Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful is reporting through his select service that Gail Kim has been backstage at NXT lately, including this week.
Sapp added that Kim has not signed with WWE and her presence backstage is being kept low profile.
Kim was very surprisingly released from TNA in March along with three other executives. She served as a producer with the company and was heavily involved in the Knockouts division apart from working in the talent relations department as well.
The Wrestling Central FAST channel, owned by Paramount Global Content Distribution, has started broadcasting on The Roku Channel app on channel 208.
Announced last month, the channel features matches from the National Wrestling Alliance and Women Of Wrestling including classic episodes, never-before-seen matches, specials, and documentaries from both brands.
FAST, standing for free advertising-supported streaming television, offers traditional linear television programming and is the model in use by Pluto, Tubi, The Roku Channel and more.
You can start watching today on Roku-enabled devices and through The Roku Channel app on several TV-connected devices.
Tonight’s Impact television tapings from the UPMC Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will air live and free on the TNA+ streaming service.
The stream will be part of the free tier of TNA+ which anyone can sign up for. Tonight’s episode of Impact will air on AXS TV on Thursday, June 26.
Scheduled for the show tonight are Mike Santana vs AJ Francis in a street fight, Masha Slamovich vs Killer Kelley for the TNA Knockouts title, The Inspiration vs Victoria Crawford and Tessa Blanchard, Trey Miguel vs Nic Nemeth, and The Hardys will be in action as well.
To sign up go to watch.tnawrestling.com.
AEW star Hook appeared on the Wrestling Observer Live podcast yesterday and revealed that he is still on the sidelines as he recovers from a concussion.
Hook got concussed during a match on the April 9 episode of Dynamite where he teamed up with Samoa Joe against Wheeler Yuta and Claudio Castagnoli. The symptoms were immediate as he vomited twice, including during the match and during the post-match beat-down.
While he did appear at Double or Nothing last month during the Anarchy In The Arena match, he still has not got any action until he’s completely cleared.
Hook did say that he should be “back soon” but failed to give a timeline.
WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque and WWE President Nick Khan visited the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida this week.
In a video uploaded on social media, both WWE execs were shown meeting the likes of Wes Lee, Ethan Page, Josh Briggs, and WWE’s newest arrival, Blake Monroe.
“You should never stop evolving,” Triple H wrote. “The future is for the taking… @WWENXT.”
The WWE PC is obviously a place Triple H is very familiar with as he ran NXT for several years before handing the reigns to fellow Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels.
You should never stop evolving. The future is for the taking… @WWENXT pic.twitter.com/FtIGhMGcto
— Triple H (@TripleH) June 19, 2025
Elayna Black, the former NXT star known as Cora Jade, sat down with Chris Van Vliet to discuss getting released from WWE and why it wasn’t a surprise, leaving school at 15 to chase her dreams of becoming a professional wrestler, the first time she met CM Punk and getting to work with him in WWE, dealing with criticism about her wrestling and launching an OnlyFans page, her matches in AEW and possibly becoming All Elite, her current dream match and more!
On having a feeling that her WWE release was coming:
“I don’t know. I feel like people have asked me that a few times, and I don’t know exactly what it is. Nothing specific happened. I’ve just always kind of been like that. I feel like a handful of my friends that I had talked to, I specifically remember talking to Roxanne, she’s my best friend, and I was like, I know I’m gonna be gone, and [she said] ‘You’re crazy, no no.’ But I always know, in my intuition, when something is happening. I don’t know what that is, I just had that feeling. And at the end of Vegas, we had that whole WrestleMania week. I remember on my flight back, I was just like, well, that’s a wrap. That was it. I just knew. And then what was it? I got fired on May 2. It was two weeks later, after Mania, it was like, well I already knew that was happening.”
