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WWE news: Bayley talks title match against AJ Lee

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WWE star Bayley earned the opportunity to challenge AJ Lee for the Women’s Intercontinental Championship by winning a gauntlet match on “Monday Night Raw” earlier this week.

The match to be played on Monday has been almost 13 years in the making. The last time the two professional wrestlers faced each other for the Divas Championship was on August 21, 2013. Lee, who was an experienced player at that time, had the upper hand against the newcomer Bayley.

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Bayley celebrates her win with Lyra Valkyria after the Woman’s Gauntlet Match during Monday Night RAW at Climate Pledge Arena on March 9, 2026 in Seattle, Washington. (Meg Oliphant/WWE via Getty Images)

A lot has changed since then. While Lee left the company in 2015, Bayley became a four-time women’s champion and two-time women’s tag team champion. Bayley helped shape the WWE women’s division into what it is now. The Women’s Intercontinental Championship wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye five years ago, let alone 13 years ago.

Lee returned to WWE in September, potentially putting two great wrestlers on a collision course with each other at some point. With Lee winning the title against Becky Lynch, Bayley was able to solidify her path to a title shot at gold.

“Man, this is so weird. It’s so weird to think about, it’s like the universe works in mysterious ways,” Bayley said in a recent interview with Fox News Digital. “I remember 13 years ago, I got the message that I was going to wrestle AJ Lee for the diva title, and I had just started my character work in NXT. I remember it looked like this: ‘What do you mean? What am I? Why? What? This can’t be possible.’ “That’s how I feel right now, because no one thought AJ would come back, let alone become the women’s intercontinental champion.”

“This seems like one of those things he’ll come back to as a one-off, dream match,” he continued. “And even when he came back and I told him that, I was just happy to have him around. We’d been in touch for the last 10 years and we were real friends outside of work, and now when I thought I was going to be in the ring with him, I couldn’t say, ‘I need a match with you,’ because I had a match. I just wanted my friend to be with me, and the fact that we got to do this now, it seems right. Now I’m like, ‘Of course we need to do this match together.’

Bayley elbows Ivy Nile in the Womans Gauntlet Match during Monday Night RAW at Climate Pledge Arena on March 9, 2026 in Seattle, Washington. (Meg Oliphant/WWE via Getty Images)

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“I would love to win this championship, I would love to, because I have to finish my grand slam role. I have to get it. I have to go to the United States and I have to go to WrestleMania. So I have a lot of emotions about it and I have to put aside the feeling of nostalgia.”

Lee’s return came as a shock to the WWE Universe when she teamed up with her real-life husband CM Punk to take on Lynch and Seth Rollins. Yet for many WWE fans, Lee’s return still seems unreal.

He returned for an episode of “Friday Night SmackDown”, which was taking place in Chicago at the time. Bayley told Fox News Digital that she was in the city to shoot a movie and had heard rumors that Lee might return.

Bayley said Lee never reached out even though they were best friends.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” he said. “I had heard the rumors. I’m this believer, and I have a lot of hope for a lot of things that I really feel, and I was in Chicago that day to shoot something for SmackDown, and I thought, I’m just going to stick around. I don’t need to go back to my hotel. I’m just going to stick around, and yeah, I was right. And I’m so glad I followed my heart, but she was so quiet about it.”