AJ Lee spent her first run in WWE fighting, loudly and publicly, for the women’s division to be paid and booked like it mattered. A decade later, she’s back, and the receipts are in.
Season 3 of WWE: Unreal dropped all five episodes on Netflix yesterday, and the standout moment isn’t a match, it’s a contract. Lee reveals that just 30 minutes before her surprise return to SmackDown last September, she signed a deal that pays her the same as her husband, CM Punk.
“It Was a Boss-Ass Moment”
“One of the things that I fought for back in the day wasn’t just for equal footing. It was, ‘let’s get paid the way men get paid,'” Lee says in the documentary. “To know that I’m signing this contract where I’m getting paid the way my husband is getting paid, where I’m being treated like an equal, it was a boss-ass moment, I’m not going to lie.”
It’s a full-circle detail for anyone who remembers 2015, when Lee went after Stephanie McMahon in public over how the women’s division was paid and booked. The two have since made peace, sitting down together on McMahon’s own podcast to hash it out. Getting a contract that puts her on equal footing with one of the promotion’s biggest stars, who happens to be her husband, is the kind of ending that story deserved.
The Nerves Behind the Comeback
The rest of the premiere follows Lee through the minutes before she walked back through the curtain in Chicago to confront Becky Lynch for going after Punk. By her own account, she was a wreck. She says she wore jean shorts for the first time in a decade, joked “hello, darkness, my old friend” as she got dressed, and admitted she nearly dry heaved into a trash can backstage while talking to Paul “Triple H” Levesque. None of it showed once the curtain opened. She says the crowd’s reaction the moment she stepped out felt like an “out-of-body experience.”
Lee had walked away from wrestling in 2015 citing her physical and mental health, and built a second career as a writer in the years since. She’s been careful about her in-ring schedule since returning, working a run as Women’s Intercontinental Champion before dropping the title to Becky Lynch at WrestleMania 42. She’s currently between matches, but stayed visible over the weekend at Fanatics Fest, where she and Paige recorded a live episode of The Nikki & Brie Show.
Whatever comes next in the ring, Lee’s already made the point she came back to make.
