What becomes of a woman in WWE, once known as a "diva," after she's done with the company
and has moved on to other, less powerbomb-heavy things?
Pretty much anything, it turns out.
The new, regular lives of former divas have plenty of plot twists worthy of their former
profession.
Here's what these WWE divas are up to today.
The athletic Amy "Lita" Dumas was one of the most visible WWE divas of the 2000s.
As Lad Bible explains, her partnership with the popular Hardy Boyz and her relationship
with WWE Champion Edge made her a constant presence in the squared circle.
However, she eventually turned her attention to other things.
According to Examiner Live, she used to sing in a punk band called The Luchagors.
The group was very decidedly not an arena-level band, but they did at least release one album
and play a tour in the United Kingdom.
Around 2013, she also had her own streaming radio show called Amy's Discordia.
Unfortunately for Lita, both ventures eventually fell flat.
The radio show failed to take off and the band's UK tour was a disappointment, which
reportedly may have led to the scrapping of their second album.
After the band broke up in 2014, Lita returned to the WWE, but in a very different role.
She acted as a producer and appeared as one of the trainers on the talent-search show
Tough Enough, after which she joined the company's creative team as a writer.
In 2019, she once again parted ways with the WWE, but luckily, she still has ways to keep
busy: Lita has operated an animal charity called Amy Dumas Operation Rescue and Education,
or "ADORE," since 2003.
Even after she left wrestling, Stacy Keibler has remained one of the more familiar diva
faces, at least if you've kept up with celebrity gossip.
Sportskeeda reports the long-legged diva left the WWE in 2006, but just because she stopped
dropping her opponents with her famed spinning heel kicks doesn't mean that she left the
limelight for long.
Keibler is well known as a contestant on the second season of Dancing With The Stars, where
she placed third.
She's also a surprisingly prolific actress, with over 30 TV, movie, and video game credits
to her name.
Oh, and in 2013, she also gained notoriety for dating a guy you may have heard of: George
Clooney.
More recently, Keibler has maintained more of a background presence.
In 2014, she got married and had a child, and the same year she also started a now defunct
lifestyle brand website.
Apart from that, she hasn't been making too many waves, until 2019, when she returned
to the WWE to induct Torrie Wilson into the company's Hall of Fame, and announced on Facebook
that she has co-founded a men's skincare brand called Caldera + Lab.
AJ Lee shattered records with the length of her WWE Divas Title reign, and her "unstable"
character caused controversy wherever she went.
However, the woman behind the role, AJ Mendez, really came into her own after wrapping up
her sports entertainment career.
As Sportskeeda reports, Lee left the wrestling scene in 2015.
She turned her focus to writing, and in 2017, her website was happy to report that her memoir,
Crazy Is My Superpower, became a New York Times Bestseller.
The good news continued later that year when she announced that the team behind National
Geographic's Genius was developing the book into a TV show.
Hollywood Reporter notes Lee is also expanding to comic books.
In 2019, she was announced as the writer of a comic based on GLOW, the Netflix show about
female wrestlers, a challenge she's uniquely equipped to tackle.
As if all that writing talent wasn't enough, Lee also finds time for a number of charitable
causes.
She is a noted animal lover who has teamed with American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA, to campaign against dog fighting.
Sports Illustrated reports that Lee, who has bipolar disorder, is also an active learning
disability and mental health advocate, to the point that she once landed in serious
hot water with the WWE for outright refusing to take part in a segment that she felt made
fun of mental illness.
"We had an opportunity to either make that a joke or make it dark and serious.
And I really, really wanted to push to make it dark and serious."
USA Today reported that Kelly Kelly had to quit her thriving WWE career in 2012 due to
a neck injury.
However, while the injury may have derailed her career, E! Online reports that Kelly,
whose real name is even more WWE-appropriate Barbie Blank, started dating former NHL star
Sheldon Souray and the couple eventually married in 2016.
Kelly handily turned both her romantic life and sports-entertainment-oriented past into
a career in reality TV.
In 2015, she has starred on WAGS, a reality show about the wives and girlfriends of famous
athletes.
She has also starred as one of the trainers on the VH1 show Celebrity Fit Club: Boot Camp.
Kelly has also dabbled in more serious acting, as Soaps reports she appeared in Days of our
Lives.
And while her active pro wrestling career seems to be a thing of the past, she still
makes the occasional appearance in the squared circle.
For example, she became the first-ever female WWE 24/7 Champion in July 2019.
Bleacher Report calls Joanie "Chyna" Laurer nothing less than the WWE's greatest female
wrestler, and her dominant presence was certainly enough to earn the nickname "The Ninth Wonder
of the World."
Unfortunately, her personal life was wrought with tragedy.
Chyna's WWE debut came in 1997, and Sportskeeda tells us she left the company in 2001.
Chyna herself has given two different reasons for her departure, which may have been caused
by either a contract dispute or a breakdown of her relationship with wrestler Triple H.
After she left the WWE, the formerly totally sober Chyna struggled with substance abuse.
Her acting and modeling gigs faded away as she started no-showing to auditions, and with
autograph signings as her main source of income, she eventually got into a number of dodgy
endeavors.
These included a celebrity boxing match against Joey Buttafuoco and an adult video with wrestler
Sean "X-Pac" Waltman, who notes that on top of all her issues with drugs and alcohol,
she also struggled with childhood trauma and mental illness.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, Chyna's tragic life ultimately ended in 2016, when
the 46-year-old died of an overdose of alcohol, painkillers, and muscle relaxants.
