hartwell for this?' And he’s like, 'Oh yeah, I’ll ask. Why not?' And then they let me be Indi Hartwell for the dark match. And then it kind of just like, kept going."
NXT 2.0 changed things. "They went through that whole weird thing of, like, you have to, you can’t have your real name, and you also can’t have a name that we don’t own," Hartwell explained. "So they gave me the option to change my name or sell it to them. So I sold it to them."
"It was always in the back of my mind, like, oh my gosh, if I get released. Like. What name am I going to be? Like, that’s a big deal to me. They said, ‘okay, yeah, we’re releasing you.’ I said, 'Okay, cool. Um, so I sold my name to the company. Is there any way I can get that back?' And then we got it all figured out. I got, I got the rights and stuff to it," Hartwell concluded.
As noted, Hartwell announced that she'd signed with TNA on April 27. It's interesting to hear her reflect on this experience, particularly as WWE just released another wave of main roster and NXT talent.
You can listen to the full interview with the former WWE Superstar below.