Deonna Purrazzo was one of many WWE Superstars cut from the company last month, and one of the few who openly said she had been thinking about asking for her release before that. Purrazzo has described how she felt misused and creatively frustrated in NXT, and in a new interview with The Wrestling Inc. Daily podcast, talked about why she thinks WWE signed her in the first place: mainly so she wouldn’t sign somewhere else.
Purrazzo was one of the wrestlers announced for All In, the pay-per-view that preceded that creation of All Elite Wrestling, in 2018, but had to pull out of the show when she was signed by WWE. Purrazzo says that she “one hundred percent” thinks WWE signed her because of that All In announcement:
This culminated in, ‘She’s going to go somewhere else and do something good with other people, so we’re going to bring her here.’ If they had done something with me, then that would have been fine. But I feel that in the last year or two with AEW, [WWE] tended to be hoarding.
Purrazzo explained she thinks she suffered from so many other women coming to WWE from the indies around the time she signed with the company. She wasn’t the only person unhappy in this environment, and then when the layoffs came around, “it was the people voicing frustration and maybe the idea that they didn’t want to be here anymore if nothing was going to happen.”
Now that she’s out of WWE, Purrazzo says she doesn’t know if pulling out of All In has ruled out a possible future in AEW:
I don’t know. I feel like there was probably some, ‘Oh, that sucks’ because I committed to doing All In and I actually tried to push my WWE signing date back so I could still do All In. But WWE wasn’t having it, I have to pick and choose those battles, but I don’t think it affected anyone negatively. That’s not anything I’ve heard or has stopped me from being friendly with people that work for AEW.
Purrazzo doesn’t know yet where she’ll end up next, but says “It’s going to be interesting to see those negotiations and see where I land.”
Source: https://uproxx.com/prowrestling/why-deonna-purrazzo-signed-wwe-aew-all-in/