CJ Perry didn’t walk into wrestling. She sauntered in like the last cigarette in a broken pack—smoking hot, dangerously fragile, and impossible to ignore. Some people are made for ballet. Others are made for war. She was forged somewhere in between, spun from Soviet frost and South Beach humidity, equal parts elegance and chaos. In a world where the line between reality and kayfabe is smudged with mascara and blood, Perry—the woman known to most as Lana—was the glittering mirage you couldn’t stop chasing.
Born in Gainesville, Florida, and sharpened by the steel and snow of Latvia, Perry was performing Swan Lake while other kids were finger painting. She danced in the Latvian National Ballet at 14, pirouetting across marble floors while most American girls her age were scrawling their crushes into yearbooks. By 17, she was back in the States, tearing through the concrete jungle of New York City like a ballerina with a vendetta—Alvin Ailey, Broadway Dance Center, Martha Graham. She didn’t just study dance. She hunted it down in stilettos and made it bleed.
But every angel gets tired of floating. Eventually, the floor gives way to the ring.
She didn’t stumble into WWE; she strut right into its fever dream with a Russian accent, stilettos higher than most careers, and an icy gaze that could have shattered Lex Luger’s mirror. As Lana, the “Ravishing Russian,” she wasn’t just a manager—she was a Cold War in heels. Standing beside Rusev like a Bond villain’s daughter with a P.R. degree, she praised Vladimir Putin, blamed America, and turned red-blooded crowds into frothing volcanoes. She was Marilyn Monroe in a KGB leather coat. She was booed, lusted after, and, most importantly, remembered.
And when the glass ceiling cracked, she didn’t crawl through it—she danced on the shards.
The storyline with Rusev (real-life husband Miroslav Barnyashev) was wrestling’s version of a telenovela mixed with Kremlin propaganda. Love triangles, betrayal, and heat hotter than a Miami summer. She kissed Dolph Ziggler on live television while Rusev seethed, and suddenly the crowd didn’t know whether they were watching Monday Night Raw or Days of Our Lives with headlocks. The fans howled. Management shuffled. And somewhere in Stamford, a writer probably tore up five scripts before settling on “Just have her kiss someone again.”
But Lana was no longer content playing the trophy. She wanted to swing the hammer.
Her in-ring career was an experiment in resilience. The matches weren’t always pretty. The critics—mostly men with Cheeto dust on their fingers—lined up to tear her apart like jackals. But what they missed was the real fight: a dancer clawing her way through the car crash that is professional wrestling. She took table bumps from Nia Jax like she owed her rent in vertebrae. She was put through announcer tables week after week—a visual metaphor for every woman who ever dared to think she could hang in the boys’ locker room.
She survived because she refused to vanish.
And yet, as the tides of wrestling shifted—women’s revolutions, athletic showcases, five-star classics—Lana, the diva, became an endangered species. By 2021, she was cut loose, her WWE career ending not with a standing ovation, but a press release. Most would disappear. But not her. CJ Perry always had a Plan B.
She popped up in AEW in 2023, a blonde ghost haunting her real-life husband Miro like a spirit scorned. No accent. No gimmick. Just a woman in stilettos with a steel chair and an attitude. For a moment, it felt like the drama was real again—until it wasn’t. A few matches, a betrayal here, a chair shot there, and CJ was gone again. Wrestling, like any bad relationship, forgets you quick when the lights fade.
But she never begged for the spotlight. She demanded it—and she damn well earned it.
What most don’t realize is that Perry never stopped hustling. Girl groups, music videos, Red Bull gigs, “Pitch Perfect,” and VH1’s The Surreal Life. She was a survivor in six-inch heels. The diva era may be over, but she still gets booked. She’s a playable character in five WWE video games—because even virtual crowds remember a woman who could draw heat by simply stepping through the curtain.
And then in 2025—like some stripper Phoenix reborn in rhinestones—she returned to WWE under a Legends contract. The word “Legend” felt strange on her, like pearls on a barbed wire fence. But hell, what else do you call a woman who lived through every backstage rumor, survived Vince McMahon’s creative roulette, was loved, loathed, released, and resurrected?
Wrestling never quite knew what to do with CJ Perry. She wasn’t Charlotte Flair. She wasn’t Becky Lynch. She wasn’t there to wrestle a five-star classic in the Tokyo Dome. She was there to make you feel something. Lust. Hate. Pity. Envy. And she did—every damn time.
She made you look. And then she made you care.
Today, she stands as a reminder of what wrestling used to be—wild, weird, and a little unhinged. A broken mirror of femininity and fire. The last diva in a world that traded stilettos for suplexes.
CJ Perry isn’t a technician. She’s a hurricane in glitter.
A bruised rose in a vodka bottle.
A dancer who learned to brawl.
And maybe—just maybe—the industry finally caught up to her.
Because love her or hate her, you remember her.
And in wrestling, memory is immortality.