While we’ve known and loved her for years as the WWE SmackDown Women’s Champion Carmella, Leah Van Dale is entering a new era after her WWE contract was suddenly terminated. After 12 years, the WWE unexpectedly terminated her tenure while she was suffering from a post-pregnancy complication called drop foot, which is when one suddenly has the inability to lift the front part of the foot. Since that moment, Dale has a new mission: to help moms everywhere.
When you speak with Dale, it’s like chatting with your favorite mom friend, the one who wants you to know that you’re going to be okay no matter what life throws at you. She spoke with such love when it came to her children, excitedly telling me about how wonderful they all are, and how she’s working to make sure they grow up into good human beings. Being a mom is one of the toughest jobs out there, full of questions, fears, and misinformation — but thanks to Dale, she’s ensuring fellow moms can be safe, educated, and in good hands thanks to her company Snatch.
“It’s basically like a forum for women to interact with each other and ask questions about everything to do with fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood. I feel like there’s just so much that we don’t know,” she said of her new organization. “You don’t know what you don’t know, especially as a mom. I wanted to create something we can educate women on.”
Throughout our chat, she spoke vulnerably and honestly about everything from Snatch to being a stepmother; from dealing with the emotions following her miscarriages to postpartum recovery.
On Her New Organization, Snatch
Snatch has already become such a saving grace for so many moms who need a place to learn, to feel safe. Dale revealed that not only do they “do live Zooms with doctors, therapists, and IVF specialists,” but Snatch is all about “educating women on all of these topics and kind of just making them feel like they have a safe space to learn about these things and chat about these things.”
A safe space can be defined as so many different things, but for Dale, it’s all about making sure women feel heard. “It’s somewhere where they can go and be themselves … Feel like they are able to ask questions and feel like they’re not being judged, and you’re able to just kind of open up and be there for other women. And that’s exactly what Snatch is.”
She added that in light of her own experiences, she’s “speaking up on it so other women who are dealing with it or to prepare other women if they deal with it in the future. I hope they don’t. But I think talking about it, normalizing it, putting it out there is so important because it’s just like why I created Snatch. We wanna talk about these things, and make people more aware of the situation.”
On Being a Mom & Stepmom
Dale and Matthew Polinsky, better known as Corey Graves, got married in April 2022 and later welcomed their rainbow baby Dimitri Paul, born in Nov 2023.
While Dale read all the books, looked at all the blogs, and asked everyone about how to go about it, she said that no amount of advice can prepare you for that monumental change of becoming a mom.
“Your whole life changes when you become a new mom. You go from everything kind of being about you and to do things the way you want them to be and then all of a sudden now your whole life shifts. And I thought I was prepared for that,” she said. “Until you experience it firsthand, it is such a change. I feel like that’s one thing that I wasn’t prepared for. It just becomes second nature to you over time. And even though it’s the hardest job in the world, it’s also the best and the most fulfilling job.”
Along with being a mom, she’s also a stepmom to Polinsky’s children Cash, Lenny, and Lola. While she couldn’t be happier about it, she did note that there’s not a lot out there to help people step into the role of a stepmom.
“I feel like I hadn’t known to turn to, I didn’t know anyone who had stepkids. There’s really no rule book on being a stepmom because I think every situation is so different,” she reflected. “I think kids take to stepmoms differently. For me, I didn’t try to be their mom. They have a mom, they have a dad. For me, I was just trying to figure out what my role was in their life and I try to be there for them when they need me.” She noted that the most important piece of advice she has for people stepping into a stepparent role is: “Don’t try to be their mom. Just figure out what your role is in their life.”
Balancing life as a mom of a 16-month-old and a stepmom to three can be a lot, and there’s no right way to do it. However, Dale is taking it day by day.
“It wasn’t prepared for either. I wasn’t sure how to handle that. I think I’m trying to figure that out still,” she laughed, detailing how since they get her stepchildren three times a week, they came up with a system. “So I try to let my husband be as present with them as possible, and I’m more hands on with my son when the kids are here so he can have more time with them. But luckily, [Dimitri] goes to sleep at like seven o’clock, so it’s great after seven o’clock [because] we have hours to hang out with the kids. Whether it’s playing games or just being present with them watching a show or a movie, we’ve finally gotten into a good groove. It’s really just trying to figure out, and I’m sure there’s been situations that I haven’t handled great, but it’s just trial and error and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
On Being an Advocate for Moms
There’s no other way to put it: Dale is a true advocate for moms, especially after what happened with WWE. In fact, she told SheKnows that the whole incident made me want to advocate even more. “I’m speaking my truth in saying that I had a baby and now I no longer have a job. If I didn’t have a baby, would I still have a job there? I don’t know, because that’s not the path that I went, so I can’t speak on that,” she mused. “All I know is that this is what happened to me. There are several women who have had babies and gone back to work, which is great, but not a lot.”
