“I didn't do her any favors,” Waltman said. “I was so f--ked up I couldn’t even take care of myself. I had no business trying to help someone else.”

Week after week, Laurer and Waltman met up with friends for binges that almost always involved crystal meth—Waltman injected the drug; Laurer either snorted the powder or chugged it with a glass of water.

The meth gave Laurer and Waltman enough energy to stay awake for two or three days straight. Then they’d sleep for 24 hours and do it all over again. Tonia Moore, a former champion bodybuilder, said she used meth with Laurer and Waltman multiple times in 2003 and 2004.

“When you get caught up in that stuff, it feels like you’re in a time warp,” Moore says. “Life doesn’t move forward very much. You sit around and come up with all these ideas but never follow through with any of them.”

When she left WWE, Laurer said her goal was to land modeling gigs and roles on TV shows and movies. But the deeper she plunged into her drug addiction, the more she no-showed casting calls.

“When you get caught up in that stuff [meth], it feels like you’re in a time warp…”

Moore began to worry about her friend in 2003 when Laurer called to say she was throwing away all of her possessions. Moore sped to Laurer’s apartment in Marina del Rey and found her cramming years’ worth of wrestling outfits, magazines, DVDs—even her WWE Women’s World Title belt—into $500 Tumi suitcases. Laurer said she planned to leave them on the curb for strangers. Her friend wouldn’t allow it.

“I told her I’d keep them for her until she was ready to take them back,” Moore says.

Twelve years later, the items are still in Moore’s closet.

With autograph signings as her main income, Laurer complained to friends that she was running out of money and joked about applying for a job at Burlington Coat Factory.

She and Waltman got engaged and filmed a sex tape. Waltman said he made $250,000 from 1 Night in China and estimates Laurer received significantly more—but the teasing and shame that followed drove Laurer deeper into depression.

Waltman said Laurer physically assaulted him twice, breaking his nose the first time before punching him repeatedly in the presence of his children in January 2005, when she was arrested for domestic assault.

“What people need to remember is that she was mentally ill,” Waltman says. “Drugs definitely didn’t help the problem, but she was just using those to self-medicate from the pain that comes from being messed up in the head, from the childhood trauma and other stuff that happened in her life

“I saw some crazy s--t. The shade of her eyes would switch colors. The features in her face would change. She could go from being mean- and scary-looking to looking like a little child in her face and her eyes. She had two personalities.”

Her friends were in love with the other Chyna, the one who adored chihuahuas and played the cello and sang songs from Moulin Rouge! on her karaoke machine. They talk about the month of September 2001, when Laurer packed a suitcase full of Playboys and traveled to New York, popping into fire stations alone to sign autographs and take pictures with Ground Zero first responders. They tell stories about the Chyna who, when she didn’t have enough money for a tip, gave her black mink coat to a mover she had hired off Craigslist.

“People wanted to be her friend because she was a star, because she was Chyna,” says Christian Moralde, an actor and former roommate. “But she was so much more than that. It was impossible to meet her and not fall in love with her.”

It was also impossible, Moralde says, not to ache for Laurer during those moments of clarity when she grasped all that she had lost.

Moralde was in the car with Laurer one day when they passed a Los Angeles billboard featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who had turned a successful stint with the WWE into a blockbuster movie career. Laurer and Johnson had appeared together on the cover of Newsweek in February 2000.

“It’d be difficult,” Moralde says, “to go from the cover of Playboy and ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and seeing your likeness on a building in Times Square to being unemployed—to not have a sense of where you’re going or what you’re going to do next.

“She was struggling to remain relevant.”





✧✧✧





When Natasha Bardon arrived at Joanie Laurer’s studio apartment in July 2012, she found a man named Stephen hiding in the kitchen.

Laurer told Bardon she’d met the drifter when he called out to Laurer as she jogged along the beach a few months earlier. Broke and homeless, Stephen told Laurer he had followed her career and that she’d been an inspiration. Laurer offered him a place to stay, and now the two were in love.

“He buttered her up,” Bardon says, “and she fell for it.”

A longtime friend, Bardon had traveled to Redondo Beach from Honolulu that July afternoon sensing trouble. Laurer liked to chat on Facebook and through text messages, but by early 2012, her replies had grown slower, more cryptic, saying only that she was “miserable” and “stuck.”

Laurer in her apartment, 2012 (Courtesy photo)

Arriving unannounced with her infant daughter—whom she’d named Deztinee-Chyna—Bardon walked into a 600-square-foot apartment with no furniture. A blow-up mattress without sheets sat in the middle of the living room, and dirty clothes were strewn across the floor. The stench of whiskey was noticeable as soon as Laurer opened her door, eyelids heavy, face drooped, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her right hand.

“She was chugging it like it was Gatorade,” Bardon said. “She was beyond drunk. I started crying because I couldn’t believe the Chyna I knew—the Chyna I idolized—was living like that.

