By the time the axe fell, she already knew the blade was coming. Cora Jade sat with her gut full of bad vibes and intuition howling like a dog chained to a burning porch. WWE didn’t need to tell her twice. She’d seen the writing on the padded walls long before the company sent its usual polite execution notice, the kind that comes wrapped in a corporate voicemail and the scent of career death.
She was one of the 17 tossed out like empty whiskey bottles ahead of the May 2, 2025 SmackDown taping. Braun Strowman, Dakota Kai, Shayna Baszler, Kayden Carter, Katana Chance—names with heat, names with belts. And then there was her: the punk-rock sweetheart of NXT, the skater girl with a dagger smile and a heart full of barbed wire.
Call it a release, call it budget cuts, call it what you want. But in the end, it felt like someone pushed her off the top rope in the dark and never looked back.
“I just had this gut feeling,” she told Ariel Helwani. “November. That’s when it hit me. I knew I wasn’t coming back.”
They called her lazy in the rumors, a slur that cuts deeper than any blade in the wrestling world. Lazy is code for “we didn’t like you enough to keep you.” But Cora didn’t just roll out of bed and slap on her boots. She bled. She cleaned the damn locker room with Roxanne Perez after matches—old-school, indie-wrestling rituals carried out by girls who used to drive 400 miles for a hot dog and a handshake.
She wasn’t sipping cucumber water and waiting on stardom to knock. She worked. Even if the work didn’t always love her back.
Wrestling With Ghosts
Cora came back from a torn knee—her first real brush with the fragility of her own body. She wasn’t a lifelong athlete. No varsity jacket. No college track team. Just grit and ring burn. Coming back from that injury was like learning to walk again while being booed by strangers who wanted you to run.
“That knee injury changed everything,” she said. “I didn’t know what pain really was until I had to fight my way through that.”
The pain didn’t end with the rehab. In the backrooms and performance centers of WWE, the insults came dressed as “constructive feedback.” Men who never cut carbs a day in their lives telling a 110-pound girl she didn’t look like a champion.
“They told me I looked like I couldn’t crack an egg.”
That’s the business. It chews you up and then critiques your bone density.
She bulked up, sweated gallons under the fluorescent lights of WWE’s strength and conditioning compound—a place designed more for former college linebackers than 20-year-old girls from Chicago who dropped out of high school to chase a pipe dream in tights.
“I worked my ass off. If I wasn’t getting what I needed there, I’d go to another gym after. I didn’t have the luxury of quitting.”
But effort doesn’t always cash in. It doesn’t earn you a longer contract. Sometimes, it just leaves you sweaty, sore, and waiting on a phone call from Human Resources.
Elayna Black, Reborn from the Ashes
Cora Jade’s time in WWE wasn’t just a job—it was the culmination of childhood dreams written in school notebooks between failed math tests and restless nights. She got to meet Bayley. She got career advice from CM Punk. She had storylines with her best friend Roxanne Perez—those rare lightning-in-a-bottle moments the business can still conjure when it forgets to eat its young.
“This was my dream. It still is. I’m not here to bash WWE. I did everything I dreamed of. But there were things… things that hurt.”
One of those things was body shaming—a dirty little secret of the industry that still thrives under the klieg lights and production cues. They’ll tell you it’s about branding. It’s about presence. It’s about “the look.” But sometimes, it’s just cruelty wearing a headset.
“I was 19 years old. I was tiny. I was constantly hearing about my body—about what I lacked, about why I wouldn’t be champion.”
That kind of talk drills into your brain. You carry it home. You carry it into the gym. You carry it into bed, where it whispers at you in the dark until it’s the only thing you hear.
Now she’s back to her roots. No more TV cameras. No more Performance Center coaches sipping coffee and handing out disappointment. She’s Elayna Black again—booked for Black Label Pro, for Atomic Legacy Wrestling. She’ll wrestle in front of crowds smaller than the catering line at WrestleMania, but she’ll be doing it on her terms.
There’s something beautiful about that. Something Bukowski might call “the joy of standing on your own grave and dancing anyway.”
The Exit Wound Still Bleeds
Wrestling doesn’t offer happy endings. It offers curtain calls and concussions, memory loss and locker room politics. It’s a business where the lights are always too bright and the shadows even darker.
But Cora Jade—Elayna Black—is still standing.
“I feel good about what I did. I feel good that I stood by what I believed in. I know I worked my ass off.”
Maybe that’s all you get in the end. Not a championship belt. Not a Hall of Fame plaque. But the right to walk out with your spine straight and your middle finger loaded.
She was never lazy. She was a bullet fired from the wrong gun.
And now, she’s finding her own target.