COVER STORY | From Adelaide to Anomaly: The Rise of Rhea Ripley

UPON HER ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND, Ripley was quickly inserted into an eight-woman tournament to crown the inaugural NXT UK Women’s Champion, and she’d go on to beat Xia Brookside, Dakota Kai, and fellow Riot City alum Toni Storm, capturing the belt and becoming the first female Australian champion in WWE history and the second Australian champion in the company overall, after her future husband, Buddy Murphy. “I was trying so hard every single day to be noticed and get put on TV,” Ripley remembers. “And once I was in NXT UK, I was like, ‘I’m helping make this brand, they see something in me.’ I wasn’t supposed to be the person that I am today. The coaches at the performance center, some of them didn’t believe in me. They didn’t believe that I had the potential to be the star that I am right now.” Michaels confirms this, saying he had “no idea that she would reach the star that she is” but that, now, “she’s a legitimate, bonafide, mega superstar.” “I don’t know if that is something that people could have called right from the beginning.”

After winning a dark match title defense against Kai at Evolution, Ripley would see her 139-day reign come to an end after dropping the belt to Storm at TakeOver: Blackpool in Lancashire. 15 days later, Ripley made her main roster debut by entering the 2019 Women’s Royal Rumble, nabbing three eliminations before getting thrown over the ropes by Bayley. She returned to NXT that August, interrupting Women’s Champion Shayna Baszler’s promo and, by uttering the words “You haven’t beaten me, bitch,” turned face as a hailstorm crowd pop rained down upon her. “I wasn’t supposed to beat Shayna Baszler, but it was always the crowd that could see the fight in me and the potential,” Ripley admits. “I remember [assistant head coach] Sara Amato running to me later, straight after the promo, and she was like, ‘We have to change the finish of the match with Shayna, because you got too much of a pop. We have to continue this story, we don’t know what’s going to happen with it, but we have to continue it.’”

I ask Damian Priest, who signed with the WWE in 2018 while Ripley was still in the UK, what his first impression of Ripley was upon meeting her in NXT. “[I was] immediately impressed,” he says. “Her size, her athleticism, her easiness—you want to see her. She had this ability to draw eyes on her, just by being herself.” Her first spell in NXT revolved around two other future superstars: Iyo Sky and Bianca Belair. When Sky came to America for the second Mae Young Classic, a trail of hype followed her. And then, she was paired with the Japanese high-flyer in what was the biggest match of her career up until that point. “I was terrified, because I’m like, ‘She’s already a known superstar, she’s been in this business for a long time. She’s been able to perfect her craft and grow not only as a superstar, but as a human being,’” Ripley says. “I think that’s where she’s a couple of steps ahead of me, especially back then.” Her matches with Belair, including her second-ever performance in NXT, at a house show in Largo, were learning curves. “Going in the ring with Bianca and realizing that I’m really not that fit, I don’t know if I could keep up with her, especially back then. She is so freakishly strong. Even just a simple lock up, after that and fighting back and forth, you’re done—like, ‘I’m tired, I don’t know if I can continue this match.’”

But Belair and Ripley dreamed of squaring off at WrestleMania after breaking the containment of development. In the meantime, Ripley watched Belair and telegraphed her timing and the speed of her moves. “If you can’t keep up with Bianca, you’re going to be left in the dust,” she says. “That was a massive thing in NXT especially, because we were two of the bigger girls. I was like, ‘I need to be a lot like Bianca with the way that I work out, the way that I hit the in-ring in class. I need to be able to get to her speed and get to her strength, so that we can compete on such level playing fields.’” They competed against each other in the Performance Center’s yearly combine, in which Belair won a record three times. “She was always the one that I was like, ‘I need to get close to what Bianca is doing,’” Ripley continues. “She’s the one that really pushed me.”

Ever since joining the banner of WWE, Ripley has played a critical part in a divergent women’s division that is flourishing in league with the men’s. “This is what we’ve worked so hard to build, and it’s finally escalated to a point where we can’t be ignored,” she says. Her own evolution into brutality—the graduation from longer, brighter hair and softer color palettes to black locks, bruise-colored outfits, and taut, ripped fishnets—mirrors the risk-taking of her fellow competitors, how young and aspiring wrestlers eyed a superstardom that lived up to the template set by the Four Horsewomen of NXT: Bayley, Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, and Sasha Banks. “We’re all so comfortable together,” Ripley says. “We want to be ourselves and captivate the audiences.” If you look back at the women on NXT in 2019, Belair, Sky, B-Fab (fka Briana Brandy), Nikki Cross, Dakota Kai, Raquel Rodriguez (fka Reina González), Chelsea Green, Kairi Sane, Kayden Carter, and Shayna Baszler have all been called up to the main roster and currently compete across RAW and SmackDown. “The women’s division is growing every single time we go out there. We have new faces now. We have so much potential. We have two new women’s championships, this is a dream for all the women that came before me.”

Parallels have been drawn between Ripley and her wrestling foremothers, especially Chyna, who stepped into the ring with Jeff Jarrett for a Good Housekeeping match and won the Intercontinental Championship at No Mercy in 1999, making her the first and only woman to hold the belt. A year prior, she became the first woman to enter the Royal Rumble. Chyna was jacked to the nines, as buff as she was all-consuming, cloaked in black and waging war on the WWE’s Attitude Era as a member of the Corporation and, later, the Corporate Ministry.

