Nia Jax was interviewed on Corey Graves’ “After The Bell” podcast to talk about her WWE return, her one-off appearance at the Royal Rumble, and how the negativity online affected her when she was released. Scroll down to listen to the entire interview.
Nia Jax talked about the hatred she received online:
“Well, I mean, I obviously can’t deny that I get a lot of hatred online. In the beginning, I was like, ‘Oh, this will be good. This would be good for, you know, like, the character will keep going on’, but at the end of the day, like, when you’re by yourself and you’re on your phone and you’re looking at the constant hate, hate hate, you’re like, okay, then you’re second guessing yourself. I’m second guessing everything I’ve done. Like, I need to improve and I need to do this, and I need to impress them, like the internet is really hating what I’m doing right now, and it really, really messed me up. It got me into such a sad place of like, when I got released, I’m like, yeah, of course, why not? I suck. Everybody hates me. Like, there’s no need for me to be here anymore. When I got into my therapy, and I’ve said this before, I don’t think anybody who’s a happy person goes online and (bleeps) on other people. I had to put it into perspective, like okay, this is a character. When they see me in the street, people are like, ‘Nia, you suck, or whatever’, but Lena over here is actually a good person.”
On how she became a part of the 2023 WWE Women’s Royal Rumble Match:
“So you obviously know my cousin Tamina. She was like, ‘I don’t know. This might be my last Rumble.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, no. If it’s your last Rumble, I would love to be a part of it’, because they had asked me the previous year, at just newly released, they had asked me to return for the Rumble and I said with a very expletive no. So this year, I was like, if they asked me and if this is going to be Tamina’s last Rumble, I really want to be a part of it. Anybody that knows Tamina knows she’s got the biggest heart in the world. I was like, dang, I would love to be a part of that. I told TJ ‘Hey, if there’s any way they think they want to put me in the Rumble, I would love to be a part of the Rumble’, and I told John Cone. I was at my mom’s house in California like two weeks before. Dan reached out and was like ‘Hey, so you’re gonna be in Rumble’, and I was like, ‘Okay.’ Thankfully I had gear makers that got it together, but I had no intention of being full-time again. I thought like, come back, have a cool little Rumble entrance, do something cool possibly with my cousin which didn’t even happen, and then kind of go off and go back to the farm. So yeah, I wasn’t intending on coming back permanently at the Rumble, but when I did get in the ring at the Rumble and I did experience the crowd and seeing everybody backstage, I was like, I fricking miss it.”
Nia Jax would go on to say, “I texted Hunter and I was just like, ‘Hey, I was wondering if you possibly had a spot for me to come back?” I want to say that two minutes later he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s talk. Let’s get on the phone and chat soon’, and so it kind of snowballed from there.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit After The Bell with Corey Graves with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
