Zayda Steel Opens Up About Leaving WWE ID Program, Recalls Tony Khan Calling Her Five Days Later

Steel spoke about why she left the program.

In October 2025, Zayda Steel announced that she was leaving the WWE I.D. program. Two months later, Steel was competing for Ring of Honor on the pre-show of the Final Battle pay-per-view.

Present day, Steel is under contract to All Elite Wrestling, and she guest appeared on AEW Unrestricted. She opened up about leaving the WWE I.D. program and eventually landing in AEW/ROH.

Steel said she was beginning to lose her love for wrestling and needed to change things up. She shared that Tony Khan got in contact with her five days after she announced her departure from WWE.

“So, I don’t know how much I can say, but, I will say this: I chose to walk away from my previous employment by choice. I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling. I just want to be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away. My plans at first were to go to Japan. I was gonna take the last two, three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was gonna go overseas and do it the right way this time and five days after I tweeted that tweet, Tony Khan texted me so, plans changed.” Steel further elaborated on her decision to walk away from the WWE I.D. program, “I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality and once I started to feel like my only escape was work and I started to not like it and not have fun — I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away — as well as my mental. Personally, I was losing myself. I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve loved. So it was pretty quickly on that. I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.’”

Steel went on to recount the conversation she had with Khan.

“Oh! This guy watches everything. He knew exactly who I was, what I’ve done. I was like, ‘What!?’ Some of my best friends don’t know what I’ve done so, his love for wrestling, instantly, I was like, oh yeah, this guy, he’s as crazy as I am so, and the phone call lasted exactly six minutes… That’s a little trippy — on the dot. But it was like, that phone call was what I needed.”

Steel is a member of SkyFlight with Scorpio Sky, Dante Martin, Darius Martin, and Christopher Daniels.

If the quotes in this article are used, please credit AEW Unrestricted with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.