Without Chyna pinning Ivory in the Reliant Astrodome during WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001, there would be no Rhea Ripley in 2025. You can see the resemblance, in the black hair and the black garb, and in the no-one-fucks-with-me attitude. At Payback in September 2023, in a Women’s World Championship defense against Raquel Rodriguez, Ripley wore a spiked-out jacket and leather kit as an homage to the late Ninth Wonder of the World. And like Chyna, Ripley pins blood-thirsty mortals without ever looking at the lights, turning so dominant that her threats about entering the Men’s Royal Rumble aren’t too ridiculous.

RIPLEY BEGAN WRESTLING FULL-TIME ON RAW in February 2021, challenging Asuka for the RAW Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 37 and defeating her. She held the belt for 98 days before dropping it to Charlotte Flair at Money in the Bank in June. Fast-forward to September, and she and Nikki Cross (known then as Nikki A.S.H.) defeated Natalya and Tamina to capture Women’s Tag Team Championship gold, which they’d retain for 63 days. It was an era of Ripley coasting in the mid-card but struggling to regain any titles. She’d team up with Liv Morgan and chase after the tag championships again but couldn’t pull them off of Sasha Banks and Naomi, leading to Ripley’s heel turn after an unprompted attack on Morgan.

At night one of WrestleMania 38, Edge turned heel by taking AJ Styles out with a chair. The following night, Edge beat Styles thanks to interference from Damian Priest, and the two revealed themselves to be the WWE’s newest stable: The Judgement Day. Priest was approached first about the faction. “The idea was taking talent that can be more but, for whatever reason, weren’t given the opportunities,” he says. Ripley and Priest had talked about teaming up together since their NXT days. “Just, anything together on screen,” he continues. “We knew that people would get it. If you see us backstage, that’s what you see in front of the crowd. Rhea had had success but then, from a super high, she was thrown around to random programs. We both were hoping for something.” Edge wanted to make a Brood 2.0, but he wasn’t going to run it his way. Priest says, “He asked a lot of questions, like ‘Who else do you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, my first pick is Rhea.’ And he started laughing, because that was his first pick as well.”

Throughout the next year, the Judgement Day would lure in Finn Bálor, kick Edge out of the group with a con-chair-to, and feud with him, Rey and Dominik Mysterio. At Clash of the Castle 2022, Dominik turned heel, attacking his father and Edge, and teamed up with Ripley. Upon Dominik’s adoption of a Latino Heat gimmick similar to Eddie Guerrero’s, Priest coined Ripley as Mysterio’s “Mami.” And the nickname stuck, marking a turning point for her career, as she would go on to enter the 2023 Royal Rumble at #1 and win the whole thing, lasting 61 minutes in the ring. “So much of my main roster career has been being Mami and growing as Mami and growing as the champion that I don’t really remember too much about how it felt before that,” Ripley says.

It’s rare for a wrestler to hit the main roster and become an instant success. That certainly wasn’t the case for Rhea Ripley who, in-between women’s championship reigns was nowhere close to the main event scene, relegated to WarGames team-ups with Damage CTRL and mixed tag matches. Right now, we’re seeing superstars like brothers Penta and Rey Fenix get big pushes, much to the delight of the fans packing the stands. But there are no guarantees that the hottest NXT vet or expat from AEW or TNA is going to be the buzziest newcomer. It took Ripley four years to even get on RAW.

“Is the thought of I’m a main event-caliber wrestler in your head from the beginning?” I ask her. “You grow into it,” she says. “I don’t want to say that I even think that right now, either. It’s so weird to think about or say out loud.” She pauses, considering where to go next. “For me, I’ve always been passionate about wrestling, and I love it so much and I want to do good. I want to learn and get better, and I want to entertain people. That’s what our whole job is; I want to have entertaining stories, have entertaining matches. I want people to be captivated by what I’m doing out there, whether it’s a promo or a match.” Ripley credits her growth as a wrestler to the Judgement Day, because she had Priest, Bálor, and Mysterio to fall back on: “It helped me with my promo work, because I knew that, going out there with Dom and him not being able to talk because they booed him out of the bloody building every single time he went to talk, I had to take the responsibility of remembering my lines and his lines.”

After winning the Rumble in 2023, Ripley squared off against Charlotte Flair for the SmackDown Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 39. It’s arguably the greatest women’s match of the decade, possibly even of the 21st century thus far, as both women ran on pure hatred for 27 minutes and beat the piss out of each other in a lipstick-smearing, main event-worthy instant classic, narrowly escaping a few potential career-ending injuries until Ripley’s final pin on Flair. Parallel to when Bianca Belair defeated Sasha Banks at Mania two years prior, Ripley’s victory was a historic moment for the women’s division, as she became the youngest grand slam champion in WWE history and Flair putting her over helped anoint the next generation’s rise to power. And, just like her father Ric’s fabled tango with Ricky Steamboat in the 1980s, Charlotte’s championship match against Ripley capped off a three-year rivalry that began with a triple threat match against her and Sasha on SmackDown and carried on through rubric-building bouts at NXT TakeOver: In Your House 2020, Backlash 2021, Hell in a Cell 2021, Money in the Bank 2021, and SummerSlam 2021.

