| WWE Considering Bringing Back The Brand Split |
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Fans may only be able to see Daniel Bryan on Thursday nights
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Following the respective deaths of WCW and ECW in 2001, WWE had a problem.
WWE had a lot of wrestlers under contract and not enough TV time. Granted, it's not a bad problem to have. But for a couple years, nearly every wrestler in the country could only make a full-time living from Vince McMahon.
So, WWE decided to split the company in two with something known as the brand split or brand extension. Raw became the exclusive home to half the roster, while the other half lived on SmackDown.
If you wanted to see The Rock, you'd watch SmackDown. If you wanted to see The Undertaker, you'd watch Raw. That's the way things were, and fans grew to adapt. On rare occasions, WWE Superstars would show up on the other brand. These moments felt like a big deal.
Over the years though, the distinction between the shows softened. Guys would jump back and forth with no explanations. The company got lazy.
Eventually, the concept was scrapped. The rosters merged, and the ratings have continued to slide. Now, in an effort to boost those ratings again, WWE is looking at bringing the brand split back.
With SmackDown moving to Thursday nights next week, WWE wants to make it a "can't miss" show again. One major idea that has been seriously talked about is a "soft" brand split, where some WWE Superstars—not all—would be exclusive to Raw or SmackDown.
WWE officials are working out the details on this proposed idea and it should be known soon whether they will actually go through with it.
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| AJ Lee |
As is often the case whenever female performer grows a following in the professional wrestling industry, fans will go online to see if she's done porn. That is the case with AJ Lee, who is turning heads on WWE television. Online searches for pornographic photos of the multi-time WWE Divas Champion have gradually been on the rise.
Sorry to disappoint grappling fans, but AJ Lee has never done porn, so it is a futile search. In fact, it is highly unlikely that Lee will participate in any form of pornography since she has gone on record as saying that she would "never" pose for Playboy because she considers herself "prude."
"Oh my God. Never, ever, ever!" Lee said during a radio interview in August 2012 responding to whether she would ever pose nude for the publication. "I can barely wear a low-cut shirt. I'm prude and I think that's what works for me is kind of being very innocent and prudish. It's gotten me pretty far and there are certain things that should be left to the imagination." She added, "Nothing wrong with it, but it's not for me."
In September 2014, Lee was involved in an alleged nude photo controversy after Wrestling Observer editor Dave Meltzer reported that she "was one of the latest victims in the latest batch of celebrity nude photos leaked that included the likes of Lady Gaga, Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansson and Kaley Cuoco." This is in reference to images of various celebrities—mostly consisting of women, and with many containing nudity—being released on the imageboard 4chan, and later disseminated by other users on websites and social media platforms such as Imgur, Reddit and Tumblr. The images were believed to have been acquired via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud. Apple subsequently confirmed that the hackers responsible for the leak had obtained the images using a "very targeted attack" on account information, such as passwords, rather than any specific security vulnerability in the iCloud service itself.
Meltzer eventually said that his report was incorrect.
"The note in last week's issue about a nude photo of A.J. Lee leaking on the Internet was not correct," Meltzer wrote in in the October 6, 2014 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. "It was a nude photo of a woman who greatly resembled A.J. Lee, similar face and same hairstyle clearly trying to look like her, but wasn't her, so we apologize for the mistake."
On September 26, 2014, Lee addressed the controversy on Twitter after a fan wrote the following on the social media platform, "I HATE to Disappoint everyone in #WWE Universe the alleged @WWEAJLee #AJLee photo well the main 1 floating around is [adult star name] not AJ lol." She responded, "Is this a thing? Thanks, I think."
The purported image had actually been circulating on Twitter for approximately a year and was labeled a look-a-like by the account that initially published it. The adult film star in the photo acknowledged it when asked on Twitter whether it's her by the same user who Lee responded to. She wrote, "lol. Yea, thats me."
