Shawn Michaels Addresses Mandy Rose's WWE Firing

Shawn Michaels addressed Mandy Rose's firing from WWE during the pre-Vengeance Day media call, revealing that he didn't have the power to fire the former NXT Women's Champion. The Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative also admitted WWE will miss Mandy Rose but they're pushing forward with Roxanne Perez as the star of the developmental brand.

"Obviously, not the ideal situation. I will say, if I'm allowed to say it for the record, I didn't fire her. I can't fire anybody. Only thing correct about any of that is that I handle creative. It was unfortunate. I think Mandy was fantastic for us. I absolutely enjoyed working with her. She was a phenomenal champion. We would have loved things to have gone different and been able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was put in a position to where I had to make a call creatively, and so we did that," Michaels said.

"It's one of the things that I've learned, doing this job, nothing comes before the brand. We have to put those things forward and that's what we did. Roxanne was certainly where we were going regardless, we just went a few weeks earlier than we expected to. The great thing is, now we're right back on course and I will say, honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose, she was nothing but phenomenal with us, we'll miss her, but we're thrilled about Roxanne Perez being the NXT Women's Champion and taking us into the future."

Mandy Rose was NXT Women's Champion but she dropped the belt to Roxanne Perez on December 13 in a hastily-put-together match that was originally scheduled to take place at New Year's Evil in January. Rose was fired the next day due to the content she was uploading to her FanTime page which was deemed to be in breach of contract.

Rose has made plenty of money since her release, earning $1 million on FanTime in December.

H/T to Fightful