During a recent appearance on “Chasing Glory with Lillian Garcia” podcast, former WWE Divas Champion Paige opened up on how her private stuff leaking affected her life, wanted to commit suicide & more.
Below are the highlights:
On being embarrassed of her parents being wrestlers at first:
Lillian: I’ve read somewhere that, I mean I know that your parents were wrestlers, you actually were embarrassed about it though.
Paige: I was. Yes. Only because I was like really young and I was in school and it wasn’t cool back then to be a wrestler and like my dad would drive up and his broken van was like: his wrestling company was called WAW Wrestling, but then the ‘W’ would be missing, the ‘G’ in wrestling would be hanging off. The Van would be like breaking and like steam coming out.
Everyone used to just make fun of me. I used to get bullied in school because of it. I wouldn’t say what my parents did. I’m not embarrassed of my family whatsoever. I love them with all my heart. It’s just like… kids can be cruel in school.
It was just one of those things where I hid it until I got to high school and then I embraced myself, because I’ve been wrestling since I was 13, I was like – No. This is me. This is what I want to do. I don’t care if you don’t want to be my friend. This is my career of choice. This is my passion. This is my love. I’m gonna do this.
And people kind of stopped making fun of me and instead they just got scared. So I lost friends because they were too scared to hang out with me.
On wanting to commit suicide after her private stuff leaked and what made her stop thinking about it:
Lillian: I think the lesson may be that you can tell people: just don’t even record, right?
Paige: Right. I would just be like – NO. Stay away from the recording type thing. Luckily I’ve never done anything after that because I got smart, but that was before the video tapes even came out. I’d definitely say just don’t record stuff. You don’t have to make someone happy by doing that kind of stuff. And that’s exactly what I thought I was doing, I was trying to make someone happy.
Lillian: Do you regret even being in that angle? Like away from the recording, just being in that position?
Paige: Yeah. I feel like I was definitely degrading myself. Woods is a really, really nice guy honestly. He’s actually my friend. I also felt bad for him, but still like I was just degrading myself as a woman and I would never want another woman to do what I did.
Don’t do that for someone you think that you like or you think that you love when in reality you’re just clouded by what you think is love. You do not want that stuff out there about you. It’s like you have to think about your family. My niece and nephews had to see it.
When I was with my ex, his kids had to go to school and these kids would get crap from it and I had to live with that. My family was very supportive, but still my niece and nephews had to deal with them saying, “Oh, your aunt is a p0rn star” and stuff like that.
Lillian: What got you out of that? You said you were thinking of committing suicide and all, what saved you?
Paige: I had like a ton of people destroying me every week. Cyberbullying is a real thing and 50% of what wanted me to let go and just freakin’ kill myself. That is so friggin’ serious. They’re hiding behind keyboards.
Thing is with me like I usually just snap out of things one day and I’m like – What am I doing! It really helped. I actually had like this one young girl write to me. Usually I just wasn’t checking stuff. I was not even writing back to people, I was so embarrassed and I had to shut myself up. I deleted my social media.
She told me that I was still her biggest inspiration and she thought that even through hell I’m still gonna come out smiling with my head held high and she really likes that and she hopes one day she can be as strong as me. So she was writing like all this really nice stuff and I was just like – I could make a difference with this.
Yes, it’s like terrible what happened to me. Terrible. Absolutely horrible. But like – Should I take my life because of it? Like, look at all these people that are reaching out to me and I’m not exaggerating, there was thousands of people. I thought everybody hated me, there was thousands of people right out there like – “You are strong”.
So just having that support system and seeing that I can actually inspire others, I kept my head up and I acted confident, but inside I was dying. I was like – “Oh my gosh please put me in a hole right now”. But yeah that’s kind of what made me kick out.
I do have the best fan base you can imagine which I kind of doubted before because I had so many mean stuff. But no, they were always there. I was just looking at the bad stuff more than the good.
