There’s been a lot of movement in the professional wrestling world over the last few years and back in October of 2025, Zayda Steel announced that she would be leaving WWE. Steel originally signed with WWE in November of 2024 as part of the company’s WWE ID program, but she ultimately decided not to renew her contract with the company.
A few months later Zayda Steel went on to debut for ROH in December of 2025, and she also debuted on AEW programming in January of 2026. Shortly after Tony Khan revealed that Steel had signed with AEW.
During a recent appearance on the AEW Unrestricted podcast Zayda Steel explained why she decided to walk away from WWE, and she also shared some insight regarding how her AEW deal came together.
“I don’t know how much I can say, but I will say this. I chose to walk away from my previous employment by choice. I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling. I just want to be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away.
“My plans at first were to go to Japan. I was gonna take the last two, three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was gonna go overseas and do it the right way this time. Five days after I tweeted that tweet (about leaving WWE ID), Tony Khan texted me, so plans changed.
“I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality. Once I started to feel like my only escape was work, I started to not like it and not have fun. I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away. As well as my mental, personally, I was losing myself. I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve loved, so it was pretty quickly on that I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.’”