by Brie Bella
It was also frustrating because, plain and simple, it wasn’t the truth. The NXT women were given the history-changing matches because they were the ones chosen to make history. And I guess that’s kind of life. That is certainly wrestling, where perception is reality. (And to give full credit, they are incredible wrestlers. They were trained to wrestle in the way that a lot of women who came before them were not. They are Superstars.)
I didn’t break my neck, and have my tits out, and get paid $500 a week to hang out with a bunch of male wrestlers. I wanted to be a top female Superstar in that company. I wanted to change how women in the sport were perceived. And I do believe that we have succeeded: We were the first women to be able to do all that Brie and I have done in merchandise sales. And when those NXT girls came up, we wanted to help them look damn good. When Charlotte was the next big push, I got behind her 100 percent. I was the naughtiest girl, the baddest girl, the biggest villain so that Charlotte, as a babyface, ruled out there. I’m good at it, after all. I learned how to embrace being hated when I was a kid making my way around that soccer field.
Brie
This past decade at WWE has taught us a big lesson about the power of uniting for a cause. When I think about how we all came together, and how we then took over, I’m blown away by what we accomplished. It can be frustrating, and you don’t get to tell your story exactly how you would like, or in a way that seems completely fair, but we have all had some incredible opportunities.
The other thing that seemed important to remember is that we were all supposed to be different—not cast from the same mold of what it means to be a female wrestler. Some girls are better wrestlers out there, some girls are better on the mic; some girls are better heels, others are better babyfaces. Everyone can be at a different level and it still works. It gives the show texture and makes it better. Ultimately, it’s a beautiful thing. If you were to look at my record, you’d see I’ve probably lost more matches than I ever won. That was fine with me because it was always about the bigger show. Nicole and I became heels in our early storyline with Bryan, when I attacked Gail Kim for being his girlfriend. And we stayed heels, which means that more often than not, everyone is rooting against you. I had no problem putting over other women all the time. I was always grateful to be out there. It always seemed like it was about something bigger than my own personal glory. But in the industry, where perception is reality, our heel-dom probably did make fans believe that we weren’t good people.
I was Divas Champion for a short period, probably about ninety days. I found out that it was going to be my turn when I was having dinner with my sister and some friends in Greenwich, Connecticut, just outside of New York. I got a text from one of the writers that they were going to give me a shot, and we immediately popped some champagne. I hadn’t seen it coming and was blown away, as I didn’t know if I would ever get that chance. I was a heel, after all, and we were really good at being bad girls. But it was time for a heel to get the title so that the babyfaces could chase it, which worked out for me. The creatives at WWE really do come up with strong stories that will be good for the title. Then they really do try to give every girl who has worked hard a chance to be the champ. I was thrilled. I took the title from Eve, and it was awesome. Before the match, she made the ref mark up Nicole’s hand with a Sharpie so that we couldn’t pull Twin Magic (we tried anyway).
The night I lost the championship, they were putting me against an opponent based on a fan vote. My boss told me that I would wrestle whomever the fans picked, and I wouldn’t know who it was until showtime. It was between Eve Torres, Beth Phoenix, and Kelly Kelly. They each wanted to put together the outlines of a match, and so I had to memorize all three. I stood out there in the ring, running through moves, waiting, hoping I wouldn’t forget or get the spots confused. Ultimately, I lost to Kelly Kelly after she pinned me when we were doing a double somersault.
The thing about wrestling is that it really is a team sport with an individual champion. We don’t all get to be that champion at the same time. Someone’s going to be on top, and for the rest of us, that means it is not our turn. But it’s much better for all of us when we take turns and help the girl who is the champion stay up there for as long as possible. When we work as a team, everyone is more into it. The audience can feel our collective energy, can get into the momentum of the matches and the emotions we’re projecting. You can’t be compelling when you’re not working together. It’s just a fact. And you can’t be compelling if you’re not driven by passion.
Nicole and I have always had passion in spades. The more people tell us that we can’t do something, the more jacked up that passion gets, and the more inclined we are to prove them wrong. We turn as many nos into yeses as we can. We have become expert at transforming hate into gold. A lot of people at WWE wanted our reality show to fail. Well, we’ve turned it into a multi-season hit with a hit spin-off. A lot of people told Nicole that she’d never be champion. Well, she became the longest-reigning Divas Champion ever … and she’ll never lose that record now that the title is retired. That resilience and drive is everything, particularly when it’s paired with positivity—it’s a combination that just can’t lose. When you see the world for its bright spots, negativity is just not part of its definition.
Nicole
While Brie and I have gotten ourselves really far on grit and determination, we wouldn’t have our life without Vince McMahon. He has given us opportunities consistently and constantly—and that’s why WWE will always be home. I would never turn my back on the people who have made me. Vince invented the Bella Twins, and Brie and I will always be grateful for that.
