Former WWE women’s champions Nikki and Brie Bella recently appeared on Sippin’ the Tea with Ariane Andrew to discuss fan criticism of their Hall of Fame induction and how they are excited for the women’s evolution. Highlights are below.
Nikki ays the women’s evolution excites her:
“I feel so blessed because I think of, you know, we go back to generations, generations of women being at the forefront of, you know, women’s rights and voting, and so many other things, majority of those women didn’t get to live to see change. I feel so blessed every night, every Monday when I see Monday Night Raw, and I see the girls closing the show, or they’re headlining hell on the cell, or doing all these incredible things and continuing to raise the bar and just keep fighting for women and using their voice and I’m like, ‘wow,’ we get to sit back and think about how we were a part of helping that and like creating that path. I feel so blessed that we actually get to witness that. It’s true when Brie [talks about] when you’re at the forefront of things, you’re the one that you’re creating change so, people don’t like change. So when you’re in front of change, and we see it in so many different things in the world and what we’ve seen in the past years, so many people don’t want to accept change, they don’t want to feel it. They want to just be comfortable and live how life is and what they know. It just brings in hate, but it was weird because I feel like we were born for it. We were able to have a shield that didn’t put us deep in depression, didn’t turn us into drugs, didn’t turn us into these things instead of made us fighters like we turned on to Wonder Women were more like this. Yeah. Like bring it.”
Brie talks criticism from fans about getting into the Hall of Fame:
“I do have to say you know, the one incredible thing that hit Nicole and I like really hard with the whole women’s movement is when they started to bring up John Cena’s name and The Rock, and then they’d say, ‘and the Bella Twins.’ I think that’s why Vince inducted us into the Hall of Fame. I know some people were like, ‘I can’t believe they got inducted.’ But we did something outside of wrestling for the women and I think that was like the big movement, too, was mainstream fell in love with women’s wrestling. You started seeing more females and young girls come to the shows because of Total Divas and Total Bellas. But then mainstream started to look at not just The Rock and John Cena anymore, they started to look at the women and now you’ve seen the women going into Hollywood which is crazy. You see all these women wrestlers now going into Hollywood and for us, over anything, that’s incredible. Because it’s nice to see women have something after wrestling because women’s careers are shorter than men’s.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)