Zelina Vega is one of those under the radar talents. She is not someone that had multiple championships in WWE. She is mostly known for being a manager to Andrade. Vega only recently seriously started pursuing a singles career on Smackdown on Fox on Friday nights. She is also one that hinted at support on Twitter for unionizing wrestlers. The question is, why was she released early from her contract? Especially at a time when WWE is protecting anyone and everyone they can with extended “stay at home” contracts? Was it the unionizing idea or something else?
WWE being savage
There has been plenty of discussion about WWE’s reaction to contracted talent’s actions outside the company. This stance is nothing new to fans that have been around longer than half a decade.
WWE has never been very accepting of talent “getting over” with fans outside their carefully structured business model. A lot of this comes from basic business thinking.
Some of it is probably the fault of Macho Man Randy Savage.
Savage was able to work out a very lucrative deal with the Slim Jim brand. A deal he would take with him when jumping ship to WCW in the mid 1990’s. This was a huge financial boon for World Championship Wrestling (WCW) while a financial crisis of sorts for WWE at the same time.
Interestingly, Savage was not the first wrestler to work with the snack food brand.
The Body and Paige influence
Another former wrestler we need to look at is probably Jesse Ventura, who has another link to Zelina Vega. Jesse “The Body” Ventura is well known for suing WWE in the past. This was partially due to his distinction of joining the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). That lawsuit was helped because WWE flat out lied to him about royalties on video sales. Royalties Ventura had a right to receive. This gave Ventura far more control over his likeness, voice, etc than what athletes see in standard contracts with WWE, or AEW, or Impact, etc. WWE's response was to remove Ventura's commentary from WWE Home Video Releases around that time.Ventura is also one of the few former wrestlers to successfully sue WWE.
Ventura’s connection with Vega is via Paige, former in-ring talent. Paige has been quite upset over being told to leave Twitch due to changes in the way WWE views these marketing options.
Taking to her Twitch, Paige explained she is not leaving the platform.
The former WWE Diva’s Champion would also go to Twitter to mention her support for unions. Ventura attempted this in the 80’s and was unsuccessful in his efforts.
Zelina Vega would reply to Paige’s tweet with a “hmm..” on October 5th, same day as the initial tweet.
Zelina Vega being rebelliously wrong
It was an interesting last seven days or so, especially for those paying attention. For one, things went kind of quiet over the unionizing situation. There was no real “action” taken, at least that we can see publicly, by anyone involved. These things take time to gain traction and maybe, just maybe, almost a month and a half is not enough time to move forward far. Paige has seen support on Twitter for her views on unionizing, but it is all from fans, or people claiming to be fans.
In the last week or so though, we saw news that Zelina Vega started an OnlyFans account.
For those that do not know, OnlyFans is a service that requires people to pay for access to content. It is notorious for being used by people wishing to sell adult material (nudes and the like). There are others that use the service for non-nude materials though.
It seems that Zelina Vega is using OnlyFans to sell cosplay pics in packs of 10.
It is at this point that I figured Vega was released from WWE. All that was left was for finalizing the legalities and such. At first it did seem that maybe Vega discovered a loophole in the amended contracts that allowed OnlyFans but not Twitch.
Considering her release was finalized recently it seems this was not the case. Zelina Vega has been officially released by WWE.
This article was originally published on the Gravis Ludus Wrestling website.