We weren’t alone, nor were we singled out for special treatment. Vince gives everyone an opportunity—everyone who comes down that ramp gets a chance. He can’t control whether the crowd connects, he can only give you the blank canvas, the ring, millions of eyeballs, and then it’s up to you to do something with it and turn it into a career. I grabbed that canvas and painted a Picasso. I knew I wouldn’t stop out there until I could be on top.
He isn’t shown on Total Divas, but within WWE, Vince has an open-door policy. He always wants people to come to him for advice. If you don’t understand a storyline, or it seems backwards, he’ll walk you through how he envisions it moving you forward. He’s a brilliant strategist and storyteller. For example, when I was a week away from being the longest-reigning champion, he sent Brie out to wrestle in my stead. And she was beaten. The crowd freaked out because they thought I had lost, and they started booing like crazy. Then, Brie slowly started pulling tissues out of her bra to reveal that it was her and not me that had lost. That was Vince’s call. I was skeptical about whether it would work, and it turned out to be epic.
We’ve gotten to travel the world on his dime, we’ve built the Bella Army under his careful watch, and most important, we’ve been able to be intimate with and connect to millions of strangers, who have truly come to be like real family and friends. Brie met the love of her life and went on to make another love of her life. We have built an incredible career that allows us to help others and give back. How lucky are we?
Brie
Stephanie McMahon, Vince’s daughter, who is the Chief Brand Officer at the company, is an incredible role model for the women of WWE as well. She was a wrestler, so she understands what it’s like out there. She has played a central role in fighting for more equality and parity for all of us. As part of “The Authority,” together with her real-life husband, Triple H, she has also played a central role in my storyline, because of a long-standing feud with Bryan, aka Daniel Bryan. When Bryan was going to be “fired” by Stephanie in the storyline, I stepped up to her. This culminated in a lot of hilarity and drama until she came out of retirement and we ended up wrestling against each other in SummerSlam.
So this is how our path to SummerSlam went down: I obviously never pitched or asked for this storyline, because Stephanie is my boss, and asking to wrestle her would have been an ins
ane thing to do. But it happened organically—and miraculously, she was game to do it, which was incredibly generous. In fact, it was her idea. The whole spectacle kicked off when she slapped Bryan. Now, if we had still been in the Attitude Era of the nineties, he would have just slapped her back, or put his finisher on her, but he had to stand there and take it across the face. The only person who could step in and respond in kind to stop her was me.
Bryan and his “Yes!” chant led the opposition against “The Authority.” In fact, in an incredible moment, there was an Occupy WWE movement where hundreds of people wore Daniel Bryan T-shirts and protested against “the man” by sitting ringside. Bryan represented the people. Bryan had broken his neck and couldn’t wrestle, and so The Authority—i.e., Stephanie and Triple H—demanded that he give up his title while he was out recovering. The fans revolted, and so The Authority said that if he didn’t give up his title, I had to quit wrestling. Bryan responded that of course I wasn’t going to quit, and then right before he went to give up his title, I yelled, “I quit!” and slapped Stephanie McMahon.
The storyline went back and forth for a while, where we had each other arrested for assault (she and Triple H attacked me and Nicole when we were signing our contracts), and then we had our big, final confrontation where I told her I wouldn’t press charges if she would wrestle me at SummerSlam. We had no time to go over the promo in advance and were quickly talking through the plan in Gorilla—where Vince McMahon, Triple H, your producer, and the timekeeper all sit—when her entrance music hit. It was a “Wait, what?” moment, and I just looked at Bryan, whose response was “Oh shit.” We would have to wing it.
It all went off perfectly, considering that we were pretty much improvising out there. I knew I was going to throw down the challenge, and that she would accept it, but I still wasn’t sure that we would actually end up wrestling. It was amazing to be in a storyline with Stephanie, and I learned so much from just interacting with her in promos. She taught me how to engage, how to hold myself with confidence, how to project like a powerful woman. She knew how to poke me and agitate me and ultimately motivate me to deliver performances that felt inspired and real. I will always be so grateful for that, because I was just some chick on the roster. She didn’t have to put me over like that or share so much screen time with me.
Before our match at SummerSlam, we rehearsed together at the Performance Center. Stephanie and Triple H both helped me figure out the psychology of what we would need to do out there. They helped me put the moves to the emotion, to bring the crowd along in my rage against Stephanie and all that she represented. The best part was Nicole’s role in the encounter, and the way that she turned on me at the last second to help Stephanie win. The crowd reaction was huge, which led to my second favorite match ever, which was taking on Nicole at the Hell in a Cell event. (The backstory of Nicole’s betrayal is that when I “quit,” Stephanie took out her vengeance on Nicole and put her in a string of handicap 4-on-1 matches where she was ripped apart by the other women, so Nicole was furious at me for putting myself first and abandoning her.) After my SummerSlam match with Stephanie, and my ultimate match with Nicole, Vince turned to me and told me that it should have been the main event. It was pretty fantastic.