“I was scared to even let her hold her goddaughter.”

Bardon walked into the kitchen and found Stephen pressed against a wall, hoping to go unnoticed. Shirtless and disheveled, he introduced himself as Laurer’s boyfriend and then fished her debit card out of her purse, telling Bardon he was going to “pick up Chyna’s medicine.” He finally returned at 7 a.m. the next day, Bardon says, with two more bottles of Jack and a wad of twenties from the ATM.

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. She told Bardon that Stephen had cut out chunks of her long black hair—and that he’d also persuaded her to cash in a 401(k) for $140,000. Only $20,000 remained, Laurer told her friend.

“He was controlling her,” Bardon says. “He was using her for money and keeping her intoxicated so she wouldn’t know the difference.”

(Stephen did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)

Bardon had seen enough.

“You’re coming to Hawaii with me,” she told her friend, “and the only answer I’ll accept is yes.”

Laurer with Natasha Bardon in Hawaii (Courtesy of Natasha Bardon)

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. Then, before New Year’s Eve, Stephen reached Laurer by phone.

“In an instant,” Bardon said, “she went from a beautiful person who was loving life, to ‘F--k it, I just want to drink.’”

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.

“That should be enough,” her friend said.

For Laurer, though, it wasn't.

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.

“In an instant, she went from a beautiful person who was loving life, to ‘F--k it, I just want to drink.’”

Laurer chose Japan. She’d wrestled there briefly after leaving the WWE and loved the culture and lifestyle. In Japan, she told Bardon, she’d be all alone, free from the drugs and the booze, free from the abusive boyfriends and free from the social media hounds and gossip rags.

By moving to Japan, Laurer wouldn’t be running from her problems—she’d be confronting them. Or at least that was her plan.





Laurer with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, into which she was baptized in 2014. (Courtesy of LDS S.M.I.L.E.)

Yohei Sato, an independent crude oil trader who was once Laurer’s business manager, was with Laurer on the flight to Tokyo in January 2013. 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.m. and asked him to come to her apartment. 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.

Sato says doctors in Tokyo prescribed everything from Xanax to lithium to Ritalin to stabilize Laurer’s moods, but she regularly ingested more than the prescribed dose.

“It was obvious she had mental illness,” Sato says, “and the drugs only made it worse because they made her hallucinate. She’d call me and say the LAPD was outside her apartment with her ex-boyfriend. I’d say, ‘Chyna, we’re in Japan.’”

Police arrested Laurer at 2:49 a.m. one day after she climbed to the top of a pole outside her residence and screamed loud enough to wake the neighbors. When Sato went to pick her up from jail, he says Laurer was telling the Japanese officers that she was a famous wrestler, that the WWE had cheated her out of money and that she was one of the biggest reasons for the company’s success.

“She wanted to make sure everyone knew she’d been a star,” he says.

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.

“She showed up to work intoxicated,” Sato says. “I kept asking her, ‘Why are you doing this, Chyna? Why? Why? Why?’”

Sato tried to help Laurer in 2014 by introducing her to members of the Mormon church. She was baptized on April 6 of that year and joined a women’s service organization.

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.

“It’s dark, and it’s cold, and I just wanna get out of here,” she said. “How am I going to get out of here?”





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The email—marked “URGENT”—arrived in Dr. Drew Pinsky’s mailbox on November 8, 2015, at 7:08 p.m.

“I have a very serious issue regarding our old friend Chyna. If she doesn’t get help ASAP, she will die. The pills, the booze, it’s bad.”

The message to Pinsky—who had counseled Laurer when she appeared on his reality show Celebrity Rehab in 2008—was written by Anthony Anzaldo, the former manager Laurer had contacted the previous June when she was ready to leave Japan.

Anzaldo had spent the past five months chronicling Laurer’s life on film for a documentary entitled The Reconstruction of Chyna, the footage for which had begun immediately after she stepped off the plane.

“Does anyone remember who I am?” Laurer said as the two left New York’s JFK Airport, a backpack her only piece of luggage. “Show me that people still care.”

Anzaldo drove Laurer into Manhattan, where she was mobbed by autograph-seekers as she passed through Times Square. A few days later, fans at the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, chanted her name—Chy-na! Chy-na!—as she took her seat behind the first-base dugout.

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.

“She needed that feeling of acceptance again,” Anzaldo says. “She hadn’t set foot in a ring in 15 years, and she was more famous than ever.”

As happy as they were to see her back in the United States, Laurer’s friends and former colleagues worried she may be embarking on too much, too quickly. They feared she’d be overwhelmed by the documentary, the constant travel for signings and the campaign for the WWE Hall of Fame.

Laurer attends the Chiller Theatre Expo, October 2015 (Photo by Bobby Bank/Getty Images)

Blais, who had reconnected with Laurer, says she was “trying to find the magic again.” Mick Foley sensed it, too, as they ate dinner and watched WWE on pay-per-view at his home in Long Island, New York.

