Chelsea Green is taking additional precautions to ensure the orbital bone injury she suffered on WWE SmackDown doesn’t become significantly worse.
Appearing on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, Green discussed her recovery and explained why she immediately pushed for a clear timeline regarding when she could safely return to the ring.
Green believes wrestlers need to advocate for themselves medically rather than simply waiting for the recovery process to play out. “If you don’t take care of yourself, and you don’t push to get answers medically, you could be out for as long as you want to be out for,” Green said. “You could be out for ages, just rehabbing. We’ve got so many things wrong with us, all of us do. So I just always want to make sure I get ahead of it.”
Green wanted WWE’s medical team to give her a specific target date for returning, even if there was a chance she could recover sooner. “‘No, no, no. Give me a date now. If I can beat the date, great.’ It’s rare, but if I can beat the date, great,” she continued. “So I got a date in Philly that night, and then I went back home.”
The days immediately following the injury proved difficult. Green said the combination of flying home, swelling and coming down from the adrenaline of performing resulted in a particularly rough period before she sought another medical opinion in Orlando. “I had a couple of very rough days at home after flying, after coming down from the adrenaline, after swelling, all that stuff,” Green said. “It was a rough few days, and then I found a surgeon in Orlando. I went to him, and then I doubled down and made sure I had a written note that said when I could come back, because WWE, they are so careful.”
Green has been wearing bedazzled protective masks since the injury, but she understands the potentially serious consequences of further damaging the orbital bone. “They have to be. This is my eyeball, and if I break it anymore, if I break my orbital bone anymore, that means my eyeball drops down an inch,” Green explained. “That’s disgusting. It means a plate in my eye. That’s a big deal.”
While WWE’s medical staff naturally takes a cautious approach, Green admitted that her own focus is on figuring out how quickly she can safely return without disrupting her storyline. “They are always going to be more cautious and careful with us, and make sure that they’re taking care and that we’re 100%,” Green said. “Whereas I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, but how can I make this story work, and how can we not drag this out? When’s the soonest I can get in the ring to give the people what they want, so that we can continue to feed this storyline?’”
Green suffered the broken orbital bone on the August 7 episode of SmackDown while teaming with Tiffany Stratton against Fatal Influence’s Fallon Henley and Lainey Reid. The WWE Women’s World Champion has remained active since the injury, with most of her matches coming in tag team competition.
Elsewhere in the interview, Green explained why she stepped away from Twitter/X in July 2025.
Green said Ethan Page advised her that if she was going to leave the platform, she needed to commit to the decision completely. Ultimately, Green felt engaging with both praise and criticism online was becoming unhealthy for her. “I was finding that I was telling the world that if I believed and fed into the love, that I would have to believe and feed into the hate, and I was,” Green said. “I was starting to feed into that stuff, and I can’t do it. I will not allow the internet to cyber-bully me or any of my friends, and I was becoming this online vigilante, and it was just biting me in the ass.”
Green was particularly frustrated with fans making assumptions about her personal beliefs and relationships based on social media. “I’m not going to allow them to tell me what my beliefs are or who I vote for, even though I’m Canadian. We’ve laughed about that,” she continued. “I’m not going to allow them to tell me what race my friends are, to bully my family, to say things about my coworkers that are untrue or unfair or whatever. I can’t do it.”
She also criticized the dogpiling that can occur within online wrestling communities. “I cannot do it. I hate bullying, and I really hate cyberbullying and the narrative that Twitter comes up with and the dog-piling,” Green said. “It’s too much. I love the fandom, but unfortunately, the fandoms—they also turn into bullying.”
According to Green, the speculation eventually began affecting relationships within WWE as fans attempted to determine which wrestlers genuinely liked or disliked one another. “Yes, and it was affecting relationships at work,” Green said. “They were trying to say who I didn’t like and who I didn’t get along with. They were trying to say these are the people that are bullies. These are the locker room leaders, and they’re still doing that.”
Green pointed to a recent Lainey Reid interview as an example, saying fans interpreted comments made as part of Reid’s Fatal Influence character as genuine personal feelings. “I literally just saw an interview that Lainey Reid did about me, and she’s completely in character as Lainey Reid from Fatal Influence, and they are trying to say that what she’s saying is the truth in real life,” Green said. “Be so for real, people. Touch grass! Realize that we’re living in a soap opera in WWE.”
Green stressed that what viewers see between WWE characters shouldn’t necessarily be confused with the relationships between the performers behind the scenes. “When we go home, we are friends. We text. We hang out. We support each other. We share clothes. We go to the gym together.”
Looking ahead, Green hopes she can establish firmer boundaries with audiences if she eventually makes the transition into acting roles outside professional wrestling. “We’ve allowed them to feel that way. We’ve allowed them to be comfortable with supporting us to a fault and dogpiling us,” Green said. “We’ve allowed it all in pro wrestling, and so that’s why there’s a part of me that’s like, I hope that if I make it to Hollywood, if I break through and I get to do movies and TV, I hope that I can set boundaries then.”
For the time being, Green accepts that intense fan engagement comes with professional wrestling, although Twitter/X remains one boundary she has decided to maintain. “But right now, I’m going to allow it all to happen while I’m in this pro wrestling world, with small exceptions,” she added. “Now the exception is, unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to reach me via X.”
