Indi Hartwell Says She Sold Her Name To WWE But Managed To Get It Back

In an interview with Chris Van Vliet for Insight, Indi Hartwell said that she initially sold her ring name to WWE when she joined, but was able to get it back after her release. She debuted in TNA with the name at Rebellion last month. Below are some highlights from Insight:

On keeping Indi Hartwell as her ring name: “I just asked. I’ve had this name my whole wrestling career. When you start wrestling at live events, they make you wrestle under your real name. I wrestled under my real name for a bit, and I think I had a dark match at NXT, and I just asked Road Dogg, ‘Can I be Indi Hartwell?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll ask. Why not.’ They let me be Indi Hartwell for the dark match. It kind of kept going and I got on TV with it. I got my action figure with that name and got in the game with that name. When NXT 2.0 started, they went through that whole thing where you can’t have your real name or a name they don’t own, so they gave me the option to change my name or sell it to them.”

On previously selling it to WWE: “I sold it to them. It was always in the back of my mind, ‘If I get released, what name am I going to be?’ That’s a big deal to me. When I got the call that I was being released, they said, ‘You’re released.’ ‘Okay, cool. So, I sold my name to the company. Is there any way I could get that back?’ We got it all figured out and I got the rights and stuff to it. I’m very lucky.”