Shawn Michaels Addresses Mandy Rose Being Released By WWE
Shawn Michaels has commented WWE releasing former NXT Women’s Champion Mandy Rose after she held the championship for over one year.
The December 13, 2022 edition of WWE NXT was the last time Mandy Rose was seen on WWE programming after a five year run in the company. At the time, Rose had been the NXT Women’s Champion for an incredible 413 days after running through most of the roster. On that episode of NXT, Roxanne Perez (who earned the title shot a few days earlier) challenged and beat Rose for the title in the main event of the show.
By Wednesday morning, WWE fired Rose due to the “explicit nature” of content she was posting on her FanTime page. The reason WWE fired Rose is because WWE management felt like the content was outside of the parameters of her WWE contract.
Shawn Michaels is a two-time WWE Hall of Famer that has the lengthy job title of Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative for WWE. What the job entails is that he gets to run the creative direction of NXT and he has been in that position since late 2021. That also means that he was the guy in charge during the entirety of Mandy’s 413-day title reigned that started in October 2021.
During today’s NXT media conference call to promote the Vengeance Day Premium Live Event on December 4th, Michaels addressed the situation while noting that he didn’t fire her.
“Obviously, not the ideal situation. I will say, if I’m allowed to say it for the record, I didn’t fire her. I can’t fire anybody. Only thing correct about any of that is that I handle creative. It was unfortunate.”
As he continued, Michaels talked about how great Mandy Rose was for the NXT brand.
“I think Mandy was fantastic for us. I absolutely enjoyed working with her. She was a phenomenal champion. We would have loved things to have gone different and been able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was put in a position to where I had to make a call creatively, and so we did that. It’s one of the things that I’ve learned, doing this job, nothing comes before the brand. We have to put those things forward and that’s what we did.”
“Roxanne was certainly where we were going regardless, we just went a few weeks earlier than we expected to. The great thing is, now we’re right back on course and I will say, honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose, she was nothing but phenomenal with us, we’ll miss her, but we’re thrilled about Roxanne Perez being the NXT Women’s Champion and taking us into the future.”
Roxanne Perez will defend the NXT Women’s Championship this Saturday at Vengeance against Mandy’s former Toxic Attraction teammates, Jacy Jayne and Gigi Dolin.