Nicole
We’ve had a lot of incredible matches, particularly because women’s wrestling has evolved dramatically even in the past five years. When we first debuted on the main stage, there were a lot of things that we weren’t allowed to try. The producers didn’t really want women to do big moves, and a lot of the other women weren’t interested in pushing for it, because they didn’t want to take those bumps. They can hurt more, and they can certainly be more dangerous. In developmental I had done a lot of lucha libre, which is a bit more aggressive than what was being done on the main stage. I struggled to find wrestlers who wanted to play ball. They were worried about getting hurt or wanted to stick with routine stuff that they were familiar with. It was hard to find partners willing to push it.
That’s why I loved wrestling Nattie and Paige so much—they were both so amazing about taking it and then giving it back. Like me and Brie, they would do anything to put on a good match, to elevate the sport to the next level. Paige and I both broke our necks, ultimately—and for her it has meant retirement—but in retrospect it still seemed worth it.
Because of how limited the segments were for the women, and because we didn’t have much time out there when we did get storylines, it really mattered that we all got behind each other in the locker room. It often felt like a two-steps-forward, one-step-back proposition. I remember one event where Nattie and Brie had a four-minute match but needed to make room for a third wrestler to come out and cut a promo as she would be entering the storyline. I was Brie’s valet. They decided to make the match short, at just two minutes, in order to give this third wrestler plenty of time to do her thing on the mic and get the crowd excited. Well, she didn’t do that, and instead used the time to go on and on about herself and our “daddy issues.” All of the Total Divas were furious in the moment because it was the exact reason why women weren’t doing well in WWE—it was far too typical of how things went down. One woman wanting to outshine everyone else instead of connecting with the other wrestlers and the story we were set to do together. She was going into business by herself, which ruins any chance of building something as a team. If they had known, Nattie and Brie would have wrestled for the full four minutes and cut her out, but that’s not how we ever chose to roll.
Backstage, Brie pulled her aside: “We’re all in this together. You can have jealousy, you can have dislike, but the only way this division is going to grow is if we connect and put that other stuff aside. We have to stop stabbing each other in the back.” I have no clue if it resonated. Change was always slow to come.
Brie
It’s funny to exist in the world of WWE because it seems like a fair number of wrestlers start to believe their own hype and start to believe their own storylines. It felt sometimes like we needed to constantly remind some of the women that we were creating fiction—that it wasn’t real. (And that if we were to get into a legit fight, I’d kick their ass.) I wanted to shake some of the women sometimes and plead with them to just focus on building a really great storyline. It can seem real, it can totally be badass, but if we don’t all work together, it’s just stupid. Bryan and I would talk about that all the time on long drives between matches, that there were just too many people who believed in their own gimmicks. They got a little bit of fame—wrestling fame not George Clooney fame—and it all went to their head.
I think without all the restrictions—both on the time we had, and what we were allowed to do—the women could have just relaxed into it a bit more. I remember walking down the ramp during WrestleMania for a tag match with Nicole against AJ and Paige. It was a really memorable moment and an honor to walk down the ramp for wrestling’s biggest event. We all wanted to do more in the match but weren’t allowed to at the time, despite our best efforts to push beyond the line. At that point, they still wanted to reserve the big moves for the guys. Now there are really no limits on what we can get up to, which makes perfect sense to me. I think they were reticent to let us off the leash because they wanted us to seem feminine, but the reality is that many of us are thicker than some of the guys out there.
We are now many seasons in on Total Divas, but filming the show never gets old. It keeps evolving as our own lives morph and change, and being able to make Total Bellas with our extended family is a dream. I get to go to work with Birdie and my mom and brother and do fun things and get paid for it. It’s certainly hard work, and when the cameras are on us it is relentless and the days are long, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I will keep filming for as long as the viewers are interested. I get paid to go to Napa and get drunk with my sister. It doesn’t get better.
The reason it’s also worked for us for so long is that there isn’t an expectation that we’ll stoke drama—we just don’t ha
ve to fabricate or fake it. As you can tell from these pages, which are full of stories we’ve never even told on TV before, there’s plenty of drama without us even trying to stir the pot, and that’s not taking into account the other women of WWE. When you take a bunch of very physical and dramatic women, and they’re on the road for five days a week fighting for a living, shit gets real. That’s just how women in WWE are. But we can step away and create some distance and all have beers together a few hours later. The fiery temperament that Nicole and I share is not dissimilar from how many of the female wrestlers operate. It has to be something that’s in our collective blood.
The same goes for Total Bellas, which we film with our mom, and JJ, and Johnny, and JJ’s wife, Lauren. As you know by now, we are quick to battle and fight in our family, and there are times when it certainly doesn’t feel worth it. Just the other week we were filming, and Lauren was talking about her blog, and I mentioned something about the rules of recycling, and JJ jumped down my throat. It can be a lot, and it’s tough to relive it again when the show airs because it can stir up old grievances.
My family has sacrificed a lot for the show, though I know that it will ultimately be worth it. When we filmed Total Divas, we didn’t make much money at first, as it was all just for a pilot. But we knew it had the legs to potentially go far, and we had a lot of faith in it. I hope Total Bellas does for our family what Total Divas did for me and Nicole.