On missed opportunities in WWE:
“I feel like, obviously, there are things that I didn’t get to do. But at the same time, like you said, that was my dream. I was eight years old, I watched wrestling and I immediately wanted to be a WWE superstar. Then I would look at all my little notebooks, I would have these bucket lists, little lists, and I would cross them off every time I would do something. It would say, get an action figure, have merchandise, wrestle this person, wrestle here, do all this stuff. And then I looked and I was crossing off so many of those things. Really, the only one I didn’t cross off was wrestling at WrestleMania, or winning the NXT Championship, or obviously any other championship. But I had gotten to do so many things that my little eight-year-old self [could only dream of]. I would lay in my bed and dream of doing those things at night. So again, obviously there are things that were disappointing and stuff like that, but never will I sh*t on WWE or trash WWE. I loved my time there. Obviously, when you care about something and you’re passionate about something, things are going to bother you. It’s because I care, it’s not because I’m like, oh f*ck this, whatever. I care about wrestling so much, and I love wrestling so much, and it is my dream and it is my passion. So yes, things did bother me, and things did upset me, because I’m only human, and I’m a human who cares about my passion, my job. So obviously, that’s gonna come up. But at the same time, I can’t say enough good things about the people I got to work with, the things I got to do, all the dreams I got to accomplish. I loved my time at WWE so much, and especially those last six months. I got to do it with Roxanne, with Bayley, with Giulia, Stephanie, all these girls I became so close with and I got to travel with them and do all these great matches and storylines with them. I loved my time at WWE so much. Were there things that upset me? Yes. Am I bitter or anything like that? Absolutely not. I’m only 24 years old. Who knows what the future holds? I’ll never burn a bridge because I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if I’ll be back there one day. I don’t know where I’ll end up. But all I know is that I loved WWE, and I loved my time there, and I have no bad things to say about them.”
On possibly signing with AEW:
“I’m open to whatever. I’m not in any rush to sign anywhere right now. I’m not like sitting here waiting for that. Because I feel like for the first time in my life, I’m trying to be present and just enjoy life now and what’s happening now. Because I feel like a lot of times I was always worried about what’s next, and this business is so go, go, go, go, go. It’s hard to sit and be present. So I feel like I’m trying to just enjoy where I’m at right now and not worry about that. But if the call came, I would definitely be open to talking and whatever. I’ve watched all the AEW shows since 2020, I never stopped watching them. Just couldn’t talk about it. I love AEW. I love wrestling. I want to continue to wrestle, wherever that is. If the call comes, hey, I’m here, but if it doesn’t for a few months or never, I don’t know. I’m not sitting here stressing about it, but I’m open to it.”
On wanting a match with Mercedes Mone:
“That’s my current dream match. I feel like her and Bayley were my favorites out of the four Horsewomen. I loved all of them, but I feel like I really, really looked up to them two specifically. I feel like I just felt the most connected to them two because Mercedes was always writing in her notebook too. And I feel like I look at her and see aspects of myself too. So to be able to wrestle her now, where we both have had our time in WWE and we’re both doing our own thing now and doing whatever we want creatively, I feel like that is the ultimate dream match.”
On the best advice she received from CM Punk:
“I feel like he’s told me a lot of things in very different situations. But I feel like the number one thing is to just drown out what everyone else is saying, because I feel like he knows it better than anybody. Everyone has an opinion on him, whether you absolutely love him, or you absolutely hate him, everyone has an opinion on CM Punk. I’ve always wondered, how does he just continue to be himself and not give a sh*t when there’s a million different opinions from a million different places. But he’s really, really always helped me just understand that it doesn’t matter. People are always going to say something. They’re going to love you or they’re going to hate you, and either way, it doesn’t matter, because you just have to be you and do what you feel is right and stay true to yourself and if people support you, great. That’s great motivation. But if they don’t, and they don’t like you, and they don’t want to watch what you do, or they want to watch what you do and criticize it, that’s still your name in their mouth, and someone’s talking about you and you’re doing something right.”
WWE today announced Raw and Smackdown across Newark, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia this Summer.
The first is a Smackdown on August 1 at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey and that is followed by Raw on August 4 in Brooklyn, New York at the Barclays Center. These two events will be in conjunction with SummerSlam at MetLife Stadium on August 2 and 3.
Then, on August 18, Raw on Netflix heads to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for an event at the Wells Fargo Center.
Individual event tickets will go on sale starting Friday, June 27 at 10AM ET via Ticketmaster.com. Presale for will begin Wednesday, June 25 at 10AM as well.
NXT this week drew just 660,000 viewers, down 66,000 viewers from the prior week as it went head to head with the last game of the NHL Stanley Cup final. The show had a 0.16 rating in 18-49 which was up 0.01 from the previous week. (Ratings credit: Programming Insider)
Fresh off her CMLL Women’s title win, Mercedes Mone will stay put in Mexico for a few more days as she already has her first challenger for tomorrow’s Fantastica Mania event.
Mone was confronted by La Catalina while celebrating her win in a segment filmed for AEW’s social media. La Catalina said she was sad, angry, and disappointed that she has worked hard for two years but Mone got a title shot instead of her just because of her name.
The new champ told La Catalina that if she wanted a title shot, she got it, and then told her to move away to continue her photo shoot while slamming the rude “people around here.”
Fantastica Mania will air from Arena Mexico, the same site of last night’s AEW Grand Slam: Mexico and will feature stars from AEW and New Japan Pro-Wrestling as well.