BUT BEING OVER WITH WWE fans doesn’t cure self-doubt. Ripley saw the praise online after her WrestleMania match with Flair but couldn’t let go of her hang-ups. “I watch [the match] back and I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s a good match, but I didn’t like this. I could have done better there,’” she admits. “I always pinpoint things that I don’t like—I’m always just like, ‘That 100% could have been better. That was not my best work.’ It’s so scary being out there at times, you get so nervous and you don’t know what’s going on. I still don’t think that I am at the very, very top. I wouldn’t say that I am, I know other people might. But, for me, I always see room for improvement. It’s wild to even think that I am one of the faces of WWE. It’s nuts, I’m just a little girl from Adelaide.”

Scrutiny built up over the next 380 days. Ripley defended the SmackDown title against the likes of Zelina Vega and Natalya before the WWE renamed it the Women’s World Championship. She retained in a fatal five-way match at Crown Jewel 2023 and won feuds against Raquel Rodriguez, Zoey Stark, and Ivy Nile before beating Nia Jax at Elimination Chamber: Perth in her home country. But for the internet wrestling community (IWC), none of that was enough, despite the fact that, in the first year of his reign as the Undisputed WWE Champion, Cody Rhodes defended the title six times and, in the first year of her reign as the Women’s World Champion, Ripley defended the title 11 times.

Storytellers talk about the men’s championships in the WWE and the dual depths they hold. You look at Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, and you watch them grapple with the temptations of selfishness as they captain the company. The longer you wear the Undisputed WWE Championship belt, the harder it gets to resist villainy. And with the World Heavyweight Championship, figures like Damian Priest and Gunther are mid-card merchants becoming more powerful, valuable superstars. But does that complex mortal coil bleed into the women’s division? “You have to be someone that people can look up to,” Ripley says. “I feel like, every time I have a championship, I am representing the people that are the outcasts. There’s a lot more eyes on you. I’m someone—heel or face—that people can look up to that is a little bit different, that doesn’t fit the social norms.”

Ripley defended her title at WrestleMania XL in April 2024 against Becky Lynch, opening the program’s first night. Out Ripley walked into a stadium of 72,543 people, as her favorite band, Motionless in White, stood positioned at the top of the entrance ramp, playing her theme song “Demon in Your Dreams” to a hungry, rowdy Philadelphia audience. The temperature had dipped into the forties, and Lincoln Financial Field offered little warmth for the wrestlers and fans alike. “I remember standing in the ring and a gust of wind goes past. I’m so cold,” she says. “Like, ‘How are we supposed to wrestle in this cold weather? Everyone else is rugged up and they’re still freezing. I’m out here half-naked.’”

But she and Lynch went the distance, trading sit-out powerbombs, Beck-sploders, Prison Traps, and Dis-Arm-Hers with each other. Ripley picked up the victory by pinfall in 17 minutes after countering Lynch’s final Manhandle Slam with two Riptides. “I’ve watched the match back once, right after it happened,” Ripley says. “ I still don’t know if it was good or bad.” She enjoys being online after a major match, scrolling to see fan reactions and clips of her performance. “You can’t get to sleep at night, because you don’t really come down off that high for a long, long time.”

The two women did a great job masking the chaos that had unraveled behind gorilla backstage. Lynch had been sick for three days prior to WrestleMania, and, on the night of their match, she was at her worst, according to Ripley. “For me, knowing that she was sick and knowing that it’s WrestleMania, I felt like, in my own mind, I had to help her as much as I could,” she says. “She was weaker, and I didn’t want to make her worse. I put so much pressure on myself to be there for both of us, I wasn’t really paying too much attention to myself.” Two hours before showtime, Ripley suffered a panic attack that kept her out of hair and makeup until the last minute. “I still wasn’t in my gear, I wasn’t ready at all,” she recalls. “I don’t remember the match, I don’t know what the hell was going on, so I started absolutely freaking out. So many eyes are on you, too. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to stuff anything up. I don’t want to go out there and suck.’”

Walking into WrestleMania with Motionless in White surrounding her was the antidote to Ripley’s nerves. “It really lit a fire under me to go out there and absolutely kill it,” she says. “I need that good entrance music, and then having the guys there made it so much better. I really needed that day.” After the match it took days for Ripley’s body to wind down, as she got tied up by a torturous back spasm. It took even longer for her brain to return to normal. “You’re just living on that high for so long, because you just wrestled at WrestleMania. It’s everyone’s dream. I just got to compete for my championship and I defended it. I was victorious.”

“Who are you before you walk out from backstage, and who do you become once your music starts?” I ask Ripley.

“Most of the time, I’m stressing,” she says.

“Let’s imagine you’re not going to run out and try to beat up Liv Morgan.”

“That’s the easy thing,” she laughs, grinning ear-to-ear.

