Lita reflects on the double standard that she feels she faces to this very day when it comes to her past relationships with professional wrestlers.
In 2005, Lita, Matt Hardy, and Edge took a real-life love triangle and allowed it to play out on Monday Night Raw for a storyline that would ultimately serve as the catalyst for Edge becoming a main event player and a multiple-time World Heavyweight Champion.
In the 16 years since then, both Matt and Edge have moved on and now have wives and children but Lita says she is still asked about those relationships and the relationship she had later with CM Punk, on a regular basis.
Speaking on Rene Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast, Lita looks back at the double-standard that she faced at the time and how her own guilt with the situation made her want to quit wrestling.
“Well, yeah, it's still talked about. My relationships are commented on, on a regular basis, on my Instagram still or social media. Meanwhile, all of the men involved, and I mean, even like anything, not controversial, like with being with Punk, or Edge, or Matt. I guarantee you, they don't get asked about it. I know they don't get asked about it because they're dudes and it's that double standard thing,” said the former WWE Women's Champion.
“I'll tell you, it was not easy. I almost quit a month or so into that whole love triangle angle, but I mean, at that point, not only was it so hard, it was also out of shame. I wasn't proud of the way I conducted myself and yes, if I had to do it over again, I absolutely would have handled myself differently, but I did it. so I was very much like, you make the bed and you lie in it, you know? At that point I was kind of just like, ‘I deserve all of these terrible things that everybody's saying to me, I deserve not wanting to wake up every morning.’ So that was really difficult and it was really difficult too as time passed, to let myself off the hook and being like the only way you can move forward with your life. You learn from your mistakes and you keep going, but like you have to forgive yourself.”
When asked whether she thinks she would get the same flack in today's environment, she noted that Matt Hardy, at the time, was rallying fans around him using the internet but she does believe that maybe there would have been some who were on her side instead of feeling that the world was completely against her.
“Obviously, with age comes wisdom, so it's hard to hypothesize because that just wouldn't happen. I have a better skill set to communicate and navigate my day-to-day, but that happened to me and there was very limited social media at that point. So I could only imagine in that current day and age with social media, but then now I think that I would have more, I think I would have some people at least taking my side, whereas I just felt like literally everyone was against me and I felt very alone and isolated and it just was in a really bad place.”
Lita ultimately went on to have a Hall of Fame career and has come back from time to time for Royal Rumble appearances and competed at WWE Evolution in 2018.
Mickie James recently spoke about double standards in wrestling and how they apply to ageism and sexism. Learn more here.
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