When the company itself argues that Trish Stratus may be "the greatest diva to ever
set foot inside a WWE ring," it's hard to disagree.
But the former diva has been significantly less visible in her life outside the company.
Stratus retired from wrestling in 2006, and aside from a few acting gigs, she has been
mostly doing her own thing.
In an interview with WWE, she revealed that between her 2011 movie Bounty Hunters and
2015 film Gridlocked, she kept herself busy operating a yoga studio business in Canada
and becoming a mother.
Of course, in keeping up with her reputation as one of the best in the sports entertainment
business, she has also indulged in irregularly regular WWE guest appearances.
One of the more recent was her allegedly final match with Charlotte Flair at SummerSlam 2019,
which was a big enough deal that even outlets like Newsweek covered it.
"It's just generation versus generation, era versus era, and to find out who's the greatest
female superstar of all time."
From 2001 to 2008, Torrie Wilson was among the most notorious women in WWE, taking part
in some wild storylines.
Her time with the industry was cut short because of injuries, but her natural athleticism soon
took her in a new, yet familiar direction.
Torrie Wilson Fit is an online personal training program that puts together her extensive fitness
experience along with a decidedly personal touch.
On the website's front page, Wilson openly discusses issues such as hypothyroidism and
past struggles with an eating disorder.
She also reveals that she used to study pre-dietetics, a subset of nutrition that aims to prevent
and treat ailments, at Boise State University.
Wilson has also stayed in the public eye a bit.
She used to date baseball player Alex Rodriguez, though A-Rod and Wilson eventually split up
in 2015.
In 2009, she also competed on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here.
And just because no ex-wrestler ever stops getting asked wrestling questions, in 2019
the fresh WWE Hall of Famer told Ring the Belle that she wouldn't necessarily rule out
a comeback match.
However, she'd only do it if she could train "for six months," and only to prove her athleticism
to herself.
Lisa Marie Varon, who WWE fans may know better as the powerful Victoria, terrorized the ring
from 2002 to 2009.
After calling it quits on WWE, she moved on to being a full-time entrepreneur.
According to WWE.com, Victoria has owned a custom car shop and a number of restaurants,
including The Squared Circle, a wrestling-themed gourmet pizza and burger joint in Chicago.
The Squared Circle endured a strange controversy in 2015, when, according to DNA Info, its
co-owner — Victoria's ex-husband — body-slammed an intruding gunman within the premises.
TMZ got hold of a video of the event, and when Victoria saw it, she was less than pleased,
not because of the actual incident, but rather because she noticed that her husband was still
employing a waitress she had wanted fired.
One thing led to another, and eventually, Victoria announced she wanted to sell the
business.
According to Eater, the restaurant eventually closed in 2017.
However, The Squared Circle's Facebook page is still operational and its posts are mostly
about Victoria hanging with cool people such as Jason Momoa, so maybe the place will eventually
make its return.
As Wrestling Inc. notes, Devin Taylor didn't spend all that long with WWE.
She was mostly affiliated with the NXT developmental property as a backstage interviewer, but that
didn't stop her from crafting a legacy as a WWE superstar on the grandest stage of them
all: The Bachelor.
According to Bustle, Taylor appeared in the popular matchmaking show under her real name,
Brittany Fetkin, and happily listed "WWE Diva-in-training" as her profession.
Unfortunately, her in-ring aspirations failed to entice farmer Chris Soules, the titular
Bachelor; Brittany/Devin was promptly eliminated from the show in the very first episode on
January 4, 2015.
WWE released her in October 2015.
According to her Twitter, she has moved on to academia.
In 2018, she got her MBA from the University of Miami, and it looks like her next stop
is a doctorate.
According to Hollywood Life, longtime WWE ring announcer Lilian Garcia, who gained fame
for her rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" to the point that she has reportedly sang
it before "hundreds of major sporting events," unexpectedly left the company in 2016.
As Pro Wrestling Sheet notes, this was decidedly not because she was released.
She asked for and received leave from her position to take care of her father, who had
cancer.
The WWE even made a point of checking in to see how things were going.
Unfortunately, things were going rather badly, and Garcia's father died on Christmas Day
that same year.
The devastated Garcia announced her plans to work with a "charity that assists veterans,"
and has only made sporadic "guest announcer" appearances with the WWE since then.
Don't worry, though — this doesn't mean she plans to stay away from the announcing
game forever.
As of the making of this video, she has taken over as the in-cage announcer for the Professional
Fighters League.
Layla El emerged on the sports entertainment scene as the winner of the 2006 WWE Diva Search.
However, the business eventually wore her down, and The Houston Chronicle reports that
the performer left WWE in 2015.
According to Layla, the reason behind her exit after nine years of wrestling was partly
motivated by the feeling that she'd, quote, "proven herself as a wrestler," but mostly
by the fact that the extremely hectic travel schedule simply wore her down.
When Layla said that she was ready to move on to the "next chapter," she wasn't kidding.
Though the former Miami Heat dancer suggested in her retirement interview for WWE.com that
she might look into choreographing and maybe even returning to Heat organization in that
capacity, her professional life ultimately took her in a very different direction: According
to Sportskeeda, Layla has gone on to carve a new career as a real estate agent.
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