But Ripley’s entrance choreo is a switch for her. It puts Demi to sleep and awakens Rhea. Before a match, she admits that she’s usually “pacing in gorilla, trying to not freak out completely” and doing breathing exercises but almost always forgetting to stretch. “Demi is very nervous about life. I have a lot of stage fright,” she says. “Rhea, on the other hand, is her own monster that just takes over my body. I wish I could be Rhea Ripley all the time.” When “Demon in Your Dreams” blasts off, the locking in is instant: “I go through the curtain and into this Rhea Ripley walk, which is not how I walk every day. As soon as I start doing that walk, it’s like I forget everything else. Everything else doesn’t matter. I’m going out there to kick ass and that’s what I’m going to do.”

None of this business gets easier, especially not for Ripley. Delivering a believable promo to 15,000 people is as hard for her as it’s ever been. But there’s a reward in never getting comfortable. “If you don’t get nervous before something, you don’t really care about it,” she says. While in Riot City, she loathed cutting promos. “You can watch them and see how badly I wanted to get out of there,” she admits. “But I feel like I try so hard beforehand to convince myself that I don’t care, and that seems to help the most, even though I know, deep down, that I’m hiding the fact that I care too much—especially because I’m not very articulate. I don’t explain myself well, I don’t know many words. I don’t talk cool.” As soon as the mic gets in her hand, her dot points are in full view and she’s running with it. When the lights cast Ripley aglow center-stage, it’s Mami who returns to the summit. “In a way, I’m very me and I feel like Rhea Ripley is another version of myself. It’s the confident version of myself. It’s the version of me that would get arrested in everyday life if I were to act the way that I act,” she laughs. “But it really is still me, but she’s the side of me that doesn’t care about what people think about her. She just wants to go out there and be herself.”

At the end of WrestleMania 40, the Judgement Day walked out of Philadelphia holding both the Men’s and Women’s World Heavyweight Championships, after Ripley retained against Lynch and Priest cashed in on a newly-crowned Drew McIntyre. “What was that like, getting to share that with an ally and to both be in your inaugural reigns?” I ask Priest. “We felt, ‘This feels right.’ Coming from where we came from, everything we went through together, it was surreal. When we stood in private, just me and her, looking at each other’s titles, we were like, ‘This is real. We just did this,’” he says. “We’re together on screen, in a faction that’s dominating the show and everyone knows, Rhea and Damian—it’s a duo, they’re best friends. It’s a package deal. The fact that we were both on top of our divisions? It felt like everything we went through was for something, and just knowing how proud I was of her and her of me, made it that much more special. That was definitely a highlight of my career—not just me being champion, but me being champion at the same time as Rhea.”

But all of that would get cut short when, after a backstage attack by Liv Morgan on the RAW after WrestleMania, Ripley suffered a grade 3 AC joint sprain and was forced to vacate the Women’s World Championship. In a match for the title against Lynch, Morgan would come out victorious thanks to interference from Dominik Mysterio, whom she began seducing until Ripley’s return to action in July. At SummerSlam, Ripley turned face for the first time in two years after Mysterio betrayed her by kissing Morgan. Two days later, she and Priest were kicked out of the Judgement Day. “Rhea and I are the Judgement Day,” Priest says. “[Getting kicked out] hurt, because you form a bond and a family vibe with everybody that’s in the group. But the idea of Rhea and I not being in the Judgement Day also made sense, because we all grew and did what we were supposed to do with it. We rose to another level by supporting each other. Mission accomplished.”

At SummerSlam 2024 in July, as Mysterio’s betrayal hung in the balance, Ripley was in tears backstage, on the verge of a panic attack not disimilar to the one that threatened her WrestleMania match with Lynch in April. She was about to lose everything she’d known and loved in the business for the better part of three years. Ripley was about to be, for the first time since turning heel in 2022, alone. “That was such a vulnerable and scary part of the day and of my career, to be completely honest,” she remembers. “I was coming back from the shoulder injury, I was terrified. I didn’t think I was ready to step in the ring and wrestle, and I was like, ‘I’m going to hurt myself again. My shoulder doesn’t feel strong, it’s hurting. I don’t know if I can do this.’” Then, CM Punk, noticing her uneasiness, stops her in the tunnel. “I’m hot, sweaty, and nervous,” Ripley tells him, shakily. “All that will evaporate the instant you walk out,” he affirms. “Go be a superstar.”

“I really needed to hear that,” Ripley tells me. “It was very sentimental to me, and I needed that at that time. I needed him to reassure me that everything is going to be okay, and there’s a reason that I’m here. I just need to go out there and kill it because, he’s right: As soon as you go out there, nothing else matters. You forget why you’re nervous, because every time my music hits, I turn into Rhea Ripley. I turn into that animal that just wants to go out there and kill and win and stop at nothing to get what she wants.”

