During her appearance on Bell to Belles, Mercedes Martinez spoke on some of the issues she had with the way Retribution was presented. Here’s what she had to say:
They wanted to change names, which is fine, you know, you can change your name but I wanted to — My thing was communication. Communication was a big thing for me where they didn’t communicate anything with me. They didn’t communicate what the group was about. They didn’t communicate the name changes until we were revealed. The gear, the masks, everything was just communication. I’m a big communication person where I want to be prepared for my job, so I want to know what’s going on. We knew we were going to wear masks, but I thought it was more for entrance or for just the aesthetic, you know? That’s fine because I wear a face mask in my entrance which is perfectly fine. I believe that the face masks, maybe we should have had some input in it, too. You know, I was like, maybe you know, here’s my face mask. I have two different face masks. Maybe we can make something similar to these two. But for this group, you know, I tried really hard but I can’t wrestle in this mask. That’s another issue was that I can’t wrestle in a mask. I have asthma. It’s hard for me to breathe in the first place without a mask. How am I going to wrestle in a mask? We’re still a pandemic. For me to train or be in a gym. or anything like that, I have to wear a mask and it’s so hard for me to do that. I built my own home gym for that reason; because I can’t breathe. I have to have an inhaler. So that was a safety issue for me. When something doesn’t feel right, regardless of maybe you can be on the main roster, you can make all this money and stuff. At the end of the day, I just didn’t feel it in my heart. It really came down to that. It really just didn’t feel like I should be a part of this group.
Credit: Bell to Belles. H/T 411Mania.