Before the glitz, before the LED boards and the corporate gloss, wrestling was a dirty hustle—smoke-filled armories, cracked linoleum floors, and a ring that smelled like blood and old beer. That’s where you found Vickie Otis, known to fans as Princess Victoria, the kind of woman who didn’t wear her crown—it was stapled to her skull by grit and necessity.
Born May 5, 1962, in the hard light of reality, not fantasy, Victoria didn’t stumble into wrestling. She scraped her way into it with fingernails and fury. Trained by Sandy Barr in Portland, she wasn’t handed a damn thing. She earned it in long car rides, cramped locker rooms, and stiff forearms thrown under flickering fluorescents.
She cut her teeth on the Pacific Northwest circuit, the kind of place where you could hear the ring groan louder than the crowd. There, she forged her first war with Velvet McIntyre—another woman molded by rough hands and tighter paychecks. They traded shots like boxers, built scars into their work, and slowly, something changed. Rivals turned into partners. And just like that, they became one of the most underappreciated tag teams in women’s wrestling history.
Together, they stormed through Vancouver All Star Wrestling, then NWA Pacific Northwest under Don Owen. They weren’t treated like eye candy or filler—these women fought. They earned respect by bleeding for it. It all culminated in May 1984, when they captured the WWF Women’s Tag Team Championship in Calgary. No confetti. No fireworks. Just two warriors with calloused hands holding leather and gold under arena lights.
But wrestling is crueler than any soap opera. What it gives, it takes back with interest.
In September 1984, Princess Victoria’s body folded like bad origami in Philadelphia during a routine title defense. Her neck cracked, her career shattered. She didn’t get a hero’s send-off or a loving video package. She got quietly written out of the script, like an actor whose role got cut midseason.
That was the end, at least for the cameras. But real life? That kept going. It always does.
Desiree Petersen stepped in to replace her. The title reign moved on. And Victoria—the woman who helped build the division—was given her walking papers. Just another broken body on the road to someone else’s WrestleMania moment.
But let’s not sugarcoat what happened in those years. While Victoria was wrestling her guts out, she was also tangled up in the web of The Fabulous Moolah, a matriarchal pimp in lace and satin who controlled the bookings and the bank accounts of many women who passed through the squared circle. Victoria’s story—like so many others—got buried under kayfabe and complicity.
When the documentary Dark Side of the Ring peeled back the curtains on Moolah’s reign of terror, Victoria spoke up. Her voice, weathered and clear, cut through decades of silence. She wasn’t just telling her story—she was unearthing a cemetery of broken dreams.
Post-wrestling life didn’t offer her a mansion or a lifetime deal. No legends contract. No Hall of Fame induction. Victoria moved to Virginia. Volunteered at an animal shelter. She gave more to stray dogs than the wrestling industry ever gave back to her.
In 2012, she surfaced again—this time managing a wrestler named Rescue 911 for a cystic fibrosis benefit. It wasn’t about the spotlight anymore. It was about giving back. Still fighting. Still grinding. Still giving, even when she’d been discarded like yesterday’s booking sheet.
But the damage had already been done. Years later, she joined a class-action lawsuit against WWE, accusing the company of negligence—of hiding the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries. She claimed she was fully disabled, confined at times to a wheelchair. Not that the business she helped build gave a damn. In 2018, a judge dismissed the suit like it was just noise.
And maybe that’s what hurts the most.
Princess Victoria wasn’t just a wrestler. She was a pioneer. One of the few who dared to take the ring seriously when everyone else wanted bikini contests and catfights. She fought the same fight night after night, for nickels and nods, while her body took the kind of punishment you don’t walk away from. And when it broke her, she was tossed aside.
She didn’t headline WrestleMania. She didn’t get inducted in glitter and pyro. She got pain. She got silence. She got forgotten.
But maybe that’s fitting. Because Princess Victoria wasn’t built for fairy tales. She wasn’t a WWE-approved caricature, smiling for the camera in fishnets. She was a bruiser in boots, with a neck full of regret and a heart full of fight. She was a wrestler.
And in a business that loves to remember the glitzy, the plastic, the marketable—she is the ghost that lingers. The one that reminds us what the cost used to be.
If there’s any justice left in wrestling, one day they’ll build her name into the foundation of women’s wrestling history, where it belongs. Not just as a footnote, but as a force.
Until then, she remains royalty in exile. A Princess without a throne. A crown forged in pain, polished in silence. And damn if that isn’t the most honest title in the business.