And Ripley went out and delivered one of the best spots of 2024, dislocating her shoulder and using the announcer’s table to snap it back into place. 57,000 people in a football stadium in Cleveland, Ohio got to witness it, as fans all the way in the nosebleeds went feral in the company of such a shocking crack. It was a TV sell with a pay-per-view pop. “You always get told to cater to the camera, because there’s more people watching at home than there is in the stadium,” Ripley says. Her husband encouraged her to add the spot into the match, and it worked. And, in a time-managed match where Liv Morgan was working her and relinquishing very little space, Ripley having that kind of moment outside of the ring was a miracle. “Where we’re completely separate, she can’t hit me or anything, people are going to see exactly what I do,” she continues. “They’re going to hear it, because the table is very, very loud. Then, with the cameras around the top, everyone could see it up the back. No one’s missing it and, if they do, they’re definitely going to replay it again on the screen. It made me look like a badass.”

A badass sell couldn’t squash all of Ripley’s worries, though. She admits that, on top of a three-month absence from the ring, her shoulder wasn’t 100% on show day. “I didn’t feel like I was ready, so I was already nervous going into that match. My collarbone was shooting outwards. I knew that I had to run into the table. I thought, ‘This is where I pop my shoulder. This is where it goes. This is where I hurt myself once again.’” But the over-the-top move went without a hitch and, by the end of the night, was trending online.

In Priest’s match against JD McDonagh on the RAW after SummerSlam, Bálor ambushed him until Ripley came to the rescue. It was a moment that gave a new emotional dimension to not just the Judgement Day’s story, but to Ripley’s and Priest’s as well, allowing their brother-sister dynamic to develop in singles competition. “Her coming out and doing that for me, it just hit different,” Priest says. “Like, ‘Of course you would have my back.’ And I’ll always forever, to eternity and back, have hers. She’s my ride or die homie. As heartbreaking as it was, being out of the Judgement Day, that moment was like, ‘Okay, I’m good with this.’” Their fans rallied behind Ripley and Priest and, when asked if they wanted to enter their mixed-tag team match against Morgan and Mysterio individually, the answer was obvious. Their faithful named them the “Terror Twins” online, and they knew it was time to reciprocate that love.

There’s an argument within the wrestling community about whether or not a superstar needs a title belt to get over with crowds. It taps into the power of championships in wrestling and whether or not accolades define someone’s legacy. In the nine months after she vacated the belt, Ripley’s pop still broke the sound barrier in every arena she showed up in. Like a phantom limb, the title’s aura lingered within her. “She’s very close to eclipsing a lot of what I think other women have done in the industry as a superstar,” Michaels says. “I don’t think she’s anywhere near her ceiling. There are times where you really feel like you’ve got a handle on what it is you’re doing, and then you look back five years later and you say, ‘Oh, no I didn’t.’ She’s only going to get better as she grows and matures, and how her character evolves is going to be fascinating to watch.”

FIVE DAYS AFTER THE 2025 Royal Rumble, I meet Rhea Ripley for the first time. Her office is a curio of the brutality she preaches. Above her desk, tacked to a wall, are the bleach-white skulls of various, demonically shaped animals, fan art, and various oddities, like a Ouija board, casket-shaped picture frames, and apothecary instruments. Her heavy metal affections vibrate in what trinkets drape her. In a corner sits a display cabinet with all of her world titles stacked above each other; next to it lies her Elimination Chamber 2024 vest: a black, studded, and chain-wrapped article of destruction with “RHEA RIPLEY” and an Australian flag painted on the back. She’s joyous, albeit noticeably exhausted after a three-week run that included her winning the Women’s World Championship back from Liv Morgan on the Netflix premiere of RAW, defending it against Nia Jax on Saturday Night’s Main Event 19 days later, and then costing her ally Iyo Sky a shot at the upcoming Elimination Chamber event.

When Jax performed her Samoan Drop finisher on Ripley, whose pacing visibly slowed down after, the IWC quickly erupted into worry, as she began clutching her waist in pain. “I thought I definitely broke my ribs, but I feel like that happens all the time,” Ripley says. “Every time us girls step out there, we’re going out there and beating each other up. There’s so many hits that people don’t notice or don’t pay attention to. We are putting everything we have on the line. It’s nice to see when people do notice it. I went on Twitter and could see all the comments like, ‘Oh, my God, I think Rhea is really injured. Please don’t be out again.’ Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, but I’ll be okay. It’s nice to see people believing in it.” I ask her how she’s holding up now. “I’m still feeling it,” she reveals. “When [Jax] sat me in the corner, she did her finisher but I was facing the wrong way so she couldn’t pin me.” Ripley pauses, before bending into a mischievous smirk: “Sucker.”

Ripley’s match with Jax was a time capsule, as she returned not to the grappling that defined her time in NXT UK, but to the lucha moves she learned at Riot City, like an Around the World DDT and chaining a Springboard Hurricanrana into a Code Red. “My bag is very deep,” she gleefully announces, reluctant to reveal whether or not she’ll ever un-retire her Michinoku Driver or Jumping Enziguri. After a six-month feud with Liv Morgan, Ripley had to play the heavy. “It doesn’t make sense for her to overpower me, pick me up, do all these moves that her fanbase wants her to do on me,” she says. “In real life, I am a lot stronger than Liv. I go to the gym every single day, I work on my body. There’s a reason why I am built the way that I am built on TV, and it’s because I work hard for that.” Stepping into the squared circle with Jax, a move-set change was warranted. “If I were to do an Around the World DDT on Liv Morgan, do you reckon that that would look legitimate?” she asks me. “Certainly not,” I tell her. “I don’t even know if she could base for that with my body type,” she continues, “because I am long and lanky, as well. Her being shorter, it’s just not going to work. Not saying she can’t, but it would be difficult.”

