A blow-up mattress without sheets sat in the middle of the living room, and dirty clothes were strewn across the floor. Bardon walked into the kitchen and found Stephen pressed against a wall, hoping to go unnoticed. Laurer later confided to Bardon that Stephen had asked her to marry him. When she declined, he got a tattoo of a wedding band inked around his left ring finger emblazoned with one word: CHYNA.
Laurer and her new boyfriend shared an email address. The following afternoon Laurer boarded a plane to Honolulu, needing only two duffel bags to carry all of her belongings. She spent Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas with Bardon and her family. She stopped taking Valium and Ambien and drank only in moderation. Laurer continued expressing anger toward the WWE, particularly because the company had yet to induct her into its Hall of Fame. Bardon reminded her that when she walked into a store, people screamed her name.
She told Bardon she was ready to take control of her life. She wanted to start over, she said, and to do so, she needed to move as far away as possible. Laurer chose Japan. Or at least that was her plan. He says she reeked of alcohol and was heavily intoxicated when she boarded the plane and was almost removed from the aircraft.
A few weeks later, Sato says Laurer called him at 10 a. When Sato arrived, the door was ajar and Laurer was on the living room floor in a pool of red. She had sliced deep wounds into her forearm, forcing Sato to rush her to the hospital, both of their clothes covered in blood.
Police arrested Laurer at a. About a month later, Sato says 12 police cars responded to a call about a woman walking through the streets of Tokyo with blood streaming from her arms and her legs.
As a crowd gathered nearby, he says Laurer swung a knife at officers as they approached, forcing them to gang-tackle her and hold her against the concrete until she was handcuffed. Laurer was admitted to Tokyo Metropolitan Matsuzawa Hospital, a facility specializing in mental health. Word of the episodes spread locally, costing Laurer her part-time job teaching English.
She landed similar work at a corporate education center, Sato says, only to be fired when a human resources manager walked into a class and witnessed Laurer teaching students how to kiss. Sato tried to help Laurer in by introducing her to members of the Mormon church. Still, unable to find steady work and with few friends, Laurer never achieved the inner peace she sought in Japan. Nothing she had hoped to conquer—the alcohol and drugs, the rage at the WWE, the lingering mental health issues—got any better.
If anything, they all became worse. Cradling her chihuahua, Horn, each night in her tiny apartment, Laurer documented her feelings in short videos on her flip phone.
The message to Pinsky—who had counseled Laurer when she appeared on his reality show Celebrity Rehab in —was written by Anthony Anzaldo, the former manager Laurer had contacted the previous June when she was ready to leave Japan. Anzaldo drove Laurer into Manhattan, where she was mobbed by autograph-seekers as she passed through Times Square. When Laurer arrived at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas for a celebrity poker tournament to raise money for cystic fibrosis, one of the benefactors—a young man confined to a scooter—was so moved by her presence that he burst into tears.
Starting with an interview on the Opie and Anthony radio show just days after her return from Japan, Laurer began lashing out at the WWE to anyone who would listen, spreading the narrative once again that the company had released her back in She blamed the WWE for a lot of stuff. When a fan at an autograph show noticed the scars on her arms and revealed that he, too, was a cutter, Laurer gave him her phone number, encouraging him to call if he ever needed to talk.
Still, Laurer wrapped her arms around her ex-boyfriend and hugged him tightly. Laurer recommitted herself to fitness, drinking smoothies and protein shakes multiple times a day while stocking her pantry with vitamins. Muscle-toning classes at Cardio Barre and stretching sessions at Hot Yoga became regular staples. As cameras rolled for E! I still want to look like Chyna.
Yet as motivated as Laurer often appeared, her life continued to resemble a ladder match for a WWE title belt: Each time she neared the top of the steps and reached for the reward dangling above, her addictions—to fame, to drugs, to darkness—sent Chyna tumbling back down. It was one extreme or the other. He said he contacted the WWE, and the company agreed to provide the funding for Laurer to enter a rehabilitation facility.
But Laurer, through intermediaries, refused the help, Waltman says. The email from her manager to Pinsky came after Laurer was found unconscious in front of her apartment in November , resulting in her arrest for public intoxication. This March, Anzaldo says Canadian border agents in Windsor, Ontario, ordered him and Laurer out of his car when she was noticeably inebriated as the two attempted to cross into the country from Detroit.
Anzaldo had spent months trying to convince Laurer to rekindle her relationship with her mother, Janet, who lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The two had already been emailing, and they eventually agreed to meet in Charlotte while Laurer was in town for an autograph show in March. Rattled by the message, Janet called Anzaldo on a Friday afternoon and backed out of the meeting. Laurer was irate. She tipped a maid to sneak bottles of wine to her room at the Sheraton and spent the night drinking in the hotel, causing her to be an hour late for her signing the next day.
Anzaldo passed her Altoids under the autograph table, hoping to mask her condition from fans. Laurer refused to speak to him that Saturday, and they sat apart on the flight home to Los Angeles the following morning. On the morning of Sunday, April 17—in what would mark her final form of communication—Laurer posted a minute, six-second video on YouTube that has now been viewed more than two million times.
