There’s a moment in every battered child’s life—somewhere between a slammed motel door and the flickering static of a busted-out television—when they decide who the hell they’re going to be. For April Jeanette Mendez, that moment came somewhere in a car seat, curled beside her siblings in Union City, New Jersey, as her family fled another overdue rent. It was a poverty-colored childhood, all rust and vinegar and the stinging bite of mental illness. Her story doesn’t begin in the squared circle—it begins in a minefield.
She wasn’t supposed to make it. The blueprint said she’d drown in the same storm that swept through the rest of the neighborhood. Her father, an automotive engineer with one foot always halfway out the door. Her mother, a homemaker turned home health aide turned survivor of her own shadows. They moved like fugitives in the night—apartment to apartment, shelter to shelter. Sometimes they lived in their car, and when that wasn’t available, they lived in the kind of motels where dreams went to dry up and die.
And still, AJ Lee became a queen.
But this wasn’t your grandmother’s wrestling queen, dolled up and full of pageantry. No, AJ Lee was chaos in Chuck Taylors—a pint-sized anarchist with wild eyes and a neck tattoo that ticked off her first title like hash marks on a prison wall. She didn’t come to WWE to make friends or play Barbie in spandex. She came to break the rules and kiss the flames.
Wrestling saved her life. Maybe that’s a tired line, but in her case, it’s gospel. When her brother went off to serve in the Army, AJ stayed behind and made war in another ring. She dropped out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts six months in, sold everything but her pulse, and paid her dues to learn how to fall the right way. Trained by Jay Lethal and forged in the indie fires of New Jersey as “Miss April,” she beat back poverty with dropkicks and survived depression with suplexes.
But the first time she laced up her boots for Florida Championship Wrestling, the WWE brass didn’t see a future champion. They saw a weird little girl with anime eyes and video game tattoos. She didn’t fit the mold. She was the mold melting in the furnace.
They renamed her AJ Lee and figured she’d be a sidekick, a filler act, a quirky little bird to toss into backstage segments. Instead, she turned every segment into performance art—mad, beautiful, unhinged. She wasn’t just playing crazy; she wascrazy, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. She danced with bipolar disorder like it was a tag team partner, spun her diagnosis into gold, and dared the world to look away.
They didn’t.
Her climb through the ranks was a sucker punch to the face of conventional wisdom. In a landscape of glamazons and glitter dolls, AJ showed up in cutoff shorts and a half-smirk, skipping her way to stardom like a girl walking barefoot through broken glass and loving every damn second of it. She wasn’t selling sex—she was selling soul, wrapped in comic book grit and Jersey concrete.
Her first big splash came not with a championship, but with chaos. The infamous love triangle—hell, love hexagon—between Daniel Bryan, CM Punk, and Kane saw AJ steal scenes like a criminal in eyeliner. One week, she was the girl-next-door; the next, she was pushing men through tables with the glee of a child on Christmas morning. Fans didn’t know whether to cheer, boo, or call the cops.
WWE called her gold.
And when she became Raw General Manager—standing toe-to-toe with Paul Heyman, slapping around Vickie Guerrero, weaponizing her instability like it was nuclear-grade heat—you’d swear Bukowski himself had booked it. A cocktail of volatility and vulnerability, AJ was madness with a microphone. She didn’t play power politics; she lit them on fire.
But it was her reign as WWE Divas Champion that cemented her legend. Forget the “butterfly belt.” Forget the era of eye candy and passive aggression. AJ Lee was real. She held the title for 295 days and made every defense a middle finger to the system that tried to reduce her to just another body in booty shorts. She eviscerated the cast of Total Divas on live television, calling out reality TV fluff with promos sharper than a broken bottle.
She made skipping down the ramp look like a threat. She made the Black Widow submission move look like poetry with a chokehold. And she made being “the crazy chick” cool for every girl who felt too loud, too weird, too broken for this world.
But the truth was uglier than any promo.
Behind the curtain, AJ Lee was breaking down. Her neck was shot, her spine was whispering death threats, and the shadow of her husband, CM Punk, loomed large. He walked out of WWE in a storm of lawsuits, bitterness, and scorched earth. AJ, still under contract, kept going—silently caught between the man she loved and the company that signed her checks. It was loyalty without an exit strategy.
She wrestled her final match the night after WrestleMania 31, tagging with Paige to defeat the Bella Twins. Then she walked away. No press conference. No tearful goodbye. Just… gone. Like smoke in a barroom ceiling fan.
In her memoir Crazy Is My Superpower, she laid it bare—childhood trauma, mental illness, suicide attempts, all of it. And she didn’t ask for sympathy. She demanded understanding. She turned the mirror on herself and made the pain beautiful, made the darkness a punchline, made survival a badge of honor.
She didn’t just retire. She escaped.
Post-wrestling, she traded in the ring for the pen. A bestselling author, a comic book writer, a mental health advocate, a screenwriter. Still fighting. Just using a different set of weapons. She joined Women of Wrestling as an executive producer, giving the next generation of weird, wild, beautiful misfits a place to scream and skip and bleed under the lights.
AJ Lee was never just a wrestler. She was a message: You don’t have to be pretty to be powerful. You don’t have to be normal to be great. You don’t have to be sane to be a star.
You just have to show up, broken as hell, and dare the world to blink first.
And if you’re lucky—or crazy enough—you’ll leave behind a legacy no title can measure and no promo can top.
April Jeanette Mendez didn’t play the game. She rewrote the goddamn rulebook.