Lola Vice did not stumble into WWE after a stint in mixed martial arts. Valerie Loureda says she entered MMA with two goals: earn money while her family dealt with her mother’s leukemia, and build a name that WWE might one day notice. The surprise was how quickly the second part happened.

“I was passionate about fighting,” Lola Vice said in an interview with The Rich Eisen Show. “My mom had leukemia. I wanted to get my family out of our situation, and there was a lot of money in MMA at the time.” She also saw the sport as a route to a different stage. “This is a platform that’s going to get me recognized by WWE one day,” she recalled thinking. Her plan, as she described it, was to fight until WWE came calling.

Lola Vice Says MMA Was Part of Her Plan to Reach WWE

That does not mean she was simply waiting to leave the cage. Lola Vice said she loved fighting, still does, and sometimes misses it. But she believes wrestling is where she belongs: “What I’m doing right now is what I was born to do with my life.” The family circumstances behind that decision were serious.

Loureda’s mother, Milagros, had leukemia, and Loureda helped care for her two younger sisters while her mother was ill. Her mother received a bone marrow transplant in 2017. Loureda later competed in Bellator MMA, finishing her professional run with a 4-1 record before moving into wrestling.

The fight WWE noticed

Vice pointed to her August 2020 fight against Tara Graff at Bellator 243 as the moment that put her on WWE’s radar. The bout took place at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut during the pandemic, when the setting was stripped down and the televised cage action had few people watching in person.

Lola Vice said she accepted the fight with roughly six or seven weeks’ notice and began cutting weight. She stopped Graff late in the second round, then danced in the cage. It was a clip built for replay, though the result came first: punches ended the fight before the celebration started. The win moved Loureda to 3-0 and drew attention to a fighter whose dancing and social-media posts had already prompted criticism from other competitors, including Graff.

“Thankfully, people found me from that,” Lola Vice said of the knockout and dance. “That’s what got my name known to WWE.” It was not her final MMA appearance, and the move to WWE was not immediate. Loureda lost a decision to Hannah Guy at Bellator 259 in May 2021, then beat Taylor Turner by split decision at Bellator 271 that November. After that last fight, her manager told her WWE wanted her to come to WrestleMania and watch.

Vice said she had pictured a later switch, comparing the timetable she imagined to Ronda Rousey’s. She did not expect the invitation to arrive while she was still in her twenties. Once she got there, the scale of the show changed the question from whether she would pursue WWE to when she could start. She recalled watching WrestleMania from a suite and speaking that day with “Hunter” — Paul “Triple H” Levesque. Vice described him as warm and welcoming. “I just sat in that suite and I watched WrestleMania, and I said, ‘Nothing gets bigger than this,'” she said.

She felt it offered a way to represent her Cuban heritage, her home and the martial arts her father had taught her as a child. Loureda took part in a WWE tryout around WrestleMania in 2022 and joined the company later that year.

Dancing and fighting on Raw

That history helps explain the Lola Vice character WWE has brought to Raw. The dance is part of her presentation, but so is the striking she learned before she ever entered a wrestling ring. In the interview, Vice said the vignettes introducing her to Raw struck the balance she wanted: “A feminine woman and someone who can also be an ass-kicker.” Lola Vice, she added, is who she is with the volume turned up.

Those clips were personal for another reason. They were her first character vignettes on Netflix, where Raw airs, and she was pleased with how they came out. Yet a month spent appearing in promotional packages rather than wrestling made her anxious. She was used to working matches, not waiting for the next one.

Vice’s answer to criticism of her appearance has been consistent since her Bellator days: dancing does not cancel out fighting. After the Graff bout, she said she would keep posting TikToks despite objections to that side of her public image. More recently, commentary about her Raw presentation has again focused on her body. Her account of the vignettes makes clear that she sees femininity and toughness as parts of the same character, rather than a choice between the two.

Her wrestling results have given that character a foundation beyond the promos. Vice won the NXT Women’s Championship in April 2026 by beating Jacy Jayne and Kendal Grey in a three-way match at Stand & Deliver. On September 14, she made her Raw in-ring debut in Mexico City and won another three-way match, against Raquel Rodriguez and Kelani Jordan, to qualify for the women’s Money in the Bank ladder match.

She officially joined the Raw roster the following week. On September 28, Vice defeated Roxanne Perez with her spinning backfist, though Perez and Rodriguez attacked her afterward. Sol Ruca came to help and was taken down too, leaving Vice with a win and unfinished business ahead of Money in the Bank on October 10.

She pursued MMA because she loved it and because her family needed help. She also thought WWE might be watching someday. She was right, and now the fighter who once danced after a knockout is doing both parts of her act on Raw.