AJ Lee Didn’t Watch Wrestling During Her Time Away From the Business

AJ Lee says she didn’t watch wrestling during her retirement from the ring, and the one time she did it didn’t turn out well. The WWE star spent 10 years away from the ring after she retired in 2015, outside of some work with WOW – Women Of Wrestling in 2022 and 2023. She recently appeared on Mind Over Mountain for iHeart Women’s Sports and during the conversation, she was asked if she kept up with the business during her time away.

Lee said that she didn not, telling Cheryl Strayed (per Fightful), “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. 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.”

She continued, “Did I want to go there and think about it? 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 fucking watching again.’ I thought it was bad juju. ‘I should’ve have.’ I got really weird about it then and I didn’t want to watch.”

Lee did not specify which show she watched that resulted in Punk being hurt. He suffered a couple of injuries in 2022 during his time in AEW, and was injured during the 2024 Royal Rumble as well.