AJ Lee stayed away from wrestling the way you stay away from an ex.
Lee was asked on Mind Over Mountain with Cheryl Strayed whether she watched during her decade out of the business. She did not.
It felt like a relationship. I’m not the type of person that is going to stalk my ex on social media. I never watched any wrestler and I stood far away from it.
The distance was not casual.
A piece of me was like, so much of heart was in it and I fell in love with it and there was a lot of trauma back then and it wasn’t a very healthy place. A little bit of it was that I had a broken heart. Did I want to go there and think about it?
She made one exception and it did not go well.
My husband went back to wrestling. I watched a show that he did. The women were so amazing and it was like, ‘this is really cool.’ He got hurt on that show and I was like, ‘I’m never watching again.’ I thought it was bad juju.
That was the end of it.
I got really weird about it then and I didn’t want to watch.
Her husband is CM Punk, who returned to wrestling in 2021 after seven years away. It lines up with what she said elsewhere in the same conversation. Lee described treating wrestling as a closed chapter, comparing it to her high school building a sports field the year after she graduated, before WWE called in 2025.
She returned on the September 5, 2025 SmackDown, worked the women’s WarGames match at Survivor Series, took the Women’s Intercontinental Championship from Becky Lynch at Elimination Chamber, and dropped it back to her at WrestleMania 42. She has not been on television since and told the same podcast that she is staying ready for the right story.
