Sonya Deville Opens Up About Attempted Kidnapping, Living In A Safe House
Sonya Deville’s life got turned upside down in 2020 when a deranged person broke into her home and tried to kidnap her for real.
Back in August of that year, a South Carolina man began stalking her and eventually managed to not only find her actual residence address in a small Florida down but actually got into her house.
The experience was traumatizing and caused Deville to take months off from her wrestling schedule to both live in a safe house and deal with the emotional fallout from this experience.
And now, Sonya Deville has spoken to Maria Menounos and has given in-depth insight into what went through her mind during this ordeal.
“There’s just so many layers to it. First of course, it’s fight or flight, and you’re just in the situation, and you deal with the situation, and that night after the incident, I thought I was gonna go back to the house and sleep there because I was stubborn and I was in shock, and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know left from right at that point.
Then, the sun goes down, and I’m uncontrollably shaking, and I’m in a hotel room under an alias name because I’m so paranoid that even though he’s arrested, he’s somehow gonna find me, and I have the dresser pushed up against the door. I made Mandy slide the dresser in front of the door on the fifteenth floor of this high rise, and paranoia starts to set in.
It’s fight or flight, and then it’s shock, and I went into an autopilot of, ‘What needs to be done? What do we have to do?’ I don’t feel first. I do first, and then I feel later. You do what has to be done, and then you feel later, so I didn’t feel the full effect for what had happened for months. I was in full-blown fight-or-flight, I was living in fight-or-flight mode for months, maybe years.”
Additional, Sonya Deville described how she needed to have armed security watching her safe house 24/7 and that her self-preservation instincts were so hard to get rid of that they impacted her ability to go about her daily life.
“I went and lived in a safe house for a month because we didn’t know if he was gonna be able to get bail. It was a 24/7 armed security house. Guys with guns standing at each door, entrance of this home, in a secured location 24/7.
It’s just weird. I would go work out at the local LA Fitness and he would come work out with me. That was a weird phase of my life. I didn’t know what was going on. My mom flew down and stayed with me for as long as she could, but then she has to go back to work. My dad came down right away, of course, then he has to go back to work.
It’s this really weird thing where something so messed up happens to you, but then life goes on. So that was something that was hard for me to deal with at that time because I am such a ride-or-die and I feel my emotions very hard and true, so I’m like, wait a second, I almost had all this taken away from me, and then life just goes on.”
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h/t Fightful for the transcription