Silke Jasso
Chyna’s fans will soon have some closure in her sudden death.
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“Wrestling with Chyna,” is a new emotional documentary that chronicles the final few months of Joanie “Chyna” Laurer’s life. In the footage from the trailer, Chyna was candid about her personal drug abuse and the personal demons that led to her 2016 death.
“I’m Chyna, I’m a champion,” she says in the trailer. ““I went from a billion dollar commodity to on the street.”
“This is just a fucked up business,” she tells cameras later opening up about the drug abuse that later ended her life. “If I need one valium, I take one Valium. If I need three…”
Chyna was once considered a “feminist icon” and quickly worse to the top in the wrestling world. After leaving the ring, Chyna posed for Playboy and appeared on the VH1 reality series, “The Surreal Life” where her battle with drug and alcohol abuse was also featured.
Erik Angra, a friend and the documentary’s filmmaker described the late wrestler a “so warm [and] so loving.”
He admitted to PEOPLE that when they first started the documentary, he had no idea the extent of her substance abuse.
“It seemed like she was getting better, but then every once in a while there would be concerning moments,” he said. “In the final months, we flew to Miami to visit her father’s grave, we were trying to deal with some of the underlying issues that she was having.”
“She started to drink, and holed up in her apartment and was pretending everything was fine. But the phone calls she was making to me were very worrisome,” Angra said, adding, “Sometimes I feel really guilty.”
According to the Los Angeles County Coroner, Chyna had ingested painkillers Oxycodone and Oxymorphone, Valium, Nordiazepam (a muscle relaxant) and Temazepam (a sleeping aide), prior to her death.
Anthony Anzaldo, Chyna’s former manager, spoke to PEOPLE about the upcoming documentary.
“It’s her facing a lot of her own emotions and issue. So it was getting a little bit intense for her and she probably was just inadvertently taking her meds a little bit inappropriately. Once we found out that was happening, we knew that there was a problem, and four days later she was gone,” he said.
Angra hopes that the documentary will help fans ““remember [Chyna] for her strength and for what she represented for a lot of women that didn’t have the voice.”
The team behind “Wrestling with Chyna” hopes to release it in the fall of 2017.
