Simone Johnson told the story of the worst week of her WWE career to the man who was at the center of it.
Johnson, who worked as Ava, appeared on Cody Rhodes’ podcast, What Do You Wanna Talk About?. The subject was February 2024, when her father took the WrestleMania spot Rhodes had won at the Royal Rumble and the reaction found its way to her instead.
She was the first member of the family to appear on WWE television after it happened, at NXT Vengeance Day two days later.
Dad came back; he shook your hand; he took your spot. That was Friday. That Sunday was a NXT pay-per-view, Vengeance Day. It was the first time there was WWE programming since that Friday. I will never forget this. I was sitting in makeup. I finished my makeup, and our head writer, Johnny Russo, came up to me and was like, ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’ ‘Sure.’ He was like, ‘Just so you know, when we play your promo, please don’t be surprised if they boo you.’ ‘Okay.’ I can understand that. That did happen.
The rest of it was not confined to the building.
All of the hate online happened. That day, it changed the way I looked at fans overall and changed the way that I looked at the wrestling business. For a while, I thought about it in a very negative way. It was quite negative at the time.
It went beyond booing at the time. Johnson posted that she was getting death threats over a situation she had nothing to do with, asked to be left out of it, and deleted her X account shortly afterwards.
She now describes it as useful.
In a way, I’m incredibly grateful that it happened because it kind of made me double down and made me more confident in what I was doing and why I was doing it. All these external factors are happening, and everyone can have an opinion because of who I am or what my dad has done. It made me be a little selfish in my journey and what I was doing, but it was necessary. That Vengeance Day pay-per-view changed so much about how I thought about wrestling and my journey and my place.
WWE reversed course, Rhodes got the match, and he beat Roman Reigns at WrestleMania XL to end a reign of 1,316 days. Johnson is no longer with the company. She was NXT general manager from January 2024, the youngest in the brand’s history, and chose not to renew her contract in January this year after six years with WWE.
