After starting in pro wrestling with a short stint in WCW at the end of that company’s existence, Torrie Wilson arrived in WWE as part of 2001’s Invasion angle. Over the next decade, she was prominently featured on television and PPV — usually in sexually charged storylines and matches & segments that ended with one or multiple women stripped to their undergarments.
Wilson, who was enshrined in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019, recently reflected on her run with the company in the aughts during an interview with Chris Van Vliet. It sounds like a pretty harrowing experience, especially in light of the sexual abuse allegations against the company and its longtime chairman Vince McMahon that depict WWE as a toxic workplace.
Of the frequent bikini contests she and the other female talent (then referred to as “Divas”) were often booked in, Wilson said:
“They were all mortifying. People don’t realize. I went out there and owned it the best I could and pushed through the fear, but it was mortifying.
“There were times when, I remember specifically a house show that I was in this bikini showdown with Dawn Marie and Sable and someone else. I was standing in the corner watching one of the girls dance in the middle and literally fighting back tears. Like, I cannot believe I’m doing this right now because it got to like a raunchy point, and I’m like, I don’t want to be a part of this, but that was also my job.”
Van Vliet asked Torrie if she felt she could turn down creative. She said it was very difficult for her to do, and could only remember two times when she said no to WWE — one of which was when McMahon wanted her to do a Playboy video to go along with one of her two photoshoots for the men’s magazine:
“No. It was like twice that I could remember that I [said no]. First of all, I’m a major people pleaser, so to say no to people is really hard, even if it’s someone you know. I’m recovering from that.
“There was one time when I had a thing with Sable where Vince wanted me to come out with the paint on my boobs like she did, and I was like, hard no, I can’t do that. I mean, it ended up being nearly nothing anyway.
“Another time was when I did Playboy, Vince wanted me to do a pay-per-view also, the video. That one was very hardcore pressed and it was really hard for me to say no, but I absolutely didn’t want that.”
Wilson says she’s proud of herself for stayed true to her values during her main WWE run, what she was tasked with doing during that run kept her away from the business entirely after she left it in 2008:
“I didn’t watch wrestling. I didn’t want anything to do with wrestling for many years after I left mostly because I just had a certain amount of PTSD from being so vulnerable out there and feeling like I was put in this kind of, like, this raunchy role that wasn’t me. I felt judgment from people. I felt like people looked down on me for like, just stuff that I did, the bra and panty matches and all that, so like, I just wanted to shut that door.
“For many years, I didn’t watch. It wasn’t until they called me to do the Royal Rumble [2018’s first ever Women’s Rumble match] that I started to kind of catch up and then I got really into it, like more into it than I ever was when I was wrestling.”
You can check out Van Vliet’s entire interview with Wilson here.
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