Rhea Ripley Shares What She Has Learned From The Judgment Day
Rhea Ripley has shared what she has learned from being part of The Judgment Day over the last year.
The Smackdown Women’s Champion Rhea Ripley is on quite a roll in 2023. She won the Women’s Royal Rumble match in January leading to a WrestleMania 39 showdown with Charlotte Flair. In a match that some people are calling one of the best women’s matches in WWE history, Ripley left with the Smackdown Women’s Title.
At just 26 years old, Rhea Ripley has already made WWE history as the only woman to win the NXT UK, NXT, Raw Women’s Title, Women’s Tag Team Titles and Smackdown Women’s Title.
While Ripley has enjoyed a lot of success this year, she may not have been able to thrive so much if she didn’t join The Judgment Day one year ago. Rhea Ripley is the only female in The Judgment Day group along with veteran wrestlers Finn Balor and Damian Priest, as well as her on-screen “boyfriend” Dominik Mysterio. They are not really a couple, but Dominik calls her Mami and that’s what the announcer push when they are on screen together.
In an interview on this week’s WWE After The Bell Podcast with Corey Graves & Kevin Patrick, Rhea Ripley talked about learning a lot from Edge when she first joined the group.
“I’ve definitely learned a lot being in The Judgment Day. The Judgment Day, it just works. I feel like we’ve all grown individually within the group as well, which has been really, really cool to see. At the start when it was me, Priest, and Edge, I feel like I learned a lot about myself and my own confidence when being in the ring with them boys, especially learning from someone like Edge. He’s a legend in his business. I loved him growing up. He was one of my favorites. I cried when he retired.”
“So knowing that I get to go out there and stand in the ring with him and back him up, and he has my back as well, it was really, really cool. It brought me to this other side of the business where like, I do get to be in the ring with the boys and I do get to be around them and listen to how they talk and how they do things. It was a different learning curve for me, which was really fun.”
“It’s not super different, but at the same time, like the way that they speak to each other, the way that they plan little bits and pieces, sometimes it’s just so intricate, and I was like, ‘Yo, I didn’t realize that we could do something like this.’ I feel like being with the boys, we get away with a lot more, which I was having fun with.”
As for the current group, Rhea Ripley spoke about how the people in the group weren’t necessarily close before The Judgment Day, but they have bonded together.
“I’ve been able to learn from people like Finn Balor, Damian Priest, and then also with Dominik. We’ve been growing in this business. He’s been in this business pretty much his whole life, which is wild to even think. But just watching his growth over the last six months, I want to say, it’s been so incredible. We weren’t even really friends before this. We barely even talked. We just said hello, like, how are you?”
“So to see how much I’ve bonded with these guys in such a short amount of time, it’s been so rewarding, and so much fun. When we’re out there, we all just help each other, which is why a lot of the time you don’t even see it, like we’re slowly or quietly talking to each other telling each other like what we should do, or how we should act, and what the plan is, sort of thing. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, Rhea Ripley revealed that she was very emotional going into her WrestleMania 39 match two weeks ago.