By the time Tatum Paxley gouged Thea Hail’s eye on a muggy May night in Florida, the story had already spiraled far beyond the usual pro wrestling fare of face paint and chokeholds. You don’t claw someone’s retina in front of God and Shawn Michaels unless you’ve cracked in ways the audience will never see. But that’s Tatum Paxley—half ballerina, half razor blade, forever dancing on the fine line between psychosis and salvation.
Born Natalie Holland, a cheerleader-turned-powerlifter-turned-gladiator, Paxley is not just another NXT face in the Performance Center crowd. She is what happens when athleticism collides with obsession, when the business of pain becomes an art form and the canvas becomes your therapy mat.
She didn’t come up through the indies, didn’t spend her nights bleeding under a VFW roof in front of 40 drunk fans and a barking dog. She was plucked from relative anonymity in 2021, a smiling rookie in the WWE’s sprawling Performance Center system—young, hungry, and polite, like a gymnast at the wrong audition.
But Paxley never fit the mold. Even in her debut on NXT Level Up, where she teamed with Ivy Nile, the freakish muscle of the Diamond Mine, you could sense something was cracked in her reflection. That faraway stare. That twitchy body language. Like a fawn with a switchblade tucked in her sock. She didn’t walk out so much as drift in. A ghost in training.
Her early days were modest—tag matches, losses, the occasional backstage segment where she looked more like a background actor than a future star. But then came the rupture. March 2023, a quiet betrayal. She abandoned Ivy Nile mid-match and walked off like she was leaving a job interview. Heel turn, they called it. But it wasn’t a turn. It was a reveal. The good girl was never really good. Just confused.
By the end of that year, she had transformed into a walking fever dream—a deranged fangirl obsessed with NXT Women’s Champion Lyra Valkyria. Paxley stalked her backstage. Interrupted matches. Smiled with that thousand-yard stare that said, “I love you so much I might break your neck.” It was creepy, uncomfortable, brilliant. Paxley was weaponizing vulnerability, using her madness as character, her obsession as motive.
She saved Valkyria once. Got kicked in the face for it. Challenged for the tag titles alongside her. Then turned on her after Valkyria lost the championship. Love, after all, is just possession dressed in prettier language. And when Valkyria didn’t have the gold, Paxley didn’t want her anymore. Like a raccoon tossing away a wrapper after the candy’s gone.
That betrayal kicked off Paxley’s finest stretch yet—floating between madness and violence, defeat and reinvention. She feuded with Thea Hail. Teamed briefly with Wendy Choo, who herself seemed dipped in dream logic before turning on Paxley. She got stuffed into a loading box. Had a casket match. Teamed with Gigi Dolin and Shotzi. Won and lost title opportunities like they were bar tabs. But through it all, Paxley remained the only constant: erratic, ghostly, untrustworthy… and fascinating.
By 2025, her journey veered off the WWE tracks entirely. She showed up in TNA, first trying to steal Jordynne Grace’s title like a cat burglar in a singlet. She’d later return to challenge for tag gold alongside Dolin—her real-life friend and brief on-screen partner-in-weirdness. Together, they beat back the Elegance twins, racked up wins, and—like all weirdos in the wrestling cosmos—inevitably broke apart.
It would all crescendo again in May 2025. After a breakdown and a brutal eye gouge on Hail, Paxley was finally ripe for a new chapter. Enter: The Culling. A faction as dystopian as the name suggests. Led by the icy Izzi Dame, this was Paxley’s new tribe—black leather, cold hearts, all business. And it made sense. She was always more blade than blossom.
She joined The Culling with that same distant look in her eyes, that calm you only see in people who’ve already snapped. In their first tag match together, Paxley and Dame beat Zaria and Sol Ruca, stealing momentum and any remaining illusions that Paxley was still tethered to humanity.
By this point, wins and losses weren’t the currency anymore. Not for Paxley. What mattered was the spiral. The descent. You watch her and think of a storm rolling through a quiet town. No purpose. No direction. Just fury for its own sake.
Even her marriage to fellow wrestler Javier Bernal in 2024 felt like a strange footnote—normalcy wedged between two chapters of madness. You want to believe there’s peace in her personal life, but Paxley doesn’t wrestle like someone who sleeps soundly. She wrestles like someone who dreams in static.
Tatum Paxley will never be the face of a division. She will never smile on the poster for WrestleMania. She’s not built for red carpets or “Good Morning America.” But she’s real. Raw. Troubled. And in a sanitized wrestling world dominated by marketability, she is a beautiful, violent outlier. A Bukowski poem in a Disney movie. Someone who bleeds weird and walks the edge because the middle was never built for her.
There’s talk she’ll break out eventually—maybe win the North American title, maybe derail someone’s title reign with a brick in her boot and a tear on her cheek. But that’s not why she matters. Tatum Paxley matters because she doesn’t fit. Because she’s messy. Because in a world of polished performers, she’s still human.
And in wrestling, that’s rarer than gold.
