Sonya Deville: WWE Exit, Almost Shaving Her Head, Slapping Adam Pearce, Scary Home Invasion

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Daria Rae Berenato (@TheDariaRae) is a professional wrestler best known for her time in WWE as Sonya Deville. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss her WWE contract not being renewed, whether a return to wrestling is on the cards, the scary home invasion that occurred in 2020, her work as a WWE General Manager and slapping Adam Pearce, why she didn't enjoy her SummerSlam match with Mandy Rose, being injured while reigning as Women's Tag Team Champion, her upcoming acting roles and more! 

Quote I'm thinking about: "Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate." - Ozzy Osbourne

On her WWE contract not being renewed:

“I’m not one to sit in things and sulk. It’s very hard for me to do that, I think, because I want to be doing stuff all the time. I have a high work ethic and work rate, and so there was no part of me that was going to sit home and cry about not getting my contract renewed. I have my family, I have my stepdaughters and my wife at home, I have so much I want to do. I have a legacy that I still want to leave. As much as I’m proud of the work I did in WWE, I very much feel like I’m just getting started in my footprint that I want to leave in this world. So I was excited. I was like, wow, now I get to go pursue those things, because I wouldn’t have left the safety net of the company. I had a steady paycheck coming in. I loved everybody there, I loved what I was doing, so I wouldn’t have left. But I think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

On whether anything could have happened to lead to the contract being renewed:

“I can’t even comprehend thinking of it like that, because it’s so serendipitous and it happened so beautifully like that chapter closed, and now I’m doing all these things that I’ve wanted to do since I was 12 years old. So I can’t even look at it like that, my brain won’t let me, so maybe? I don’t know. I was training my ass off. I was always on point with my look and my character work. So I think it was just time. I will say transparently that I was feeling like I was in a rut for the past few years of my career there, I felt a little like I needed a change of pace, and I didn’t know what it was. I never would have left on my own merit, but I felt a little bit like I was in a loop, kind of in Purgatory, like I wanted an opportunity. I got the title with Chelsea finally, then the injury, got back from the injury, was finally getting my footing again in the ring after coming back from the ACL [tear], and then I got released. So it’s hard to look back and regret any of it, though, because I really feel like everything happens for a reason.”

On how long it took to process:

“To be completely honest, I probably haven’t processed it because, like you said, I was right on to the next [thing]. I didn’t sit and sulk or really feel it that much. I’ll have moments where I’m like, wow. Being a WWE superstar became my identity. I was Daria, the WWE superstar, in my personal life, to my family, to my friends, like that was my identity. Probably because I started when I was 21 it was who I was. So that like mindset took a minute to get rid of. Now, you know, when I talk to people and they’re like, What do you do? It’s so weird to not say I wrestle for WWE.”

On whether she has retired from wrestling:

“Definitely for now. Never say never. But right now I feel at peace with that. I’m not gonna lie, and I haven’t said this, but it almost is like an open wound, and if I think about wrestling somewhere else, it’s like I was so loyal to the company, it was my only home from 21 years old to 31. I’m a ride or die type of person in general. So it’s weird to even think about doing that, but not there.”

On acting dreams:

“My first dream was to be an actress. I was 12 years old. My mom found an acting school like 45 minutes from our house, and she would take me every Tuesday and Thursday night for three hours. It was in this woman’s basement, which sounds really creepy, but my mom would sit outside and wait for me and take me home because I wasn’t obviously old enough to drive, and I was obsessed. My dad took me to Vegas for this acting convention where I was doing monologs on stage, that was always what I wanted to do. Then I fell in love with MMA as well, and so when I was 19, I moved to LA and I was like, Oh I can pursue my acting career here, and I can fight MMA here. So that’s what I was doing when WWE found me.” 

On possibly returning to MMA:

“I can’t say no, because it has such a spot in my heart, but I will say acting feels more true to what I want in this very moment.”

