Samantha Irvin, WWE could not come to terms on outside projects

Samantha Irvin’s music career influenced her decision to leave WWE.

Irvin, who had been with the company since 2021, announced her departure before Monday’s episode of Raw in Philadelphia. Lillian Garcia returned and replaced her as ring announcer on the show.

Our Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed her decision to leave WWE on today’s edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, noting that she is looking to focus more on her music and could not come to terms with WWE on outside projects.

“She’s actually been thinking about it for about a year,” Meltzer said on the show.

“She’s got some outside projects she wants to do. Apparently, couldn’t come to terms with how it worked with WWE and off she goes,” Alvarez added.

“She wants to be a singer. I mean, she is a singer, she also plays the flute but she wants to get more involved in her music. It’s just something she’s been talking about for a long, long time and finally pulled the trigger on it,” Meltzer continued.

It was noted that Lillian Garcia left WWE in 2009 to focus on her music career as well before returning to the company in 2011.

Irvin posted to X on Tuesday, clarifying that she’d given the company notice she was leaving “months ago.”

Not long after the news broke, Irvin’s fiancee, AEW’s Ricochet, noted on social media that she was not headed to AEW.

“Haha, she’s not coming to AEW,” he wrote on X. “You can all rest easy.”

“(Irvin’s) not planning on going to AEW, not saying 100 percent that she won’t go. Ricochet actually tweeted that she’s not going and it’s not her intention to go there,” Meltzer added.