AEW: Mercedes Mone Provides Update on Her Current AEW Abscense, Tommaso Ciampa on Financial Stability Being Reason For Him Choosing AEW Over Staying in WWE, Update on Brody King’s Abscense from 2/11 AEW Dynamite Show

Mercedes Mone Provides Update on Her Current AEW Abscense

Mercedes Mone has been absent from AEW since the January 10th episode of AEW Collision over her taking a break from AEW following her TBS Championship loss to Willow Nightingale.

Mone provided an update on Thursday on Instagram stating that she recently traveled to Cancun, Mexico for stem cell treatment and has been feeling like the best version of herself during her break.

“So I’ve been really trying to enjoy this time off by really healing my body and taking care of myself, because I wanna come back to the ring better than ever. I’m gonna be very busy in March because I still have a lot of championships to defend. Yes, I defend my titles, b*tches. But I’ve just been really taking this time to feel good and I really wanna feel good inside and outside. If you saw a couple of my videos at the House of Sun, oh my God, my back, my neck feels so amazing. I’ve never felt my spine just feel so straight. Now I’m here in Cancun, Mexico, for stem cell treatment. I came down to RejuvStem because a lot of my co-workers came down here and told me about the results so, I’m super excited for feeling my best version of myself.”

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Tommaso Ciampa Comments on Financial Stability Being Reason For Him Choosing AEW Over Staying in WWE

A recent episode of the AEW Up Close with Renee Paquette show featured Tommaso Ciampa as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Ciampa’s thoughts about his reasons for his decision to join AEW after leaving WWE.

“Every performer, specifically people who’ve come up through the independent scene, you love the business. And the thing you really genuinely want is for it to love you back. And like I’ve been told numerous times, this isn’t the business. The business doesn’t love you back. But I’m an optimist, you know, so I think it’s not going to love you back 100% of the time. But those moments when it does, like we thrive for that, you know? So that’s what I feel like.

So it’s a lot of that going on right now for me, where it’s like, ‘oh man, I haven’t felt loved back for a bit.’ So that was big, but at home, you know, honestly, it was less about just like looking forward to, ‘oh, we’re doing this AEW thing’ because it was a ton of uncertainty. Like our decision to move on. We talked about that for months. I might even say a couple years, realistically. That’s a big thing, right? [Regularly checking his bank account and understanding his financial stability].”

Ciampa also gave his thoughts about how him being financially stable in his life and wrestling career led to him taking the “risk” and joining AEW.

“To be honest, that’s the biggest thing that you start to go is…we are getting a definitive income, it’s a salary. And you know what the independent scene’s like. You understand the travel if you start to go to different countries to do this and stuff, and what’s that impact on my wife?

And just the life we live, so there’s just the biggest decision of it all was like, are we finally ready to do it, you know, and like when I left NXT to make the move to the main roster. Financially, we were not ready to do that, and we knew it. So, there was not really a question of, ‘okay, let’s take a risk. Let’s bet on ourselves.’ We got at that time a three-year-old, now a seven-year-old. It just wasn’t in the cards. Yeah. But now I’m starting to go, yeah, I think we are at the point financially, let’s take the risk.”

Transcript h/t: F4WOnline.com

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Brody King’s Abscense from Feb. 11th AEW Dynamite Show Update

As noted before, Warner Bros. Discovery recently denied having any involvement in Brody King abscense at this past Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite show in Ontario, California. WBD had been rumored to have made the call to not want King to be on the show due to concerns over a repeat situation with the crowd chanting “Fuck ICE” taking place again on a live televised AEW show.

PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that his sources also confirmed that WBD had no involvement for King’s abscense from the show. Those spoken to stated that the reason for King’s abscense was due to AEW officials never had scheduled for King to make an in-person appearance on the show.

King reportedly was among several talents who flew out of LAX this past Wednesday to Australia causing them to miss the show due to the travel schedule.

King and others flew out of LAX last night to Australia, requiring them to miss Dynamite due to the travel schedule.

The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer issued a correction for his initial report stating that those spoken to within AEW confirmed that nobody from WBD had asked them to not use King on the show. Those same sources spoken to reportedly also confirmed that AEW officials simply only planned to use King in a video package on the show.

In regards to WBD, Meltzer reported that those spoken to over the past weekend stated that there were concerns about how much publicity the anti-ICE chants had gotten from the WBD side but AEW was never told to not use King on the show.