Mandy Rose released by WWE after dropping NXT women's title

Originally published at https://www.postwrestling.com/2022/12/14/mandy-rose-released-by-wwe-after-dropping-nxt-womens-title/

One day after dropping the NXT Women’s Championship, Mandy Rose (Amanda Saccomanno) has been released by WWE.

Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp was the first to report the release with two sources confirming the news to POST Wrestling.

Fightful’s report states that WWE felt it was put in a position where it had to release her due to the “explicit nature of the content on her BrandArmy page” and was outside the parameters of her WWE deal.

Rose dropped the NXT Women’s title to Roxanne Perez on Tuesday in a match that was announced at the start of the show following Perez’s win in the Iron Survivor Challenge match at Deadline over the weekend. That match had originally been scheduled for January 10th on the New Year’s Evil special.

Rose was part of Tough Enough in 2015, which was won by Josh Bredl and the late Sara Lee with Rose signed by WWE after the series. After a stint in NXT, she was called to the main roster in 2017 and paired with Paige and Sonya Deville as Absolution.

She returned to NXT in July 2021 and won the NXT Women’s Championship from Raquel Gonzalez at Halloween Havoc that year and held it for 413 days, losing the title on this week’s episode.

That is a new one. Get naked and get released! Getting payed more for her page probably anyway.

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Wow WWE had invested a ton of time and promotion into her character. Even though it’s “just NXT” she has felt like the face of that brand all year. Even more than Bron. Very surprised they let her go and didn’t just do a minor suspension.

But maybe she was adamant that she wouldn’t change her content leaving WWE no choice.

Or maybe they needed a smokescreen to distract people who follow Wrestling from the latest Vince story in the WSJ. It’s not like this just emerged, seems she had this going on for a bit of time where they could have moved more swiftly. Timing isn’t lost on this follower who recognizes FUD when he sees it.

If it broke their policies on Dec 14 it broke them on Dec 12th or last week prior to their PLE or last episode. Biggest change in landscape is WSJ published another piece on Dec 13 :man_shrugging:

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She started to do nude pictures recently apparently.

Yup, that’s exactly what this is. Distraction from Vince

I cannot tell sarcasm or not, but did she just do nudes Yesterday and therefore they moved to let her go. Or was this always a card to pull on a rainy day? Hella bummed as she was the best act in NXT and really broke out over her run there, and she shouldn’t be collateral damage. But you can’t argue the timing isn’t at least odd. If they knew of this prior to 24 hours ago.

her first nudes came out over a month ago

That’s a Hella long time to wait to decide somebody needs to be released who is a current Champion, being promoted as Champion, in your commercials as Champion, and you didn’t have her drop the Championship.

Well that’s why they waited till now to release her. Distraction from whatever is going on with Vince.

I mean it’s not a big distraction. According to Bryan Alvarez she is making more money with her website than with NXT.

Or… This has nothing to do with Vince. Not once did that cross my mind.

Clearly the WWE felt a line was crossed. But we have no idea what push the issue over said line or when it happened. We also don’t know about any discussions had before the release. Was this the last straw, or was this the first offense? I have no idea.

And as for the timing, I can play that game too. Deadline was the 10th, NXT was the 13th and she was released the 14th. It is almost as if instead of having the long reigning champion just disappearing they finished out their plans (albeit on fast forward) then released her. They have pushed drug policy violations in the past to finish the programs.

Not every has to be linked together.

Did Alverez cover the WSJ story and will there be any further follows up about it by Wrestling Outlets or just when the WSJ does the work?

How quickly the topics are shifted isn’t meant to be obvious. It’s meant to do what it does, shift the conversation to the next drama.

Yesterday Wrestling was abuzz with whether Vince will come back and newest developments re: VKM, by the morning it was about a performer and nudes. Not connected, likely working to shift focus. Or they just decided they’d fire her with no advance notice after finishing the storyline. I’ve always admired their willingness to see stories through to completion and protect talent on the way out. Definitely deserve to get benefit of the doubt. :roll_eyes:

Also, she is disappearing with no explanation after dropping the title. So not sure why it wasn’t done a few days earlier to crown a new champion on a Premium special. Maybe to juice a rating for TV. They must have figured Mandy is very popular. Did they write her off on TV? Injury angle? Loser leaves town match? Maybe she’ll cut a Regal time warp promo to explain it all :man_shrugging:

Do people seriously believe Mandy Rose being let go has anything to do with the new Vince McMahon news stories? Mandy Rose is a blip in the news cycle and will have zero baring on the amount of press that Vince McMahon will get for a sexual assault accusation. People need to step outside of the IWC bubble.

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You mean months of no coverage of Vince between WSJ stories? Where flooding the interested audience (“zone”) with other stories and gossip is enough to make sure there is more muted coverage of Vince between WSJ stories?

There is virtually no interest in Vince since maybe the first wave of juicy headlines by mainstream media. The investigation was a nothing burger to the public and investor community. Those who loaned money to Vince helped protect the stock (see Morgan Stanley), and the penalty for Vince himself was that Vince had to go home, watch his net worth go WAY up, largely in part because nobody cared he was gone (the fanbase celebrating and praising such quick changes under Hunter actually gave more reason to believe in WWE going forward i.e benefit Vince) Vince very much still owns and therefore has control over WWE, always has, always will until he is forced to or decides to sell. He probably watches the IWC bubble you speak of with great amusement as he banks his dividends while they forget he exists in the background.

