Tessa Blanchard has signed with MLW and will debut on September 12. Blanchard announced the deal on TMZ’s Inside the Ring podcast, where she confirmed the move ahead of the full interview airing Thursday.
“I’m going to be starting with MLW here soon, and I’m super, super excited for everything to come,” she said.
Her debut comes at FIGHTLAND in Charleston, South Carolina, a city where her father Tully Blanchard worked earlier in his career. Blanchard is a third-generation wrestler. Her grandfather Joe Blanchard promoted Southwest Championship Wrestling out of San Antonio, Tully is a WWE Hall of Famer, and her stepfather is Magnum T.A.
She went straight at the champion. Shotzi Blackheart has held the MLW World Women’s Featherweight Championship, which the promotion presents as its Women’s World Championship, since February, and Blanchard said she intends to build the division around herself.
“I think what’s been missing from MLW is a franchise, a name that the division’s built around,” she said. “This division was built and now the franchise, well, I’m here.”
Blanchard said her goal is to make the title the number one women’s championship in wrestling.
There is already a queue in front of her. Blackheart retained against Jazzy Yang on the August 29 episode of MLW Fusion, and Lady Frost confronted her after the match. Blanchard’s claim to the front of the line is not one MLW has booked yet.
The same episode carried the vignette teasing her arrival, which did not name her. It showed a large diamond with the line that pressure breaks most people and others are made for it, then broke the diamond into smaller ones and closed on the words coming soon.
Blanchard will keep her base in Mexico City and continue working for Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre as part of a joint arrangement between the promotions. She has spent most of 2026 in CMLL, where she challenged Persephone for the CMLL World Women’s Championship on July 31 and lost. Persephone has since won the AEW TBS Championship at All In: London, which makes the woman who beat Blanchard in July a double champion in a bigger company by the end of August.
Blanchard secured her release from TNA in June at her own request. She is a former TNA Knockouts Champion and became the first woman to win the promotion’s world championship when she beat Sami Callihan at Hard To Kill in January 2020.
MLW had been building to the arrival for weeks. Court Bauer confirmed earlier in August that the company was in talks with her, calling her incredibly talented but declining to confirm a deal.
FIGHTLAND is also the show where MLW World Heavyweight Champion Killer Kross is booked. Kross was on the August 29 Fusion making a save for Matt Riddle, and his wife Scarlett Bordeaux has said the September 12 date is the next major booking on their calendar. The card is shaping up as the biggest MLW has run this year.
Blanchard is 30 and has been wrestling since 2014, when she debuted at a Queens of Combat show in North Carolina after being trained by George South. She won the ECWA’s Super 8 ChickFight tournament in her first year. The MLW signing is the first time since the TNA title run that she has been positioned as the centrepiece of an American promotion’s women’s division.
What she is walking into is a division MLW has been building rather than one that is finished. Blackheart came in from WWE and has held the title through the year. Blanchard could do the same from TNA into MLW.
