Zelina Vega was released from WWE in late 2020 after protesting the company’s ban on the use of third-party services such as Twitch and Cameo. Vega continued to produce content on her Twitch channel and launched an OnlyFans account, which WWE saw as a breach of contract. Vega made her WWE return on the July 2nd, 2021 episode of Friday Night Smackdown.
Zelina discussed working out the issues with WWE over her Twitch account in an interview with Steve Fall.
She said, “It [Twitch] was something I was so reluctant to do for the longest time. Saraya was trying so hard to get me into it, ‘you’d be perfect for it, you play video games anyway, you might as well do it on Twitch and have other like-minded people to talk to and play with.’ ‘Nah, it’s my space and I like to play video games alone.’ She’s like, ‘You’re going to like it. If you get past the set up part, you’re going to love it.’ After suffering through that, she was right, and she usually is because she knows me so well.”
“It grew into this massive thing. I’m so big on being authentic, if you’re authentic, people are going to recognize that. You can’t just stick anybody in my position with a kitty headset and say, ‘blah blah blah about this episode’ and they have no idea what they’re talking about, because they’ll see right through that. That was one of the major things that I told WWE initially. ‘I didn’t know this was going to blow up as much as it did, but I feel there is an audience that we’re missing here,’ especially with everything going digital now, this is where the kids are and where we’re going to get them. There is a way to blend the worlds. Once they kind of figured out what I meant by that, that’s really what was missing, the communication there, once we talked it out and figured out, ‘this is how we can work together,’ that’s why I’m back and why I’m back on Twitch and everything worked out. It’s crazy how a conversation can change a lot of things. I find it funny that it took so much and now it’s become something like me and Xavier Woods just presented an award at the Streamy’s. She goes from 2020 that was kind of a hard time, to now. It’s crazy to see how it’s evolved.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to Jeremy Lambert for the transcription)