“I do think Bare Knuckle is badass. So yeah, I can’t say never. I have a really great relationship with Invicta and Shannon Knapp, the owner of Invicta, which is the only long standing all female MMA promotion. So I’ve been doing a lot of fun stuff with them. I will say being around the girls and being like in that atmosphere again gives me some crazy nostalgia. [Are you training again?] I will be training while I’m out here. I will say that, yeah, I am training. The only time I trained MMA in New Jersey was when I first started when I was 15.”

On the scary home break in:

“Well, it’s funny because me and Mandy [Rose] are sitting on the front lawn being interviewed by the police. Then once we were done, they were like, ‘Why don’t you take some stuff that you need and go find somewhere else to stay, because it’s a crime scene now.’ It was insane. So I’m like, okay. So me and Mandy went in, and I packed a bag, and then we talked to WWE, and they were great. They were like, we’ll book you a hotel. I was like, I want to sleep in my bed. I was under the impression that I would be right back in that house. Then nightfall came, and we ran back there for something and I couldn’t even open the front door. It took me by surprise, because earlier that day when my adrenaline was high and I was still probably in fight or flight mode, I was under the impression I would go right back to my house as soon as the caution tape was down. Then yeah, nightfall came and I couldn’t even go in my front door. It was too close to home.” 

On the situation potentially being much worse:

“I’m the luckiest person on the planet. I tell people all the time, and when I retell the story, people often have the opinion of, ‘Wow, you got really lucky.’ Because if one thing went differently, me, or Mandy, or both of us would not be here right now.” 

On his motivation:

“His whole thing was he wanted to be my boyfriend, I guess. And he was mad that I wasn’t into his gender as a whole, and so he had no shot, and he was angry about.”

Had he contacted you before?

“So essentially, my ex-girlfriend at the time had gotten some creepy messages from a fan, and she was able to see her messages because she wasn’t getting a ton of fan messages. He was deep in my request folder. I’d never seen his messages to me, which he had been sending for three, four years. But she saw a message, and she was like, ‘Hey, Daria, this is concerning.’ He has my address. He had her address, her mother’s house, and he had sent the address and said, ‘I know where you live. I’m coming to get Daria, and I’m gonna kill you.’ So I saw that, I actually sent it over to WWE, and was like, ‘Hey, this is concerning.’ I guess they tried to trace it back, and nothing came of it. So we all kind of thought nothing of it. This is another scary fan. And then two months later, he was in my living room.”

On the night of the break in:

“So I had responded back to him on my ex’s account, saying, ‘You have the wrong address, idiot.’ Because I was so scared that this guy was going to show up at her house and try to hurt her. But by doing that, I let him know that he had the wrong address. So when he broke in two months later, it was to my address, and Mandy slept over that night. We were filming in Tampa or Orlando at the time, it is during the pandemic. So Mandy slept over and we went out to dinner, we went to Ocean Prime, we had a great night. We come back to my house and we’re watching Bates Motel on the couch, which was not the greatest show to be watching right before that, but we’re just hanging and Mandy fell asleep on the couch. It was like 1 am or something like that, and I was dozing off on the couch. I was about to just let us both sleep on the couch, because it was a very comfy couch, and we were so tired. I was like, no, let me wake Mandy up and tell her to go to the guest bedroom. I went to my bedroom. Thank God. I grab my phone, as I’m falling asleep, I turn on the alarm system from my phone. I throw my phone on the bed, and it was pitch black. 2:43 am I think it was, I hear my alarm system going off, and I’m like, What the f*ck now? My room’s pitch black. My phone is somewhere in the bed and I can’t find it. I’m freaking out. So I get up and I run to the alarm panel on the wall outside of my room, and it says, living room door open. So my immediate thought was, Mandy must have went outside. She must have not thought I set the alarm. Maybe her boyfriend called or something, and she ran outside. So I run into her room, and she’s f*cking dead asleep, and I’m like, Okay, well, if Mandy’s not outside, and it says, living room door open, what the f*ck is going on? 