New championship won — and a new challenger already found for this Friday Night!
While NEW @CMLL_OFICIAL World Women’s Champion @MercedesVarnado was celebrating her victory, she was confronted by CMLL’s @LaCatalinagar, who’s looking for a fight. And Mercedes has accepted the… pic.twitter.com/hCRsUpUWRE
— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) June 19, 2025
Justin Barrasso is reporting that Vince McMahon made a play to purchase Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship and while meetings were done, BKFS founder and president David Feldman said that he was not ready to relinquish full control of the company he started.
“He’s a great guy, his whole team is great, but the timing wasn’t right for us,” Feldman told Barrasso. “He’s Vince McMahon – if I were him, I’d want creative control, too. He was awesome, very complimentary, and he was very serious to do business.”
McMahon recently launched his 14TH & I sports and entertainment investment company, with his former WWE lieutenant Brad Blum as the company’s president.
Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, based in Philadelphia, is the first promotion allowed to hold a legal, sanctioned, and regulated bare knuckle event in the United States since 1889.
Individual SummerSlam 2025 tickets went on general sale yesterday morning on Ticketmaster.com.
SummerSlam Saturday and Sunday has the cheapest tickets listed at $105.25 each, which is pretty low considering it’s one of the major premium live events. The most expensive at ringside are going for $6,008.40 per night.
The massive MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey is hosting the show and half the stadium remains closed off, with WWE not finding it easy to sell tickets for this event so far.
The layout of the seating art also changed, suggesting a big stage will be set up rather than the curved entrance with minimalistic stage as in previous years.
Combo tickets are also available starting from $231.35.
PWInsider.com is reporting that Liv Morgan will be undergoing shoulder surgery and will be out for months to come.
Morgan dislocated her shoulder on Raw during a match against Kairi Sane. The match went to a commercial break and then it was stopped after the show returned, with Michael Cole announcing that Morgan was unable to continue.
Her injury throws up all the plans in the air that there were for her involvement with Nikki Bella at Evolution.
She is also one half of the WWE Women’s Tag Team champions, with the titles possibly to be vacated yet again.
Bryan Danielson showed up at the ROH/CMLL Global Wars tapings yesterday at Arena Mexico and sent the fans into frenzy with “Yes!” chants.
The former AEW champion was involved in the show-closing angle and even got a bit physical while leading a massive “Yes!” chant.
Danielson has not wrestled since losing the AEW World title to Jon Moxley at WrestleDream in October of last year and has been absent from AEW television.
Global Wars will air on ROH’s streaming service HonorClub at WatchROH.com. A subscription is required.
Bryan Danielson and friends saving the day for Blue Panther at Arena Mexico. pic.twitter.com/fdhqOmeFuW
— Eduardo Martinez (@PharrFromHeaven) June 19, 2025
Mercedes Mone has added the CMLL Women’s title to her collection as she defeated Zeuxis last night during AEW Grand Slam: Mexico.
She won the match after she reversed a bodyslam attempt from the second rope into one of her own and hooked up the legs tight for the three count.
This title now is added to her collection of the TBS title, the RevPro British Women’s Undisputed title, the EWA Women’s title which she won a couple of weeks ago in Austria, and the Owen Hart Cup tournament title.
Her win brings to an end Zeuxis’ 278-day run as CMLL Women’s champion.
Mone has a chance to add yet another title next month as she takes on Toni Storm for the AEW Women’s title at All In: Texas. Mone remains undefeated in AEW.
WWE Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan recently underwent cervical surgery but is experiencing “some adverse reaction” according to his friend and business partner Eric Bischoff.
Bischoff shot down the rumor that Bubba “The Love Sponge” spread on his show saying that Hogan was on his deathbed, with family members called in to come and say goodbye.
Bischoff said that doctors are expecting Hogan to make a full recovery and should be sent home today.
TMZ.COM even uploaded a story debunking Bubba’s story, saying that Hogan was in hospital for neck and back problems and not for heart-related problems like he said.
Tonight’s episode of AEW Dynamite is marketed as Grand Slam: Mexico and will take place from the world famous cathedral of lucha libre, Arena Mexico in Mexico.
The broadcast will run for two and a half hours and will also feature the participation of CMLL talent. The show starts at 8PM ET on TBS and also streams live on Max.
Scheduled for tonight are Zeuxis vs Mercedes Mone for the CMLL Women’s title, Kazuchika Okada vs Mark Briscoe in a non-title match, MJF vs Mistico, Ricochet vs Mascara Dorada vs Hologram vs Lio Rush in a four-way match, a 10-man tag match with Samoa Joe, Katsuyori Shibata, Powerhouse Hobbs, Swerve Strickland, and Will Ospreay vs Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli, Wheeler Yuta, and The Young Bucks, plus a 12-man tag match with Atlantis Jr, Brody King, Adam Cole, Daniel Garcia, Bandido, and Templario vs FTR, Hechicero, Josh Alexander, Konosuke Takeshita, and Kyle Fletcher.