During her first World Championship reign, Ripley’s membership in the Judgement Day often overshadowed her reputation. That role was her life for three years. Look back at some of the stable’s group entrances, and you’ll find Ripley in the background despite holding the most prestigious belt. Now, her name is no longer preceded by “representing the Judgement Day” in intros. She’s carrying the belt alone, no longer forced to participate in a hierarchy between allies. But she never got to ease out of that routine. “It’s very, very strange,” she says. “Every time I’m going out there, even now that my feud with Liv is done, every time I go out there and I don’t see either Liv, Raquel, or Dom, or Priest, it’s very strange to me. I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I belong here right now,’ and I just need to get over that hurdle of always having someone there that I’m familiar with, that I’m used to having.”

The last time she was a solo champion was after beating Asuka for the RAW Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 37. Her ensuing feuds were largely forgotten, because none of her opponents were over enough to contend in the main event picture for the longterm, and her first responsibility was to be a menace and rile up the men around. With a thriving women’s division to feed from, Rhea Ripley can now be the champion she wanted to be after defeating Flair in 2023, saying, “I didn’t want it to always be about Judgement Day. I wanted to defend the title, I wanted to have stories with the women, but none of them were built up to the point that they are now, where it could be taken seriously.”

DURING A RECENT EPISODE OF Stephanie McMahon’s ESPN+ series Stephanie’s Places, Ripley was put over by “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, just as she’s been put over by Shawn Michaels, Cody Rhodes, CM Punk, and Charlotte Flair. “She’s beautiful, and she has a solid frame,” Austin told McMahon. “Everyone knew she was a blue-chipper, ‘cause she has the looks, size, charisma. She thrives in the biggest of moments, and I don’t even think she’s peaked yet. I’m really excited for her present. She checks every box that you could want checked.” When a WWE Hall of Famer recognizes the good parts of your work ethic and talent that you don’t get to notice yourself, it says a lot about the impact of your craft. The Rhea Ripley that steps into the ring on Monday nights has the ego and the mettle to hit a Riptide on men twice her size, but the Demi Bennett ensconced in a wall of weirdo relics before me is far more soft-spoken and peaceful.

I ask her if she pays the advice of her heroes forward to the younger superstars on the roster. She does when she can, workshopping matches with women like Ivy Nile, Roxanne Perez, and Maxxine Dupri during downtime periods, but she recoils at the thought of being important enough to dole out wisdom. “I feel like I’m not as big of a deal as I may potentially be to these people,” Ripley admits. “If I were to say some inspirational quote to them, or just try and give them a pick-me-up, I don’t think it’s going to be as important in my head, because it’s only me. I’m just Rhea Ripley.” But her body and her mind remembers the affirmations given to her by her elders, like CM Punk, Triple H, and Paul Heyman, who’s taken a shine to Ripley, telling her, “You’re a superstar, kid!” when they pass each other backstage.

But Ripley can go from Demi to Mami on a dime, as she tells me that “hearing people that you grew up watching saying such nice things about you and saying that you’re a big deal in this company and you’re one of the best” was humbling, because she rarely thinks of herself that way. “To be able to go out there and be the ‘Stone Cold’ for women, but in my own authentic way—hearing that come from him reassures me that I’m on the right path and I am doing things correctly and I’m doing things my way. It might not be by the book, but it’s my way and it’s what works for me. And it worked for him.”

Comparing yourself to a legend is a tall task, but Rhea Ripley is the “Stone Cold” Steve Austin of the women’s division in 2025. She’s so over that not even a heel turn could bring her heat, à la Austin’s unsuccessful turn after WrestleMania 17. The gray area wasn’t only in the aluminum beer cans Austin smashed together in promos, but in his line-straddling anti-heroism, too. It’s a character Ripley has always bought into, a babyface with an attitude that isn’t so black-and-white. “When I’m being a babyface, I’m still very heel-ish in a way. I just have more sympathy for people,” she says. “I’m not heartless, right? But the people on the other side of the match, they’re gonna feel how brutal I can really be. Judgement Day Rhea didn’t care about anyone. I just wanted to brutalize someone, that’s all I really cared about. Now, I can still be my brutal self but I can get along with others a little bit better.”

NINE DAYS BEFORE WRESTLEMANIA 41, I meet with Ripley again. There’s a soreness in the air. After unintentionally costing Iyo Sky her Elimination Chamber qualifying match against Liv Morgan via disqualification. “Liv grabbed my hair and, out of self-defense, I hit her,” she recalls. “I was trying to help Iyo. I was trying to go out there and take care of Raquel [Rodriguez] so she didn’t have to worry about two people.” To make amends, Ripley gave her ally a proper championship opportunity. And, in a twist, thanks to a spectating Bianca Belair—who won the Women’s Elimination Chamber two days earlier—cheering for Sky, the Damage CTRL high-flyer came out victorious on March 3rd. Ripley remains winless against Sky in non-house show matches, dating back to their semifinal match at the second Mae Young Classic. “Making that match official was my idea, so I can’t get mad at anyone else, because I’m the one that did that,” Ripley says. “But I knew that the stakes were there. I knew that WrestleMania was around the corner and I was making such a massive gamble in my career, but Iyo was one of my friends.”