If that Netflix documentary every comes out - is it going to be hard hitting? The world outside the IWC does not care abut Vince more than being another billionaire to admire/criticize. If the Netflix doc does go up, it’ll draw even more attention to the glorified persona (good and bad) and likely do nothing to tarnish his legacy more than already has. It will be visible to millions more viewers than the 9 Lives doc was which came out this week (and was only going to get coverage in Wrestling circles). So watching those Wrestling Circles go abuzz with another story, while also damning - though I guess divisive in nature - to take heat of of WSJ-9 Lives combo - seems like well played PR/Media Relations. They obviously fed the quotes about their “tough position”. Mandy wasn’t that popular appearing on NXT only so this too will blow over very quickly which you can bet they are keenly aware of.

If the indications were they knew about the cause of the firing prior to this week, and knew when 9lives and WSJ piece could be coming, is it so crazy to think these people didn’t act savagely for their own PR. Flooding the zone with stories is an extremely common strategy. (the increase in AI stories lately?) That it only needs to impact one zone (the IWC) as a distraction makes it easy. There really isn’t another zone to even be worried about; the WSJ is not concerned with Mandy Rose, they are going to cover Vince with their pieces periodically until they don’t. Then who will?

I strongly believe that if the Wrestling World wants to rid itself of VKM it’ll have to do it itself. It’s frustrating as hell that while this guy had to publicly step away in shame that his punishment was to make more money this year personally than he probably has in the last 5 years. The limited pressure applied in the wake of the Summer bombshells made it very easy and comfortable for him to even think he could come back as alluded to in the last WSJ story. And he’ll probably be accepted back by a vast portion of the Audience. Is that because the IWC Bubble really just wants drama and more stuff to get frenzied over - good or bad? Have the influencers in the space done enough to cover the story beyond what WSJ will do. I doubt the space has the attention span. The WWE knows this, which brings it back to the point of flooding a zone so nothing sticks and nothing can be fully analyzed, investigated, and no IWC journalist can do a real story on it for fear of missing what comes next. (Gee, I wonder who taught who this, Vince or Donald).
There has been some very good work done by the beat reporters. Those who cover Wrestling with regular cadence. WWE knows they don’t have the time and resources to do a deep dive, and probably don’t need the WWE comms team coming for them. Still, if not for the reporters on the beat, covering the industry day in and day out, highlighting this guy is still very much there benefiting immensely, orchestrating a sentiment that he should be forced completely out and Wrestling fans won’t accept that kind of behavior, I’m not sure what coverage is going to do this. Vince will wind up coming back. And probably 2 months later it’ll be accepted and just another crazy story in this guys career.

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No more thoughts on the topic. Don’t mind being the outlier pointing this stuff out. Vince has made boatloads of money. Nobody forget that he isn’t gone. Still owns the company. And hates the IWC for which he likely plays as Marks and his Comms team probably does too. They know we don’t have attention span to remember things like this. Myself Included

the IWC bubble got #GiveDivasAChance and #CancelWWENetwork to make differences. #ForceVinceToSell would have WAY more impact than waiting for more WSJ stories to drop, while we focus on whatever next exciting thing it is to get worked up over. Myself included.

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Just finished listening to last night’s shows:
I thought John and Wai did a really good thing covering 9 Lives and discussing Vince and a potential return as well as revisiting the Summer stuff. Some of that convo should not be pay-walled. Wrestling media should try to flood the zone and keep the pressure on Vince so he cannot come back, and that the victims are never just footnotes in another episode of Wacky Vince

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Yeah. Anyone who has been following the story knows it’s not a mainstream story and the best way to keep it out of the mainstream is to keep wrestling media talking about something else.

WWE is all about protecting Vince at all costs and will do anything to shelter him. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention the last 20-plus years.

No, I do not think that an NXT talent being released has anything to do with “hiding” a story like the Vince story.

I’m not suggesting the WWE wouldn’t do that for some moral reason, it’s that a Mandy rose release is barely even a news story. This isn’t *spoiler alert for house of cards…….Frank underwood starting a war to hide a personal scandal. I know you love your conspiracy theories in wrestling, but you are really really really overestimating the power of the Mandy rose story here.

Ill be honest, I dont really see what the rest of your post has to do with what I said. Im not disputing the majority of the Vince stuff, I just dont think a Mandy Rose release is connected. If WWE was going to use those types of tactics to distract from the Vince story, Im pretty confident they would do better then that.

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Did the Mandy story dominated IWC yesterday?

Frank Underwood wishes he was Vince McMahon (true, and sad). Fantastic reference @kliq Made me :smiley:

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Honestly, this board and Meltzer are the only places I saw it. The Vince story I saw everywhere…just to name a few places, I saw it on Global news, WSJ, Toronto Sun etc. It was everywhere.

:laughing: Im glad you got the reference, I was worried at this point it was too dated lol.

Here’s the UK most popular newspaper coverage…