So I started screaming. I’m like, ‘Mandy, get up!’ She’s like, coming to and she’s like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘Stay there!’ So I leave her there because it’s the back of the house, and I run to the living room by myself. I turn on all the lights, and my blinds are drawn over the two sliding glass doors, so I don’t know which one’s open. There’s two different doors. They’re kind of perpendicular. So I’m like, f*ck. Well, let me check the one that I always use, that’s probably the one that’s open. So I go to the small one, and I peel back the curtain, and the door shut, but I’m just checking the lock. It’s locked. Sorry I missed a part. When I’m going to check the lock, I look up and the man is standing right at the door, as close as you are to me right now. So he has a black mask on, a black backpack, all black clothes. I’m looking at him, and I scream. ‘What the f*ck do you want?’ At first you’re thinking did a neighbor lose its dog? Then I see the mask, and I’m like, something’s off. Then he advances towards the door, and if it was a burglar, it was a robbery, alarms going off, the homeowners there, you would run, right? You don’t want to get caught. I’m like, Well, it can’t be a robbery. So as soon as he advances, I run to grab Mandy to tell her ‘Holy sh*t, there’s someone in the house.’ We run out the garage door next to Mandy’s bedroom and take off in her car that was parked behind my car.”

Did you call the police?

“The ADT system called the cops automatically, but we also did call the cops, they were there within like three minutes. So we circled around the neighborhood, and then we saw the cop cars come, but they came in lights off, sirens off, quiet. Now, I don’t know where this guy is at the time. The whole time I’m running to Mandy’s room and out the garage door, I’m waiting to get hit over the back of the head with a bat or something, I don’t know what’s happening. Well, what actually happened was when I ran he already had the other door open, but he had a little blind spot when he had to cross through the curtain. So he thought I ran up the staircase, but I ran behind the staircase to Mandy’s room and out the garage. So when the cops got there two minutes later, he was waiting at the bottom of staircase with a knife in one hand, pepper spray in the other hand, looking up, and they f*cking tackled him and got him out. So when they asked him, ‘Why were you waiting at the bottom of the staircase?’ His response was, ‘I thought she went up there, and I know she has MMA training, and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked, so I was gonna wait till she came down and pepper spray her.’ So like this whole thing’s unfolding, I’m still not understanding what’s happening. So the cops come up to me, and they’re like, ‘What do you do? Who are you?’ Because they didn’t know anything about wrestling. It’s like, ‘Oh, I wrestle.’ [They ask] ‘Do you know this guy? He’s saying he knows you.’ And I’m like, No. [They say] ‘Well, he says he messages you on Instagram.’ So they’re having me look up his name, and then I find his messages, and it’s like four years worth of obviously unresponded to scary DMs, all the way to the extent the last message was that night when he was on my patio and it said, ‘I’m here, baby girl, I’m finally here. Look outside.’ While me and Mandy are watching Bates Motel He said, Look outside, baby. He’s watching us through the blinds. So, you can’t really see out, but you can see in kind of gimmick, he’s watching us through the blinds watching TV.

If one thing happened differently, like, had we slept on the couch? He had the door open, the doors right behind the couch. We would have both been maced before we could even wake up. Had I not set my alarm that night because I was being lazy and just went to sleep, which I’ve done many nights, we would be dead. Like one different move in any scenario, we wouldn’t have made it.”

On escaping serious harm:

“I’m very grateful. I’m very lucky, and I think about it all the time. I often feel bad for victims of stalking that don’t have that ending, because some people, stalking is a serious issue in the United States, specifically, where these women specifically are hounded and stalked by these people for years, but if they don’t cross a certain legal threshold, you can’t get them detained. So they’re leaving stuff in their mailbox, they’re showing up at their front door. You’ve heard the stories even with other women wrestlers, but you can’t do anything about it unless, I know it’s weird to say, but like him breaking into my home and actually attempting something allowed me to put him in prison for 15 years.”

On her new podcast:

“So it’s just supposed to be a modern lifestyle, relatable podcast, but with two women. So the irony is, we aren’t so traditional, but at the same time, we are so normal. So we talk about parenting, we talk about our chickens and our ducks and our homesteading. We talk about relationships and love and marriage and sex and all the things that people, I think, have been wondering about me for years, because I think I’m still a bit of like a phenomenon to some people, like, Oh, she’s in this lesbian relationship, especially in the wrestling world, it’s not that prevalent. So we’re answering a lot of the questions people have been asking for years.”

