Maria Kanellis Opens Up on AEW Exit, Tumor Battle, and Why She Has Not Retired From Wrestling

Maria Kanellis has broken her silence on her AEW departure, her battle with a tumor in late 2024, the arrival of her son, and whether she has walked away from professional wrestling for good. The answer is honest, complicated, and worth reading in full.

The Quiet Exit That Deserved More Attention

When Maria Kanellis parted ways with All Elite Wrestling and Ring of Honor at the start of 2025, after her contract expired, the departure did not generate the volume of coverage that might have accompanied the exit of a performer with a longer, more headline-driven history in the promotion. AEW is a busy company with a large roster, and contract expirations that result in quiet separations are rarely treated as significant news events.

What was not widely reported at the time was the health context surrounding that exit. Maria had been dealing with a tumor around the same time her contract was running out. The confluence of those two circumstances, professional uncertainty and a serious health challenge, created a situation that no straightforward “talent and company parted ways” report could adequately capture.

She has now spoken about all of it in an interview with Wrestling Life Online, and the picture that emerges is considerably more human and more interesting than the transactional narrative of a roster departure typically allows.

What Maria Said About Her AEW Time: Appreciation and Unfinished Business

“So, with my time in AEW, I feel like I didn’t really get to accomplish everything that I wanted to. I appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate the fact that I got to work with such tremendous talent. But it just, you know, I got my tumor right around the time my contract was ending and so it just kind of ended… TK was very sweet about, you know, wishing me well on my tumor and everything like that. But for me, professionally, I just felt like I could do more.”

Maria Kanellis, Wrestling Life Online

The structure of this statement is important. Maria is not expressing bitterness toward AEW or Tony Khan. The acknowledgment that he was “very sweet” about her health situation is a genuine compliment that speaks well of how the company handled her personal circumstances. The frustration she expresses is not with the people or the opportunity. It is with the incompleteness of what she was able to achieve before the circumstances that ended her run.

That combination, genuine gratitude for the opportunity alongside honest disappointment about the professional ceiling she reached, is a nuanced position that many performers in similar situations struggle to articulate without it tilting toward either excessive positivity or resentment. Maria lands in a more honest middle ground: both things are true at the same time. She is grateful. She also wished she could have done more. Those two feelings coexist without contradiction.

The tumor’s timing, emerging “right around the time my contract was ending,” is the detail that most changes the texture of the departure narrative. This was not a clean business decision made by two parties who had reached a mutual and amicable conclusion about the working relationship. It was a situation where health circumstances intervened in the middle of a professional transition, and the combination produced an outcome that Maria herself describes as something that “just kind of ended” rather than concluded on her terms.

The Health Context: A Battle That Preceded a Major Life Milestone

The tumor in late 2024 was not the only significant life event in Maria’s immediate post-AEW timeline. She also gave birth to her son in January, making the period from late 2024 into early 2025 one of the most physically and emotionally compressed stretches of any person’s life, let alone a professional athlete and performer navigating a career transition simultaneously.

The intersection of a health scare, a new baby, and an uncertain professional future is not a combination that lends itself to clean decision-making about the future. The instinct to step back, to prioritise recovery and family, and to delay any significant career decisions until the immediate demands of those circumstances were behind her is entirely understandable and clearly reflects what actually happened.

That she attended a TNA show in Nashville just three weeks after giving birth, and that the experience rekindled something in her, is a revealing data point about who Maria Kanellis is as a professional. Three weeks postpartum is not a period when most people are making career assessments. The fact that she was there at all, and that being there made her miss the environment, says something about how deeply embedded her connection to professional wrestling is.

The TNA Nashville Moment: Where the Future Started to Come Back Into Focus

“So it took me a long time to even consider doing something again. And then I went to TNA and they had a show in Nashville, which is like 30 minutes from me, and I was only three weeks postpartum and I went to TNA and I was like, wow, you know, everybody here is so nice. So, it’s like I see everybody backstage and I was like, ‘Oh, I miss this. I really miss this.’ And so, the doors aren’t closed. It’s open for the right opportunity. Until that opportunity comes up, until, you know, it’s the right thing, it’s not going to really take me from my family.”

Maria Kanellis, Wrestling Life Online

The TNA Nashville experience is described with a specificity and warmth that makes it feel like a genuine turning point rather than a casual anecdote. The proximity of the venue, thirty minutes from home, made attendance accessible without requiring a significant logistical commitment. The welcome she received backstage reminded her of what she values about the wrestling community at its best: the people, the camaraderie, the shared understanding that comes from being part of a profession that very few people truly understand from the outside.

“I miss this. I really miss this.” That sentence, repeated for emphasis in the interview, is the most direct answer to the retirement question that anyone could ask. You do not miss something that you are ready to leave behind permanently. That emotional response, arriving three weeks after childbirth and in the middle of a health recovery period, suggests that Maria’s connection to professional wrestling is not something she has chosen to set aside. It is something that circumstances temporarily prevented her from pursuing.

The qualifier that follows, that any return has to be “the right thing” and must not “take me from my family,” is the responsible framing of a performer who now has priorities that wrestling must coexist with rather than override. That is not a retirement. It is a recalibration of what participation looks like at this stage of her life.

Maria’s Wrestling Timeline: A Career Worth Revisiting

Mike Bennett and The Kingdom: Keeping a Thread Connected

The Maria Kanellis story and the Mike Bennett story are, at least in part, the same story. Her husband’s continued involvement in professional wrestling through ROH and AEW means that the wrestling world remains a daily presence in her household regardless of her own contractual status. The Kingdom’s surprise return to ROH at Supercard of Honor last month, after an absence that suggested the duo might be finished with the company entirely, confirmed that Bennett and Matt Taven are still active in that promotional space.

The household dynamic of a wrestling family, where one partner is actively performing and the other is navigating a potential return from the sidelines, is one that Maria understands better than most observers can appreciate. The logistical and emotional complexity of both parents being active in a touring profession, particularly with a young child, is significant. Her qualifier that any return must not “take me from my family” almost certainly reflects a genuine calculation about how that logistics question resolves in practice.

Whether that calculation eventually produces a return to ROH alongside her husband, a TNA stint closer to home in Nashville, or something else entirely is the open question that her interview leaves genuinely unresolved. What it does not leave open is whether she is done with wrestling. She has answered that clearly. She is not.

Conclusion: Not Retired. Ready. Waiting.

Maria Kanellis spent late 2024 dealing with a tumor while her wrestling contract expired. She gave birth to her son in January 2025. She attended a TNA show three weeks later, stood backstage, and remembered why she loved the business. She has not worked in professional wrestling since her AEW departure. And she has told Wrestling Life Online that the doors are not closed.

That is not the statement of someone who has retired. It is the statement of someone who has been through a significant period of personal challenge and is waiting, deliberately and thoughtfully, for the right circumstances to realign before stepping back into a world she has never stopped missing.

Professional wrestling has a habit of pulling people back. For some, that pull is purely professional. For Maria Kanellis, the backstage warmth she felt at that TNA show three weeks after childbirth suggests the pull is something more personal: a community she belongs to, a craft she has spent her career developing, and a sense of purpose that the right opportunity will reactivate.

The doors are not closed. Maria Kanellis will return to professional wrestling when the timing is right for her and her family. Based on how she describes that TNA evening in Nashville, the timing may not be far off.