Tessa Blanchard Became The Impact Wrestling World Champion, Amid Controversy And Online Allegations

Tessa Blanchard just made history in the ring, but a lot of fans aren’t as behind her as they might have expected to be a few days ago, and it’s hard to blame them. Nevertheless, Impact went ahead with the story they’d been very clearly building for months, with Tessa winning the Impact World Championship from Sami Callihan in the main event of tonight’s Hard to Kill PPV.

That makes Tessa Blanchard the first woman to win the top title of a major promotion in a Main Event PPV match. Whether she’s the first woman to hold such a title really depends on what you consider a major promotion. Sexy Star won the Lucha Underground Championship in the third Aztec Warfare match (LU’s Royal Rumble equivalent), but Lucha Underground looks less like a major wrestling promotion (as opposed to a scifi/fantasy show about wrestling) the longer they’ve been off TV. And then of course there’s Kimber Lee’s Grand Championship run in Chikara a few years back, and various other things on the indies.

But here’s what we can say for sure: No woman has ever won the WWE Championship. No woman ever won the NWA or WCW World Championship. No woman is going to be winning the AEW World Championship anytime soon. Women don’t even compete in NJPW. But as of tonight, one woman has won the Impact World Championship. So in terms of mainstream wrestling that airs on TV, that’s a big deal.

The only problem is, Tessa Blanchard has a lost a lot of fans this weekend, and that puts her new milestone in a weird light, to say the least. On Saturday morning, Tessa tweeted that women should support each other. The clapback was immediate:

Obviously Allysin Kay’s accusation got the most attention, because of the racism involved. It was backed up by the woman in question, La Rosa Negra of Puerto Rico, although she later deleted her tweet. Other women who were around at the time confirmed Tessa’s unfortunate behavior:

https://twitter.com/SwoleWorld/status/1216109022216146944

https://twitter.com/SwoleWorld/status/1216109023407300608

Allysin Kay also made a point about why she’d never brought it up before:

Tessa made some attempt at defending herself, but didn’t go into specifics.

https://twitter.com/Tess_Blanchard/status/1216078836212944897

https://twitter.com/Tess_Blanchard/status/1216082844277182464

It’s not a great look for the new Impact World Champion, particularly on what should have been the proudest moment of her career thus far. With so many known female wrestlers in agreement about her past behavior, she’s not going to get far with denials. The best we can hope for is that she offers some real apologies and does some real work on bettering herself.

And as for Impact Wrestling, who were probably hoping to come out of this show looking really progressive and now find themselves in the middle of a whole other controversy… well, that sure is the sort of thing that happens to Impact Wrestling, isn’t it?