During a recent interview with “Ring the Belle”, Maria Kanellis commented on her storyline with Mike Bennett in WWE, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On her storyline with Mike Bennett in WWE and working while pregnant: “I was supposed to be on TV another four weeks, and then Mike was going to literally turn on me and be like, ‘I don’t need this. I’m gonna go do my thing.’ He was gonna use that he’s a recovering drug addict and all of this really positive stuff to build this positive inspirational character and be the babyface that he truly is. It just didn’t do anywhere. I think it’s really sad in that sense, but the most important thing to me is that so many women have said to me how empowering the storyline was and how great it was to see a pregnant woman on WWE. How inspiring it was for me to win a championship even though I was pregnant.
“So many people paint pregnant ladies like they’re disabled. It’s actually the definition of pregnancy in federal law is as a disability, so to see someone out here pregnant…..I think I might have been 20 weeks when they had me written off TV. Maybe it was a little further along. But to see me with a pregnant bump and out there and still moving and traveling around, it was inspiring to women. For me, if that’s all that comes out of it, that’s good enough. I’m sad that they made my husband look so crappy, but at the end of the day, it also gave him such great motivation to get back out there and kill it.”
On what she wants to see with the future of women’s wrestling: “More opportunities. Right now, women do get more time on television. I feel like the characters as a whole could be built to be more whole characters rather than just one thing. Yes, I understand you are strong, but I would like to see something else. I think Becky [Lynch] has done a fantastic job of that and I want to see more of that. I want to see more women that have these full characters. It’s not really on them, it’s on how much time they get on television because when you only get a couple of minutes, of course you’re only gonna show one thing because otherwise, it’s very confusing.
“I want to see more well-rounded characters in wrestling because they have more opportunities on television. I’d like to see the women’s championships, no matter what company, put on just as much of a pedestal as they are the men’s. So, if there’s gonna be a press conference, there’s the men’s champion and there’s the women’s champion. I don’t believe a championship is a gender, I believe it’s a title. It’s a title that should be reseptented in the same type of way as a men’s championship. I’m hoping you see that in Ring of Honor, but I also hope you see that in other companies as well.”
