Former WWE superstar Indi Hartwell explains how she kept her name after being released by WWE:
“I just asked. This is how it went – so I’ve had this name my whole wrestling career. When I started at NXT, when you start wrestling on live events, they make you wrestle under your real name. So I wrestled under my real name for a bit. And then I think I had a dark match at NXT. And I just asked Road Dogg, like, ‘Can I be Indi Hartwell for this?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll ask. Why not?’ And then they let me be Indi Hartwell for the dark match.
“And then it kind of just like kept going. And then I got on TV with it. I got my action figure with that name. I got in the game with that name.
“And then I think it was when NXT 2.0 started, they went through that whole weird thing of like, you have to – you can’t have your real name and you also can’t have a name that we don’t own. So they gave me the option to change my name or sell it to them. So I sold it to them.
“And then it was always in the back of my mind like, oh my gosh, if I get released, like what name am I going to be? Like that’s a big deal to me. So then when I got the call that I was being released, they said, ‘Ok, yeah, we’re releasing you.’ I said, ‘Ok, cool, so I sold my name to the company. Is there any way I can get that back?’ And then we got it all figured out. I got the rights and stuff to it.”
(source: Insight with Chris Van Vliet)