Going into that title match against Sky, doubt was settling in on Ripley. The wounds from her Judgement Day eviction and Dominik Mysterio’s betrayal were still open, and Damian Priest’s recent transfer to SmackDown shattered her. “I had already been so emotional and so mentally broken by people that I called my family that everyone who is my friend, I can’t fully tust,” she says. “I want to be able to trust them, I need to be able to trust them, but I can’t.” Watching Belair root for Sky turned Ripley into a goth pressure-cooker.

“After we’ve been putting across for the past two, three years that we’ve wanted to face each other at Mania, for her to then cheer for my opposition, knowing that I’ve never beaten her before and this could change everything for WrestleMania, where we don’t get to step in the ring together, I had a lot of feelings going through my body. So, I snapped.” Backstage after the main event, Jackie Redmond put the camera in front of a devastated, trembling Ripley, who delivered the best promo of her career. “No one told me what to say or what to do, and it was what was going through my mind at that time that I just spewed out in front of everyone,” she says. “It’s documented, so I’m never going to be able to forget those feelings and that hurt.”

For as consequential as her match with Charlotte Flair during WrestleMania 39 was, no WWE performers have been as valuable to Ripley’s career as Belair and Sky. She and Sky were babyfaces in NXT at the same time, heels at the same time. They were teammates during WarGames. “We always meshed,” Ripley says. “and I was always there for her and she was always there for me.” But how beatable is Iyo, and what keeps preventing Ripley from pinning her? “Unlocking that killer mentality and that killer side of who I am and what makes me me and makes me go out there and accomplish what I want,” she tells me, “I feel like I can’t fully switch that on when it comes to Iyo, because I have a little sympathy for her. I don’t want to hurt her too bad, because I respect and like her.” With Belair, she and Ripley have rarely stepped into a ring together on the main roster. “She’s changed and evolved a whole lot,” Ripley says. “I’ve been watching her and seeing what she’s overcome and what she’s gotten better at, but I can only learn so much by watching. And vice-versa.”

But come WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas, Ripley, Sky, and Belair will be in a triple threat match, where anything can happen. It’s high-flyer versus brute, quick strength versus ruthless powerhouse. “I’m going to have to go in there with the mentality that I had within the Judgement Day,” she says. “I’m going to have to be the Eradicator, just brutalizing people. I’m going to have to unlock that and then, possibly, I may be able to pin Iyo or Bianca.”

“Maybe Adam Pearce’s flub about you representing the Judgement Day wasn’t totally inaccurate then, if you’re going to try and summon the Eradicator,” I say to her, referring to the RAW General Manager’s recent gaff at the Women’s World Championship contract signing.

“When he said that, I legit was in gorilla and was like, ‘Man, I haven’t heard that in a long time.’”

“They’ve been wanting to add another member.”

“I mean, you never know… But I’m good.” [Laughs]

Ripley’s beef with her old stable is firmly in the rearview, and the upcoming triple threat’s complex dynamics have started weighing on her. “You have to have eyes in the back of your head 24/7, because anyone could come from any direction,” she says. “Someone that was knocked out two minutes prior could now be pinning you.” Ripley, Belair, and Sky being so familiar with each other has its advantages and disadvantages. “They know my strengths and my weaknesses,” she says of her opponents. “That’s what they’ve been capitalizing on the last few weeks, which is why I had my rematch with Iyo and I wasn’t successful. They know me better than a lot of people know me, and I know them a lot better than a lot of people know them. I don’t know if that’s going to be a good thing or not, going into this match. But I don’t want to be pinned. I don’t want to lose. I want to win my Women’s World Championship back.”

She’s been involved in some of the best women’s triple threat matches of the 2020s, be it against Flair and Sky at NXT TakeOver: In Your House 2020 (“ I was stuck in a little predicament—in the figure eight and then Iyo hit me with a moonsault, so I literally got ganged up on by both of them. I’m proud of that loss, because it took two people to beat me”), or when she showed up to SmackDown in 2019 and fought Flair and Sasha Banks. “That’s where the unpredictability comes in—a little girl from NXT just scurries her way in and quickly pins Charlotte Flair. You don’t want to be the one that’s pinned, or the one that’s on the outside watching the pin happen. You don’t want to be the one that loses. There’s three of us, two are going to lose.”

AT THE RAW TAPING IN Cleveland on February 3rd, I watch a few dozen mini Rhea Ripleys trot around Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse. It reminds me of when, in the mid-2000s, at nine years old, I fell in love with wrestling. My friends dressed head-to-toe in John Cena gear, arm bands, jorts, and all, and I’d go trick-or-treating in a Rey Mysterio mask. On the playground, we’d do wrestling moves off slide ladders and hit the D-Generation X “suck it” moves on our opps. Now, there are young fans slicking their hair back, rocking pitch-black lipstick, and sporting Ripley’s brutality vest, because stepping into the aura of someone you idolize remains timeless. Ripley’s “dirty little moshers” even held a Rhea Ripley lookalike contest in Indianapolis during Royal Rumble weekend, which she regrets missing.