“It’s something a lot of wrestlers encounter once their career is over,” he says. “It’s an identity issue. You don’t know what to do next. You try to find ways to make an impact in other areas the same way you did in the ring, but it’s difficult. It’s an incredible feeling that you can’t replace.”

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 2001.

A few weeks later, with Anzaldo’s camera rolling, Laurer showed up at the organization’s corporate office in Stamford, Connecticut, to inquire about money she felt it owed her. They didn’t make it past the receptionist’s desk before security guards escorted them out.

“There were times when we thought she had put it past her,” Anzaldo says, “but she kept reverting back to it. She blamed the WWE for a lot of stuff.”

Laurer still had her encouraging moments.

During stretches of sobriety, she routinely left flowers on her landlord’s doorstep, and she loved interacting with her followers on social media. 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.

At the August 2015 funeral for “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Laurer came face-to-face with Levesque for the first time since her departure from the WWE. Earlier in the year, on a podcast, Levesque had suggested that Laurer’s appearances in porn films may keep her out of the Hall of Fame. Still, Laurer wrapped her arms around her ex-boyfriend and hugged him tightly.

“I’m so sorry all of this has happened,” she whispered.

“It’s something a lot of wrestlers encounter once their career is over: It’s an identity issue. You don’t know what to do next.”

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!’s plastic surgery reality show Botched, Laurer had scars on her breasts and her waist removed for good.

“I have all of these appearances coming up,” her yoga instructor, Kimberly Shrednick, remembers Laurer saying. “I know I can’t look exactly like I did, but I still want to look like me. 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.

“She was a binger,” Anzaldo said. “She’d go months without touching drugs and alcohol and then go crazy on it for nine to 10 days. It was one extreme or the other.”

It wasn’t uncommon for Laurer to take multiple doses of Valium and Ambien each day, often chasing them with a $9 bottle of wine called Barefoot Bubbly.

Even though he hadn’t seen Laurer in more than a decade, Waltman continued to hear stories of her drunken episodes from friends. 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 2015, resulting in her arrest for public intoxication. Laurer, who had nearly $20,000 in her purse from an autograph signing the previous weekend, told police she’d been unable to find her keys.

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.

Back home, members of Laurer’s social media team routinely removed drunken rants from YouTube and Twitter.

“I checked the internet every day just to see if Joanie was alive,” her sister says.

She wouldn’t be for much longer.

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.

But just before they were scheduled to reunite, Anzaldo says Laurer became intoxicated and sent Janet a long, offensive email—“spewing,” her manager called it.

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.

Five days later, Laurer no-showed an autograph signing in Dallas before WrestleMania 32, a decision Anzaldo says cost her $25,000. Laurer claimed she backed out because Vince McMahon and Waltman planned to have her arrested as soon as she walked off the runway at DFW Airport.

On the morning of Sunday, April 17—in what would mark her final form of communication—Laurer posted a 13-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.

“I’m just kidding,” she said. “I love it.”

Laurer gazed toward the beach across the street, where surfers rode waves in the Pacific.

“It looks like it’s going to be a gorgeous day out there,” she said. “How lucky am I?”

Unbeknownst to Laurer, friends had planned to confront her that week about her substance abuse on the TV show Intervention. But when a cameraman called her on Monday, she didn’t answer the phone. Voicemails and texts the next day weren’t returned, and there were no posts from @ChynaJoanLaurer on social media.

Concerned, Anzaldo drove to Laurer’s apartment on Avenue B and Esplanade around 3:30 p.m. that Wednesday, sneaking past her security gate with the mailman after her landlord refused to buzz him in. Stepping off the elevator onto the fourth floor, Anzaldo approached apartment 407 and knocked on the door.

No answer. He rang the bell. Nothing.

If the door is unlocked, he thought to himself, it means she’s home.

His cellphone camera focused on his hand, Anzaldo reached for the knob, twisted it and stepped into the entryway. Immediately, he noticed an odor.

“It was the smell of death,” Anzaldo says.

He walked past the bathroom and kitchen into the den. Turning to his left, the manager looked through the open doorway of the bedroom. Lying on her right side and tucked neatly under a white down comforter, Laurer appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

Anzaldo could see the top of her forehead, but a pillow obstructed the view of her face. He lifted it away.

“There was no vomit, no blood,” Anzaldo says. “Her eyes were open. She was staring straight ahead.”

Two pill bottles rested on a nightstand next to Laurer’s bed. Although toxicology reports have yet to be released, Anzaldo believes an accidental overdose of Valium and Ambien caused Laurer’s death. It was not, he insists, a suicide.

“She didn’t want to die,” Anzaldo says.

TMZ cameras captured Laurer’s body as it was wheeled toward an ambulance. Anzaldo contacted her family members and close friends, then posted the news on Laurer’s official website, TheRealChyna.com.