USA Network’s new series, titled The Rainmaker, will be making its premiere on Friday, August 15 at 10PM ET, suggesting that the three-hour format of Smackdown is coming to an end a week before that.
Smackdown has been three hours since the first episode of 2025 on USA Network, a highly unpopular decision but one which remained so far. The added extra hour was only supposed to be temporary and rumors were that it was expected to go away by the end of May, but obviously that did not happen.
Multiple TV-focused websites are now reporting that The Rainmaker will take the Friday 10PM slot and will benefit from Smackdown as it’s lead-in.
WWE has not announced anything official yet.
Former WWE star Shotzi sat down with Chris Van Vliet on the latest episode of Insight to discuss her time in WWE coming to an end and what’s next, missed dream matches, how her tank entrance was created and where the tank is today, suffering an injury on NXT and the return, getting married in Las Vegas and wrestling that night in her wedding dress, her love of horror movies and more!
On her time in WWE coming to an end:
“My situation is different than others, because I had my injury for like nine months that I was gone from that. Then I was at NXT for a small stint, and then I wasn’t on TV for a little bit. So I was ready for it. I feel like I had already done the grieving process, and I was already out of the locker room for a little bit. So it didn’t come as a shock to me. I was just like, Okay, now I get to work.”
On expecting the call:
“I don’t know. Honestly, I felt like I had a good run at NXT, and I was hopeful that there would be something for me at SmackDown. I kept getting little glimpses of ‘Okay, we’re gonna run with this storyline,’ or this or this. It wasn’t until around Mania that I started to think maybe they’re not gonna re-sign me, because it was just like storylines getting cut week after week. Then I was just like, Okay, I see where this might be going.”
On the tank:
“I still can’t believe I got them to do that. So I found this mini Tank at Walmart, and I bought it for the Indies. I used it only on a couple of shows, because obviously I can’t travel with that tank, I don’t have the buses that WWE does. So for local shows, I would come out in the tank. There were actually some indie promotions that were like, we bought one for our show, they would bring me in, and I’d have a little tank there. But I sent Hunter a video of my little mini Walmart tank, and he was like, ‘Can you get it to Full Sail tomorrow?’ And I was like, Oh, yes. And I ordered an Uber XL to get this Mini Tank over to Full Sail.”
On whether the tank will make an appearance post-WWE?
“I’m still trying to get that tank back. Okay, so my little tank, they actually cut in half to make the bigger tank that you see on TV. So half of that is mine, which is the point that I made. I was like, ‘Can I have half of the tank, or maybe all of it?’ So, I mean, I’m willing to drive to Connecticut and get it out of the warehouse if I have to.”
On her wedding and wrestling that night:
“That is something that I’m so grateful for that WWE let me do. So I got married in Vegas, and this was completely unplanned. We had been engaged for a few months, we were planning a big wedding, and I got booked on a Vegas live event after the holidays. I turned to my husband, and I was like, ‘What if we just eloped in Vegas?’ He was like, ‘Yes! Absolutely, let’s do that.’ I’m so glad we did it, because it was so stress-free and so much fun. And then when we decided that we were gonna do that, I hit up Road Dogg and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m getting married before the Vegas live event. Can I wrestle in my wedding dress and can we make it a whole thing?’ He was like, ‘Absolutely!’ Road Dogg is so down for the fun stuff. So yeah, he was game on. That’s probably my favorite WWE memory.”
The June 9 episode of Raw on Netflix drew 2,900,0000 global views and was #7 on the Netflix top 10 global chart this week. This was their best number since the April 28 episode.
The chart shows that 6,100,000 hours were consumed watching the episode which was trimmed to 2 hours and 2 minutes.
Raw was top 10 in 16 different countries last week including Bahrain, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Egypt, India, Kuwait, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, and United States.
TBS champion Mercedes Mone and The Beast Mortos confirmed publicly for the first time that they are dating and are a couple.
It was the Mexican star, 38, who first uploaded a photo with the caption, “In your arms I find peace.” His original text was in Spanish.
Mone, 33, then confirmed to TMZ that the two are in a relationship, joking that this was a proper case of “a real beauty and the beast” situation.
The multi-champ was married to WWE costume designer Sarath Ton for eight years but the two had been separated for years. She filed for divorce last year.
Congratulations to the two!