Did you think it was a big deal when you were on Tough Enough and you were openly gay?

“No, I was scared at first, because I was like, Oh, are they going to want a lesbian in the WWE? I was so naive at the time and young, and I just didn’t know what it meant when they asked me the question on Tough Enough, ‘Are you in a relationship?’ I was kind of sh*tting bricks, because I was like, Is there a wrong answer here? I wasn’t comfortable with myself at that point, so I didn’t know if it was gonna tarnish my chances. But then it became just this thing that was a big deal to a lot of people, and it didn’t feel like a big deal to me. I was like, oh, okay, it’s cool. I’m getting all these amazing messages, and people feel seen, and I’m now becoming, unintentionally this safe spot for other wrestlers or other younger people watching me. But it was a very unintentional path. It was kind of just me starting to become confident with myself, but it happened to be in front of live cameras.”

On being known as a former MMA fighter when she debuted in WWE:

“Yeah, it very much was so and because it was the natural fit, right? The notion behind my hiring was kind of explained to me that we’re legitimizing the women’s division, and with that, we want athletes and fighters. And so I was kind of the first female MMA fighter to be brought on. So I was like, Oh, I just gotta be me, and that’s what I did in NXT. Then when I got to the main roster, and kind of felt like I had done it, and it was time for a change. So I slowly started getting in touch with a different side of myself and kind of creating the Sonya Deville character that you came to see. But really it was funny, because when I got hired, I was this ass kicker, right? There was no need to give me a mic, because I was just there to kick ass. And then I started asking for promos, because I knew I had taken acting classes, and that side of it was actually where I was more comfortable. So I was like, I want to do that. I want to be a character. And so Vince finally gave me the opportunity during the pandemic era in the Mandy storyline, and I was able to cut some lengthy promos. And that was kind of when Vince gave me the nod of approval and was like, Oh, she could talk.” 

On the head-shaving storyline with Mandy Rose:

“Bruce Pritchard pitched it to me, and he’s like, we’re gonna do hair versus hair. You and Mandy, you’re gonna shave your head. You’re gonna turn into this GI Jane character, and you’re gonna just plow through the division.”

How did you feel about shaving your head? 

“I was scared. I just didn’t want to be ugly. I was like, I don’t know what I’m gonna look like with no hair. This is before AI was that big, but I was using this editing software to edit a bald head on myself, and it was all very traumatizing, but I was down. I told him, yes, let’s go. Let’s do it.”

On neither Mandy nor Sonya liking their SummerSlam match:

“Yeah, it’s not my favorite match. It pisses me off still, because it’s my favorite storyline I’ve ever been a part of, and I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done with promo and character work and even the whole lead-up. But yeah, we were a f*cking mess. Not to make excuses, but the attempted kidnapping happened two nights before SummerSlam. Vince wanted to scrap the match on our behalf. I told him absolutely not, we worked this hard, and this motherf*cker is not gonna ruin our moment. So we scrapped the hair versus hair because I had to go to court and testify the next day and I was like, I’m probably not in the right frame of mind to be bald right now during all this, there was too much to process. He agreed. And he was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I was like, I don’t know. I got to think of something equally as high-stakes, another stipulation. So I came up with the loser leaves town. So we get to work that day, and the producers come up to us, and they’re like, ‘Okay, it’s now a loser leaves town match, but Daria is going to go over.’ And it’s weird, because the producer and Mandy felt like that wasn’t the right move, because Mandy was supposed to be the babyface coming out of this. I was obviously the heel, and I had been kind of kicking her ass the whole angle, so I agreed with them. So I actually went to Vince and Bruce and got the ending changed. I said, ‘Sir, I think Mandy should win, because I have a way to get me back from a loser leaves much better than we could get Mandy back. Why don’t I come back as like a schizophrenic the next week? And you’re trying to tell me that I don’t work here anymore, and I lost, but I’m under the impression that I’m somebody else, and we go with this whole angle.’ Vince’s exact words were, ‘I f*cking love it! God damn it. You can be hanging from my chandelier in the office, swinging around.’ And I was like, Okay!