“My fans come with all these stories and I try to embrace them as much as I can because, as much as I mean to them, they also mean that to me,” she says. “Even just the little things—women coming to me and being like, ‘You were the inspiration and the reason that I cut my hair short, now I feel more comfortable and confident in my own body, because I did something that I wanted to do.’ A lot of people are stuck [thinking] females have to have long, luscious hair, be thin, be petite, and be perfect. That’s just not reality at all. It’s nice to see people welcoming the true them and being genuine and being comfortable in their own skin. That’s all I’ve really wanted to make people realize in this profession.”

She continues, “We’re on such a high platform, and people need an inspiration. They need someone to look at and be like, ‘Oh, she doesn’t care about what anyone else says, so why should I?’ That’s what I needed when I was growing up. Some of the notes I get, they’re so heartfelt and they really make me cry sometimes. I have to compose myself, but a lot of my fans are just so passionate and I love them all. They’re absolutely batshit crazy, but they’re my batshit crazy.”

Ripley has been over with the WWE audience for a long time, but she points to one moment as especially significant in her uptick in popularity: when she was set to cut a RAW promo on Liv Morgan the week after returning from her AC sprain. The titantron screen showed her coming into the arena from an elevator, and the Dayton crowd’s pop surged through every tunnel in the building, telling a story of its own before Ripley even picked up a microphone. It was bedlam. “I could hear them from the elevator and I still had a long walk to go to get into gorilla and then out to the crowd,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Damn, all these people are excited to see me?’ It’s baffling. You’ve got to a point where you’ve captivated the audience so much that they’re excited to see any little bit of you, even if it does start backstage.”

She wasn’t an unproven Aussie doing “coconut shows” in NXT anymore. She was Rhea “Bloody” Ripley, the Eradicator. “I’m 28 now. I’ve grown up and found who [Demi is],” she says. “Rhea Ripley has done the same thing. I want every fan of mine to be comfortable in their skin and be themselves and not care about what people think. Who are you trying to please? Are you trying to please other people? You’re trying to please yourself at the end of the day. Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be miserable, being someone else?”

Priest cites Ripley’s professionalism as an influence that leaves an influence on other himself and other wrestlers in the WWE locker room. “She can just stay humble, get aggressive, get serious, and be this smiling ball of joy while being intimidating,” he says. “It’s the weirdest combination. But you watch her, you see her demeanor, the way she carries herself, the way she treats people, the way she reacts to how she’s being treated. It’s all everything you would want a champion to be. She loves her fans and even her haters. She’s like, ‘Go ahead, give me more fuel.’ And then she goes out and kills it every time. And, even on camera, she’s just as impressive, as far as how she carries herself on camera as she does off camera. Those are the things that I look at, and those are the things that I take with me. We should all strive to be that way. That’s what separates a professional wrestler and a ‘WWE Superstar.’ She is the definition of a WWE Superstar, and that’s not in any one division, male or female. She’s a superstar who’s on a different level, and she’s earned every second of it. She fought for all of it.”

The 20-year-old Rhea Ripley taking too many house show pins is never too far out of reach for Demi Bennett. “I wanted to fit in with what I thought WWE wanted at the time,” she says, mentioning that most of the women in the company weren’t tattooed at the time. “It sucked, because I was like, ‘I love tattoos, but I love WWE and I want to be a WWE Superstar, but they won’t hire me if I have tattoos.’ I could never really be myself. I was like, ‘I gotta have long hair. All the girls have long hair. I have to look a specific way. I have to be lean and be colorful and bubbly, and that’s what they want from me, so that’s what I’m going to do.’ I hated every single second of it.”

Like the second Mae Young Classic was for Ripley in 2018, WrestleMania is a reset for the WWE. Titles change, old feuds end and new ones begin. RAW and SmackDown transition into their next chapters. Win or lose against Iyo Sky and Bianca Belair this weekend, Rhea wants to take the embellished, violent, and aggressive sides of her character and put more Demi Bennett into it. “I need to have some sort of evolution in the way that I can express what is going on in my head and then, hopefully, get people to connect with that and gravitate towards that and see that Rhea is not a bad person, she’s just a very misunderstood human being that is very bad at expressing her feelings and prefers to just lash-out with anger and violence, because it’s a defense mechanism. That doesn’t get portrayed enough on TV, Rhea Ripley’s human side.”

On RAW days before our final conversation, as Ripley enters the ring to sign her WrestleMania contract, the Minneapolis crowd chants “Rhea!” instead of “Mami!” I question whether there is a world where she moves on from the nickname she brought with her into superstardom. “I feel like I’ve become Mami in a different way,” she reveals. “That name is always going to cement such a historic moment in my career, and it will stick with me forever. People are still going to make bracelets that say ‘Mami’ on it, people are still going to have signs that say ‘Mami’ on it, even if I do evolve and change and grow and people do start chanting ‘Rhea.’ It’s such a pinnacle of my career.” Will that part of her character ever disappear? “We will grow and evolve and add onto it, but it will always be there.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.