On November 4, 2021, Athena (Ember Moon in WWE) was released by WWE after a six-year run with the company that saw her win the NXT Women's and NXT Women's Tag Team Championships.
After a run on the Independent scene, Athena joined AEW at AEW Double or Nothing to confront Jade Cargill.
Appearing on Talk Is Jericho with Chris Jericho, Athena reflected on the period between WWE and AEW, and how AEW was the goal for her.
"When I left WWE, that was the one thing I wanted to do, I wanted to figure out a way to get to AEW. When I walked out of that building, I thought, 'How in the blue hell do I get ahold of Tony Khan?' Between my rep and everything, we had kind of been in talks in December to see if there was interest. During my 90-day situation where I couldn't do anything, 'Ah, just kind of threw away the dream job. Do I want to wrestle anymore?'" she questioned.
"All of these requests came in from the Indies of, 'we want you to come do our show, we want you at our show.' 'Well this is new," she recalled. "I remember having to run to everyone else to get a booking.' All these old promotions that I used to work for were like, 'Hey come work with us. Come do this.' 'I don't know man.' I remember this promoter at Warrior Wrestling goes, 'whatever match you want, I'll pay your rate, you get to pick your opponent and who you want.' 'Thunder Rosa.' I threw out a name because I recently met her and she was awesome. I went down to Mission Pro and worked out to see if I still wanted to wrestle. She got me some really good girls to roll around with. We went broadway, 30 minutes, and it was so much fun. I was so emotional after because it was like, 'I thought I was going to throw this all away again.' It got the bug going and that's when I told my rep, 'Let's do it, if he wants me let's do it.' It became, IMPACT wanted me, there was interest at AEW but we could never get ahold of Tony because he's so busy. IMPACT would be like, 'Hey, hey girl, hey.' 'Yeah, yeah, I know, hold on.' My friends would be like, 'Girl, I heard you're coming here.' 'We've not talked to them. We only said, hey, we'll talk to you next week.' It became this weird, where do I go? What do I do? I had two companies showing interest and it was like, 'I think I want to go to AEW. I have friends at IMPACT, but I want to do AEW because I've had my eye on it for so long.' Fast forward to May, it happened so quickly. Tony called my rep, 'Let's do it.' Within the next week, I was on a plane to Las Vegas."
Athena entered into a program with AEW TBS Champion Jade Cargill that culminated at AEW All Out with Cargill winning.
Athena would go on to win the ROH Women's Championship at ROH Final Battle by defeating Mercedes Martinez. She successfully defended the title on Monday's AEW Dark: Elevation against VertVixen. Fans can find results and the stream for the show by clicking here.
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