Mandy Rose was suddenly released by the WWE on December 14, one day after dropping the NXT Women’s Championship to Roxanne Perez on an episode of NXT. It was initially reported that Rose was fired by the online fan page she had on the subscription site FanTime began featuring content that WWE higher deemed “too explicit”. Rose has since stated in interviews that she was fired because of the FanTime account itself and not necessarily because of the content, but she has since continued to produce content for the page, generating over a million dollars before the end of the year from subscriptions.

Shawn Michaels, who oversees the NXT brand, commented on the situation on Thursday at a media conference to promote this weekend’s NXT Vengeance Day event. He claimed he was not responsible for Rose’s firing and spoke incredibly highly of her.

“Well look, obviously it wasn’t the ideal situation. I think if I may say it for the record, I didn’t fire her. I can’t fire her, I can’t fire anyone. The only right thing about that is that I I am creative. But no, look, of course it was a shame. I think Mandy was fantastic for us, I absolutely loved working with her. She was a phenomenal champion. We would have liked things to have gone differently and we were able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was obviously put in a position where I had to call creatively and we did that,” Michaels said.

“One of the things I’ve learned on this job is that nothing beats the brand and we have to bring those things forward. Roxanne is definitely where we were going anyway, we just went there a few weeks early than expected. The great thing is that we are now back on track. And I will say I think the world of Mandy Rose. She was nothing but phenomenal with us. We will miss her, but we are thrilled to have Roxanne here the NXT Women’s is champion and takes us into the future,” he added.

Perez defends her championship on Day of revenge against Rose’s former Toxic Attraction stablemates in Gigi Dolin and Jacy Jane. The event takes place this Saturday at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.