Zayda Steel: Tony Khan texted me five days after announcing WWE departure
Former WWE ID wrestler Zayda Steel has opened up on her journey to AEW following her WWE exit.
In a recent appearance on AEW Unrestricted, Steel opened up and revealed she “chose” to walk away from WWE.
“I don’t know how much I can say, but I will say this. I chose to walk away from my previous employment by choice. I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling,” Steel said. “I just want to be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away.”
She further shared how AEW President Tony Khan texted her “five days” after she announced her WWE departure.
“My plans at first were to go to Japan. I was gonna take the last two, three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was gonna go overseas and do it the right way this time. And five days after I tweeted that tweet [about leaving WWE ID], Tony Khan texted me, so plans changed.”
“I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality. Once I started to feel like my only escape was work, I started to not like it and not have fun. I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away. As well as my mental, personally, I was losing myself,” Steel continued. “I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve loved, so it was pretty quickly on that I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.’”
Steel, 22, had her recent match on the March 1 episode of ROH, where she lost against Mina Shirakawa.
Shounak Chakrabarti is an experienced sports journalist with a lifelong passion for athletics and storytelling. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Journalism from the University of Leeds and joined F4WOnline in 2025.
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