After being suddenly released last November, Zelina Vega made her surprise return to the WWE back in June. At the time of her departure, the 30-year-old star had taken a public stance against WWE’s new policy regarding Superstars working with third parties like Twitch and Cameo and had even gone out of her way to show support for unionization. This week she finally broke her silence about why she chose to return to the company while speaking with Digital Spy‘s Stephanie Chase.
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“I think, more than anything, WWE has always been a place that I felt like I had some kind of unfinished business with,” Vega said. “And, for me as a kid, you look and you’re like. ‘I want to be a champion,’ there’s so many things that you want to accomplish and coming back. I set my eyes on the SmackDown Women’s Championship and that’s what I’m focused on the most and seeing where that takes me.”
In a separate interview on Talk Is Jericho, Vega’s husband Tom Budgen (now Malakai Black in AEW) said part of the reason Vega agreed to return was that he was still with the company. Unfortunately, on the same day she returned to SmackDown, he was released.
“Two weeks before I attacked Big E, on the night of the last vignette, I had a sit down with Vince. He was convinced of it and liked it. I wanted to get his thoughts as I hadn’t seen him in six months and a lot had happened. I wanted to see how he was doing. We had a normal conversation. We did the attack on Big E and something about it didn’t feel right. I told my wife as well. The way he looked, there was a disconnect. Not a disconnect as in, ‘I don’t get it,’ but I felt he made up his mind, even back then. It’s his company, it’s fine. When (the release) happened, Johnny Ace [John Laurinaitis] called me and even he was confused,” Black said. “My wife was crying because she knew. She was about to come back and one of the main reasons she wanted to come back was because I was there, which was more or less the driving force, other than the promises they made her.”
Upon her return, Vega was immediately inserted into the Women’s Money in the Bank Ladder Match. Unfortunately, she has yet to win a match in her second WWE run.
