This past Wednesday, Steph De Lander and her real-life husband Mance Warner quit TNA, after the promotion refused to clear her for in-ring action following neck fusion surgery on her C5 and C6 vertebrae that she had done in October 2024. In January, she noted on her social media, that her neck was 100 percent healed.
De Lander was reportedly told she would never be able to wrestle for TNA again.
In a new interview with TMZ’s Inside the Ring, De Lander opens up about her departure from TNA Wrestling, also revealing she was told by higher-ups in the company to contact Steve Austin or Kurt Angle for advice about her neck.
“It’s one thing for a normal person who has an injury to recover to a level of being okay to get through day-to-day life. It’s completely different for a professional athlete to recover to a level of being able to go through full-contact sport, and that’s what my argument was is I was trying to explain to them, ‘Hey guys, I know I’m going to my local yokel rehab center down the road, but I don’t feel like I’m getting enough specialized care to get to a point where I can start wrestling again.’ So I was asking them, ‘Hey, is there anywhere, any other places that you know that you guys could send me to do my rehab?’ I was trying to just get some more sports-specific treatment, and the response to that from someone very high in the company was, ‘Well, maybe you should DM Stone Cold Steve Austin or Kurt Angle and ask them for advice.’”
DeLander also said that she told TNA that she had the surgery done by WWE’s spinal surgeon, Dr. Andrew Cordover of Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Center in Birmingham, Alabama – further adding they gave her clearance weeks ago.
“I actually went to WWE’s spinal surgeon to do the surgeries and I got clearance a few weeks ago. I received a phone call on Monday of this week that basically they never wanted to let me wrestle at TNA again. They just didn’t feel comfortable with that. So then I made the decision to leave, and my husband did too in solidarity.”
DeLander also said that she paid for both of her surgeries and physical therapy.
“So I’ve paid for both of my surgeries. I paid for P.T. for both of them. My insurance maxed out so I currently have a $9,000 AdventHealth bill sitting there, that I’m gonna get to at some point but, yeah, it was 100 percent covered on my end and if you’re not working at TNA. I was not on a salary, I was not getting paid every week regardless. If you’re not there, if you’re not on the road, if you’re not working, you don’t get paid so, yeah, financially, it was a very big hit as well. The agreement was always, we will get to a point where as long as I’m fully cleared, I will get back in the ring again. We’d even had conversations about money. ‘Hey, we’re gonna pay you X amount, but once you’re back in the ring wrestling, we can renegotiate and we can give you a pay rise.’ So there was definitely the notion presented to me of we are gonna get to a point where you are back in the ring again.”
She further talked about how TNA doesn’t have a budget for a proper medical team like WWE and AEW does.
“I think it’s because they don’t have a budget set aside for injuries and a proper medical team. At WWE or AEW, there is a fully-staffed medical team. They have doctors, they have PTs, they have all sorts of people whose job it is to take care of the wrestlers when they get injured, to rehab them back to full health, and then to let them continue their careers as wrestlers. Unfortunately, TNA does not have it set up like that whatsoever. As I said, majority of my communication about my injury was through their chiropractor, who I spent 18 months trying to get a return to the ring protocol out of it, and I only got it a month ago. So, they really don’t have a setup for injuries, especially for spinal injuries, and that’s honestly why I wanted to be open about my story is, A, I want people to know the truth of the injury and the situation because I’ve already seen a bunch of misinformation online. So I wanted to set that straight of I had a one-level cervical spinal (injury) of my C5, C6 joint, or vertebrae, which is the most basic, straightforward neck injury that so many wrestlers in WWE and AEW have had before, fully recovered and returned to the ring. I did not break my neck. That’s not what happened. Even though my boss told me I broke my neck, I did not. Just to clear that up, I had a fusion because I had a bulging disc.”
De Lander has not wrestled since August of 2024.
You can watch the full interview below.