Simone Johnson says she spent about a year thinking about leaving WWE before she did it, and that what finally decided it was not feeling able to grow there. Johnson worked as NXT’s on-screen General Manager under the name Ava and left the company in January. Cody Rhodes asked her on What Do You Wanna Talk About whether it was a hard decision.
“Incredibly,” she said. “It was something that I had been thinking about for, I think, about a year prior. And I knew that my contract was up in February, and a couple of things had been happening. There’s a lot of different reasons why I chose to leave, and it was incredibly hard.”
She did not go into what those reasons were.
“But I felt like it was time. I really, really wanted to grow, and I didn’t feel like I was in a position at WWE to where I could grow,” Johnson said. “And I’m incredibly grateful for my time there. I would not change it for the world. But I knew I needed to do something else. I need to learn and grow and see what’s on the other side.”
Rhodes, who left WWE himself in 2016 and has talked often about that decision, said only she could know, and made a point about the difficulty of taking that kind of decision when your family is in the business.
“Family is going to tell you their experience. This is your experience,” he said.
Johnson now works at Seven Bucks Productions, the company her father and mother founded in 2012, and she described the role in some detail.
“My official title is Junior Executive, I believe. Which is a fancy way to say that I get to read scripts and take notes and sit in on so many meetings with incredible writers and producers and directors, and I feel so lucky,” she said. “There’s so much that I thought I knew about the entertainment industry, and then getting to learn so much more has been so eye opening. They’re not lying when they say making a movie is the hardest thing in the world.”
She said the value is in the rooms rather than the title.
“Every time that I get to sit in on a meeting, whether it’s an internal meeting at Seven Bucks or we’re taking meetings with other directors or producers, I always feel like I learn so much,” Johnson said. “I leave those meetings and I’m like, okay, where do we go from this, or what does this look like now.”
Johnson signed with WWE in February 2020 as its first fourth-generation wrestler, debuted on television in 2022 as Ava Raine in Joe Gacy’s Schism, and became NXT General Manager in January 2024. She announced the NXT Women’s North American Championship at Stand and Deliver that April, the first women’s secondary title in WWE, and was put in charge of the revived Evolve brand in March 2025.
Her contract expired on January 29 and she confirmed the exit on Instagram the following day, writing that she had chosen not to renew and that it was a difficult decision. WWE put out a statement thanking her, which Sean Ross Sapp noted at the time is not something the company usually does for departing talent. Shawn Michaels named Robert Stone, her on-screen assistant, as interim General Manager on the NXT of February 3, without mentioning her by name.
This is the second time she has addressed the exit publicly and the first with any detail about the timing. Speaking to Gianmarco Soresi on The Downside in June, in her first interview after leaving, she said there was not one particular thing, that it was a lot of things that had been on her mind for a while, and that she does not regret it. The year of thinking about it and the February contract date are new here.
She has also said she is not sure she wants another public-facing role like the one she had. The Seven Bucks job is the other side of that, and the way she describes it, reading scripts and sitting in meetings- is the opposite of being on television every Tuesday night.