Along with being an advocate herself, she’s making sure her children are as well. “I think it’s important to have a voice, and if you see someone who isn’t using their voice, then you should help them find their voice. It’s important to speak up, especially as a woman, even though you may get backlash for it — it’s important to speak up because you know your truth,” she said.
On What She Wishes Workplaces Knew About Postpartum Recovery
Along with advocating for pregnant women, Dale also wants a spotlight to be shone on women dealing with postpartum recoveries, especially those that aren’t discussed too often. In fact, she didn’t even find out about one postpartum condition she had until months after the fact, all thanks to Snatch.
“I didn’t have postpartum depression, but I did have postpartum anxiety and [postpartum] rage and those things I didn’t even know I had until just a few months ago,” she said, then detailing about what made it all click for her. “I actually had an expert on for my speaker series [with] a postpartum doula and she was speaking about postpartum rage. She was like, ‘Just the mere sight of my husband in the kitchen. I hated him. I hated him. And I love my husband.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this sounds so familiar. Because my husband is incredible, but it was like this weird like sense of resentment that you can get, I guess, when you have the postpartum rage.’”
Along with postpartum anxiety and postpartum rage, Dale had to deal with drop foot after welcoming her son. “I was in labor for almost three days and I was pushing for several hours,” she said, noting how her legs were up on the stirrups for hours upon hours; while pushing, the compression of a nerve behind her knee cause the deep fibular nerve damage that led to drop foot. “I couldn’t really walk the first few weeks after having my son. My foot was just kind of flopping around because the muscles that control the top of your foot, they were not able to activate properly,” she revealed.
During her recovery, WWE ended her tenure — and she’s not the only woman to have dealt with this. “There’s just so much that we don’t know about postpartum, and especially when it comes to the workplace,” she said, noting, “I’m not just speaking in terms of WWE and speaking in terms of women everywhere. There are so many women. Even when I was recording the podcast, when I spoke about this the first time, there was a woman behind the camera that came up to me. She goes, ‘The same thing happened to me.’ And I’m just like, that is crazy. And then … the floodgates opened. So many women since then have come up to me and said that, whether they message me on social media or I see them out in public. It’s crazy, and it’s just so much more common than we think.”
She added, “I felt like it was important for me to talk about it because I do have a platform. There have been so many women who have, in the last few weeks since I’ve talked about it, reached out to me saying the same thing happened to them in their workplace, and it breaks my heart that they are dealing with this and just have nowhere to go, nowhere to turn to. And they’re just dealing with that. So I feel like it’s important to speak up on it, because it’s not just me.”
On Her Miscarriages
Dale has always been open about her private life, letting fans in on some really tragic events. She’s been candid about how she’s felt during the highs of life — and during the lows, such as dealing with previous miscarriages. In a previous interview with People, she revealed she had “back-to-back” miscarriages in 2022, saying she had a chemical pregnancy and then an ectopic pregnancy. However, she later became pregnant again, and welcomed her son Dimitri.
During our chat, she spoke about how she dealt with the mix of worry and excitement while she was pregnant with Dimitri, shining light on something that so many women face, but is rarely talked about.
“I wanted to be so excited but I was so worried. I think I just kind of handled that internally and tried not to speak on the anxiety too much outwardly … I felt like if I was speaking the positivity into existence, then that would be how it would go,” she said. “So while I was cautious, I was also optimistic … [but] the fear never goes away, even as a mom. I mean, it’s like once you become pregnant, the worry never stops, and it continues into motherhood, and that’s just part of being a mom.” Still, she told us, there’s one important thing moms must do despite the worries.
“You have to trust yourself,” she said. “I feel like that’s something I wish I did more when I first had my son. I was so worried about everything being perfect, or how it should be. I think trusting your gut, like as a mom — you know your kid best, and it’s just like this weird thing that happens to you when you become a mom. It’s just this instinct.”
Truly, Dale has seen and lived through so much. In this new era, she’s all about making sure women feel seen, safe, and heard. With Snatch comes a new wave of openness, and a time of ending stigmas around subjects that used to be so hush-hush. Dale’s new mission isn’t about fighting people in the ring; it’s about fighting for fellow moms in her own way.
“I just hope that as women and as a society and just in general, we can get to a point where this isn’t a conversation anymore,” she reflected. “And that we can figure things out in the future for women.”
Before you go, check out these WWE stars who’ve gone from wrestling in the ring to wrangling their kids at home.
