Her life growing up was movie-of-the-week chaos: mom addicted to drugs; dad struggling to raise two kids alone. She left home at 15 or 16 and got a job at a pizzeria. Fighting saved Taylor Starling-Vespe. The gym provided a family, and discipline and stability funneled the anger and confusion into purpose. Tattoos helped her with the pain. Now 29, Starling-Vespe is covered in ink. Her right arm features a bee-strewn honeycomb, a nod to her “Killa Bee” nickname, a moniker given to her from a larger sparring partner who couldn’t shake her.
Her story today doesn’t fit the hard-luck, noirish script of her past. As she took a swing to become a star in the ring and as a media personality with Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, Starling-Vespe found happiness and learned that stability was not an impossibility. Now, she is a homebody in Rock Hill, South Carolina, giving her kids, Carson, 9, and Brody, who turns 8 in October, everything she never had.
Fighting is still there. But being a fighter when you’re happy? That’s a whole other battle.
From Pain to Power
Starling-Vespe reclines in bed, wearing a purple Nirvana sweatshirt, when she shares her story with Inked. The bedroom is her happy spot, where she zones out on murder podcasts and “The Golden Girls,” a show she unabashedly loves. She favors Rose. “I’m not going to lie; I’m a smart woman,” she says, noting her similarities to Betty White’s sweet, spacy character, “but also very dumb.”
In late January, Starling-Vespe lost to Bec Rawlings at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. Now, it was less than a month before her August 2 fight against Shelby Cannon in Sturgis, South Dakota. She knows this path has a hard stop — it’s time for a title shot or to pursue Plan B: a media career.
This fight will tell her what’s next, and Starling-Vespe wears the approaching verdict like slipping on a pair of her favorite slippers. In a Zoom chat, the let’s-get-it-on stare of the athlete, the primped-up, hitting-the-club vibe of her on-camera work, is absent. The absurdly battered post-fight interviewee from that famed meme is long gone. She’s totally at ease.
She also interviews fighters for the BKFC. It’s fun, Starling-Vespe says, but not an all-consuming passion. “I do have the gift of talking to people, and I do have the gift of being a fighter and relating to these fighters on another level.”
As a freshman at Manzano High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Starling-Vespe was a clenched fist. Being a blonde girl in the Southwest made her a walking target, and she hated to see weaker kids get bullied. She fought. A lot. It was, she admits, “an outlet for dealing with my internal conflict and my own pain.”
Starling-Vespe’s dad, Robert Starling, had remarried; she hated her stepmom and moved to New Mexico to live with her mom, Carla Roynon, whose meth addiction accelerated. Her mother started selling things around the house to fund her habit. She says her mother died a couple of years ago, but she remains in contact with her father, who lives 25 minutes away.
The school’s wrestling coach urged Starling-Vespe to stop before things turned ugly — she needed a place to hit without repercussions. Fighting became about “expressing myself and getting rid of all the hatred and anger,” she says. She grew to respect it.
The in-school rumbles stopped; the pain stayed. It was fuel as she established her career.“I will be honest and say that I was a different fighter when I was terrified and hurt and scared,” she says. “Now it’s like, OK, I’ve put my years into this. It’s more… I know I’m good now.
“I need to go test myself,” she continues. “How can I do that without being all over the place and a mess? It’s more of a challenge to go in there and be like, ‘I am sane. I am happy. I am fulfilled.’ What kind of fighter am I? Strategically and mentally, I have to navigate that all the time.”
In March, Starling-Vespe married Nick Vespe, a photographer for BKFC. She’ll see her husband on fight night — the job requires him not to show any favoritism toward his wife — and it clicks. Even when self-doubt rattles the cage, she knows she deserves these moments. And she knows why she’s there.
“I’m fighting because I love it,” she says. “I love the sport. Even if I act like I don’t sometimes, I love it.”
Readying for Another Round
Starling-Vespe loves how her tattoos look in the training photos her husband takes, the ones all over her Instagram. She fixed some mistakes, like the tiny sun on her buttock inked by an artist with three fingers. The piece looked like a preschooler’s masterpiece. That’s OK, she says, because “even the bad tattoos have good stories.”
She’s running out of real estate, but there’s always room on her skin for the better stories. Thirty minutes after Starling-Vespe defeated Cannon at BKFC 79, the newlyweds got matching Sturgis buffalo skull tattoos, evidence that, yes, there is room for love — in and out of the ring.
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