In the summer of 2012, Celeste Bonin, then known as Kaitlyn in WWE, won an opportunity to challenge for the WWE Divas Championship.
Except that she wasn't meant to win that opportunity.
Bonin won a Battle Royal on Raw to become the No. 1 contender for the Divas Championship, being held by Layla at the time. The win was supposed to be for Eve Torres, but a botched spot left Bonin as the last woman standing, giving her a future title shot. In an interview with Ring The Belle, Bonin spoke about that moment and admitted that she thought she would get fired for that.
"It's so hard to watch because, in that moment, I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm going to get fired.' That reaction from Layla was 100 percent real. She was like, 'This bitch.' So Raw is live and there's a saying, 'Nothing goes wrong on live TV,' because once it happens, it's there. You have to go with it. We all knew going in that I wasn't supposed to win. There was supposed to be a different spot. I was going to clothesline [Eve Torres] over [the top rope], she would catch herself and then I was going to be eliminated. In that moment, she said, 'You have to hit me harder.' I JBL'd her over the rope and she hit herself so hard, she fell," Bonin said.
When Bonin went backstage, she thought she would get an angry Vince McMahon yelling at her, but the reality was the complete opposite. Bonin said McMahon was actually laughing at how the match ended.
“I legit thought that when I walked back through the curtain that I was going to be fired. That was right on the cusp of the Divas getting more opportunities. So I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve f***ed everything up.’ I walked back and Vince was laughing hysterically. I was like, ‘Is it like an evil laugh?' There was a lot of people who thought I didn’t deserve it because I was still so new, I hadn’t proved myself, it's such a weird industry. but there was also a lot of people that were like, ‘Congratulations, this is your opportunity. Take it,’” Bonin said.
You can check out the full interview in the video at the top of the page.
