Paige Reveals The Effect of Her Sex Tape Leak on Her Health and Mind, What She Learned From It

– Paige appeared on Lilian Garcia’s Chasing Glory podcast and talked about the leak of her sex tape, how it affected her and more. Highlights are below, courtesy of WZ’s Bill Pritchard:

On her reaction to the sex tape leak: “I craved privacy. I want it. I don’t even want to tell people the next time I speak to a guy. I don’t want people to know about it, and it’s mostly because of what happened last year. People invading my privacy to a point where sometimes I don’t even want to go out. People are just looking at me bad; for example today [the day the episode was recorded] is Wednesday and I was out with my friends. We’re just sitting there, I had a Bloody Mary, whatever, and a guy goes up to my friend and says ‘That’s the porn star, I jerked off to her yesterday.’ My friend, she did stand up for me, but I was just like… I went in the toilet, and I cried in the toilet.”

On how it’s affected her: “It’s just one of those things where I find it hard to be close with anybody. That’s exactly a reason why. I’m not a bad person. Those are the kinds of things that I don’t want to be known like that. People make mistakes, and I’ve made a ton of mistakes, and that was one of them. I was young, I was dumb, and I was like 19,20… I was dumb. Those are the kinds of things I just want to tell girls — social media is a big thing. Cameras are a big thing — just be careful with what you do with it, because you never know what’s going to happen in your future. I know I was already in a position where I know I could’ve made something of myself, and I made a stupid mistake. Now that’s something I have to live with every time I walk down the street, and people can see every part of me and it makes me sad. I’ve made jokes about it because it helps me heal, but when it’s someone like that, degrading me in a way, I don’t deserve that. It wasn’t my fault…I barricaded myself in the house for a couple of months, it was so bad to the point where I was contemplating suicide. I was so sad, that’s why I was doing so much stupid stuff. I was drinking heavily, I wasn’t doing drugs at that point. I was just in a really, really, really bad place.”

On how it hurt her reputation: “I hate the fact that I’m going to be known for that. It’s not just ‘Paige: WWE wrestler who was a Divas Champion, Total Divas star … it’s the ‘WWE’s sex tape scandal’ and it’s always headlined like that, and I don’t want to be remembered like that. It breaks my heart.”

On the scandal affecting her health: “I was literally on the floor, I got so skinny I ended up collapsing with exhaustion in a hospital in England. They told me at the time that it was like stress induced anorexia. My family was there, Alberto [El Patron] was there and I was collapsed. I wasn’t eating, sleeping, I lost all my hair. I have clip-ins right now but I have no hair because it literally fell out because I was so stressed. I was so sick, and no one knows about it. I hadn’t told a soul. I was there in the hospital, and it just broke my heart, like why would someone want to do that to someone [else]. Like why would you want to put stuff out of someone like that, and invade someone’s privacy? What does it give you?”