Kris Statlander Speaks Out Against Criticism of AEW Women’s Division

In a recent interview with Knockouts and 3 Counts at the Starrcast event before AEW All Out, TBS Champion Kris Statlander tackled ongoing criticisms aimed at the AEW women's division. Speaking to Fightful, the champion had a lot to say on the subject.

Addressing critics of the AEW women's roster, Statlander remarked, "I’d say, I’d like to see them get in the ring and try and do anything we’ve done. Of course, not everyone is going to like everything. Maybe not everyone works well together, but not everyone has chemistry with everyone. I think it’s unfair, a lot of what we see online is based off small clips, not the whole match. You don’t know what goes into putting a match together, having a match, being a wrestler, all the stress we deal with, all the criticism we get online from people who don’t know us, we don’t know them, and people will tell us to ‘kill ourselves’ or that they hate us or that we should get fired from a job we love doing because maybe we had a bit of an off-night. I wish people would take into consideration that, yes, we are on television and we are wrestlers, but we are people.”

Statlander also spoke about the nature of social media interactions. She elaborated, “If any of you guys read a tweet that said, ‘This person is so bad at holding a phone, they should kill themselves, they should get fired,’ how would you feel? It sucks, and we have to always go out there and put on a brave face. Because we’re women, we’re always seen as less than and there is always going to be more criticism because we’ll never be good enough. So many of us try so hard to prove that we deserve just as much praise as the guys do. We really do. We show up, we work our butts off, we train and try hard, and we want to put on the best show that we can for everyone, our fans, the company.”

Finally, on the topic of public scrutiny, the champion lamented, “It sucks that the people who have never done anything we have to do, week after week, the traveling we have to do, it sucks that they can’t just like wrestling for wrestling, and they think they know better than we do. If we have an off night, we know it, we don’t need the entire internet to tell us that we didn’t have our best night. I wish some people would take into consideration that we’re doing our best. Not everyone is top of the top and has their best night every night. We understand, we know we’re going to get chewed up and spit out, we all know it’s coming. It sucks we have that fear going onto TV, ‘if we screw up this one thing, I’m not feeling great, I’m nervous,’ we know people are going to hate us for it, for trying to do our jobs. It’s quite unfortunate that we have to deal with that more than a lot of other people do.”