A feather dangling from her hair, Laurer guzzled an orange energy drink, a glass of water and a spinach smoothie. She rambled about a health food delivery business she hoped to start and then stepped onto her balcony, where she complained about the whistles and catcalls she often heard from construction workers. Unbeknownst to Laurer, friends had planned to confront her that week about her substance abuse on the TV show Intervention.
Stepping off the elevator onto the fourth floor, Anzaldo approached apartment and knocked on the door. His cellphone camera focused on his hand, Anzaldo reached for the knob, twisted it and stepped into the entryway. Immediately, he noticed an odor. He walked past the bathroom and kitchen into the den. After meeting Paul Levesque and Michael Hickenbottom better known by their stage names Triple H and Shawn Michaels, respectively in following a WWF now WWE show, the company reviewed her wrestling tapes and expressed interest in her joining the organization.
This was disputed, partly, by one of Laurer's mentors who called her a liar, claiming he landed Laurer the position. In an interview about whether wrestling was a reputable sport and form of entertainment, she said , "I'm probably one of the most recognizable female athletes in the world right now.
If I go to India, they know who I am At the same time, Laurer starting dating Levesque and remained with him until In her early years at WWF, she adopted the name Chyna and became a force for women in wrestling unlike anyone before.
She entered battle royale style matches—the first for a woman—and rose through the ranks to become one of wrestling's most popular and profitable stars, despite men in the circuit being intimidated by the idea of a woman beating them. Chyna ultimately became the first and only woman to win the Intercontinental Championship. Behind the scenes, Laurer posed for Playboy , which stirred controversy in the wrestling circuit.
A number of different issues started to arise, particularly after she and Levesque broke up in , that led to Laurer leaving WWF. Reports of her pursuing an acting career were dominant at the time, but later on, it was confirmed that Laurer asked for a salary more than double the one she was offered from WWF, which they ultimately passed on. Following her departure from the WWF, Laurer's public wrestling career never reached the same heights of her heyday. Ultimately, she found herself in a bind, unable to bring the name "Chyna" along with her, as it was licensed to the WWF.
In a video, she addressed some of the issues, clarifying , "My name is Chyna. Those who know me as Joanie or Joan, that's cool.
But just to let everyone know, my name is legally Chyna. The video and her subsequent pornographic films would haunt her for years, and before her death, she spoke on the issues, saying , "A tape came out that I didn't want to come out. I felt violated, both physically, sexually, financially. It was in the midst of a tumultuous relationship. An abusive relationship.
She appeared on The Surreal Life in , a litmus test in its day for just how hungry a famous person was for screen time, and then returned to The Surreal Life: Fame Games in She made Illegal Aliens with Anna Nicole Smith , who would die of a prescription drug overdose three months before the movie was released. Drew , on which she denied being an addict. She would also later insist that drug use wasn't to blame for any of her loopy behavior on TV.
In , she and Waltman released a sex tape, 1 Night in Chyna , that would actually go on to be a best-seller—and that, in turn, led to her enduring gig as a porn actress. Tila Tequila and Amy Fisher were among her competition. I love them, but I was out of that entity, you know what I mean? I was always with the boys. So I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if there was going to be You know, after going through that world, I don't do drama.
I don't do any of the typical 'girl stuff. The girls are gorgeous, but a lot of them—all of them—have personalities to match And that's nice for me because I haven't really had a lot of female friends. So to be embraced, in something that you'd think would be very catty and very jealous Chyna didn't entirely abandon wrestling—or, it didn't entirely abandon her.
In addition to making fan-driven appearances, she was a commentator and enforcer for Inoki Genome Federation in , and then returned to the ring in with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. Her surprise debut on Impact! But while she would make a few more adult films, her last being 's She-Hulk XXX: An Axel Braun Parody , her final years were largely made up of appearances in connection with who she used to be.
In the meantime, she moved to Tokyo in and then, in , rekindled her relationship with her mother, Jan LaQue , whom she'd been estranged from for almost three decades.
Waltman ultimately called in to defend himself, insisting, for starters, that they negotiated the sex tape together. He said, "All I'm speaking is the truth and you're full of s--t. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be a dick, but I'm trying to mend fences and you keep spewing these fing lies.
And Hunter [Triple H] never hit you. Hunter never hit you. You told me he just pushed you out of the way because you were all up in his face and trying to get him to hit you.
Chyna did admit during the interview to at least having used drugs, but she didn't call it an addiction. When I was with the girls I did a little bit. For the entirety of her career and the rest of her life, Chyna would deny using anabolic steroids to beef up her physique. Drew broached the subject on Celebrity Rehab , and she both denied that and denied having an addiction problem in general.
She told Steppin' Out Magazine in that her "killer monster bod" was not chemically enhanced. I didn't even know what they were talking about," she recalled. But she insisted she was too freaked out by the possible consequences to ever even try steroids, which are known to cause violent behavior and numerous other negative side effects.
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