When Deonna Purrazzo became one of the many workers laid off by WWE earlier this month, she responded positively, tweeting, “The people closest to me know this is something I’ve been struggling with wanting for the better part of the last year. Happy to say I gave this journey my best and MORE excited for the future!” In a new interview with Fightful, Purrazzo explained why she had been looking to leave the company.
Purrazzo signed with WWE in 2018. After competing in the Mae Young Classic, she wrestled most of her matches on NXT house shows. She never had a real angle on NXT TV and appeared on main roster programming as enhancement talent. “I feel like NXT is a culture of you’re grateful for what you get and you don’t ask for more,” Purrazzo said of how she was being used, “and I wasn’t grateful for what I got.”
Purrazzo said she worked hard to get to NXT, and once she got there, she thought of character and vignette ideas and “different ways that they could use me and use my potential and it did fall on deaf ears.” In a recent interview with the Conversations With Love podcast, Purrazzo’s friend and tag partner Chelsea Green, who still works for NXT, concurred that “Deonna has so much potential. She was not used in the capacity she should have been used in.”
Purrazzo said she had been thinking about asking for her release for months, and she was open about not wanting to be a jobber. According to Purrazzo, at least a few people who were cut from WWE had “expressed creative unhappiness” too, and she thinks that’s why she was let go.
I definitely feel like that’s frowned upon in NXT. For me, I feel like, and maybe it’s just making myself feel better, but that was probably a reason why I was let go. Because I said a month ago, “Hey, I’m not happy. If you’re not going to do something with me, let me go. Let me figure this out somewhere else.”
Purrazzo is already being proactive about her post-WWE career, starting a new interview series that premieres on Independent Wrestling TV tonight.