Sonya Deville says the phone call that ended her ten years in WWE hurt her far more than she let anyone see, and that she has since come to think she needed it.
Deville, who now works under her real name Daria Berenato, went through it on The Determined Society.
“It definitely hurt my feelings more than I let social media know, or anybody around me probably know,” she said. “It wasn’t that I took it personal, because it’s a business. I totally understand.”
What made it land as hard as it did was arithmetic.
“I got signed when I was 21. I was still a forming human, and so I was there till I was 31,” Deville said. “My entire identity, my entire adult life, all I knew out of adult living was I’m a WWE wrestler. Every single week I fly out. I’m on the road four days a week. I’m home in my bed maybe two, for 10 years, and sometimes I’m not home for three, four weeks at a time if we have a European tour.”
Her word for what followed was mourning.
“It defined who I was. I didn’t know who Daria was or what I stood for outside of that, and so I was hurt, because it was kind of like mourning a loss,” she said.
She said the loss was not really the job.
“I loved everyone there, from production to ring guys to the camera guys to talent to makeup department. They were my best friends. I was cool with everybody,” Deville said. “So the breaking of that cycle, that routine, those friendships, was hard.”
Asked how she avoided sinking after it, she said it came down to how she reads her own life.
“We are here to have a journey. It’s not about the destination, or else we’d be rushing to our own end,” she said. “So it’s about the journey, and it’s about learning and growing.”
She was candid about where she had been before the call came.
“Looking back, it’s probably the best thing that could have happened to me, because I think that I was becoming numb,” Deville said. “Numb’s not a great word, but I was kind of becoming numb to the routine and stagnant, and I felt a little broken down. I felt like I was losing that luster that I always had, that fire that I always had.”
She was careful to separate that from the wrestling itself.
“It wasn’t for a lack of the love of the sport, but just going through a lot of things and politics and all the kinds of things that go into a high-level sport like that,” she said. “I needed it. I needed a wake up call. I needed a fresh start, and so the passion and the fire I’ve gained back for my life over the past two years has been insane.”
Deville was signed out of Tough Enough in 2015, having come to the show from mixed martial arts rather than wrestling, and was released in February 2025. She was the first openly gay woman WWE signed, and spent a stretch of the run as an on-screen authority figure on SmackDown rather than an active wrestler, which is part of what she means about the routine. Her only WWE championship came on the July 17, 2023 episode of Raw, when she and Chelsea Green beat Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez for the Women’s Tag Team Championship, eight years into her run. She tore her ACL eleven days later in a title defence against Charlotte Flair and Bianca Belair and had to give the title up. She returned in May 2024 and worked another nine months before the release.
She has moved into acting, appearing in the television film His, Hers and Ours and filming the horror comedy Gay Zombies, and is billed under her own name for that work.