 I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t see me hanging from your chandelier, but sure, and so we were on the same page. It was all good. Mandy was gonna get her comeuppance. I was gonna get an amazing character arc out of it, and all was gonna be well. And then the loser leaves happens, and I’m not needed for TVs, like, one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, a month, two months, like, all this time’s going by, and I’m texting Bruce from texting Vince. I’m like, ‘Hey guys, what’s the deal? I thought I was coming back right after. It’s the only reason I agreed to lose was because we had this cool angle to come back and bring me back.’ They were like, ‘Oh, just, just stay tight. Hang tight.’ Then all of a sudden, finally, Bruce says, ‘You know, after a second thought, when we do a loser leaves, we have to honor the stipulation, so you have to stay gone for a while.’ I was like, ‘Oh, why didn’t you tell me that when we discussed this? I would have much rather have won.’ I don’t have many regrets in life, but booking myself to lose that match is probably my only one. And it was like a running joke when I came back in the writers’ room with, like, the head writers, they kind of busted my chops and were like, ‘Remember that time you booked yourself to lose a match that when we were trying to push you?’ And I was like, so much you don’t know behind the scenes, because you’re not having these conversations like, ‘Hey, when you win this one, we’re going to push you, and we want Mandy to go in a different direction. You’re going to go in a different direction.’ So it wasn’t that transparent. So I didn’t really know what I was doing to myself at the time. So I ended up sitting home for five months. Then I come back, I go into Vince’s office, I’m like, ‘Hey, sir, what are we doing? Like, what do we do now?’ He’s like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I have these really cool suits in my hotel room, and I think it’d be cool to have a boss vibe to me.’ He kind of looked at me and was like, ‘Where are the suits?’ And I was like, they’re my hotel room. He’s like, send a runner to go get them. I was like, Okay, what the f*ck is going on? He didn’t tell me anything. He’s like, ‘You’re gonna walk down the hallway in a suit and superstars lined on both sides, and they’re gonna be clapping for you.’ And he just walked down. And I’m like, and then what? ‘That’s it.’ Okay? So I put my suit on, getting hair and makeup, and if you go watch it back, my return was I walked down the hallway in a suit with superstars lined on both sides, and then that slowly evolved into the GM character with Pearce.”

On working with Adam Pearce:

“I had so many crazy pitches for that character. Vince would always say, we’re not booking Adam Pearce vs. Sonya Deville at WrestleMania. Because I always wanted to push the limit with Adam, but there was no payoff for him. He couldn’t get a comeback, so we couldn’t go too far with it, but I did get to slap him that one time.  He’s tough. He was, like, lay it in. I was like, Okay, careful what you asked for.”

On not revisiting her partnership with Chelsea Green:

“They just didn’t want to go back to it. They didn’t want to go back to it. I had pitched that it would be a natural angle to go after Piper and be like, What the hell? Bitch, that’s my f*cking championship! Very natural angle. But they had this idea for this faction, and so that was where we were gonna go. I will say, while I was out, I did pitch coming back in my MMA gimmick, like a modified version, but I did pitch going back to my roots, and I think Triple H had the same kind of idea. He was like, Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Let’s do this group. When he told me the group, I was like, Okay, interesting. I didn’t know how the three of us were going to blend together, me, Zoe and Shayna, in PFC. So I was open minded to it, and of course, whatever he wants. I saw myself more as the mouthpiece in that scenario and I was like, okay, but we couldn’t get our footing. And then we were given the name Pure Fusion Collective, and I thought that was terrible. I don’t think it was ever going to be the thing, but we tried to make it work.”

On an upcoming film:

“So I’m doing a holiday film. You might see a fellow WWE legend in his own right, Mick Foley in there. So yeah, Mick Foley and Sonya Deville in a holiday film together. Who would have thought? So I don’t know if it’ll get out before this Christmas. Actually, I don’t know, but we just filmed it. I was just in Nashville filming it, really, really fun. It’s called Heartbreak, there’s some really funny, if you know, you know things in there that I think wrestling fans will like.”

What is Sonya Deville grateful for?

“The health of me and my family, the ability to spend these moments with my family, and the ability to pursue my dreams.”

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