Sonya Deville opens up about her injury.
On the July 17, 2023, episode of WWE Raw, Sonya Deville and Chelsea Green beat Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez to win the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship. In doing so, they won their first titles in WWE. However, Deville suffered a torn ACL during a match against Bianca Belair and Charlotte Flair on the July 28 episode of WWE SmackDown. As a result, she was forced to relinquish her title.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Sonya Deville reflected on suffering the injury and recalled how she initially had no idea.
“I had no idea. I must be so naive to this. I’ve been an athlete, I was like, I’m fine. I tagged out. Alright, I’m lying. I knew something was wrong. It felt a little weird. My knee buckled and I was like, 'Oh, that was weird, but I’m fine,' I have eight minutes left in this match. We’re about to go to a commercial break. I need to get it together. So I tagged out to Chelsea and I got on the apron. Luckily, we were in a commercial break. So I was like alright, let me suss out the situation. So I’m hopping on the apron and anyone in the live audience was probably like, 'What the heck is she doing?' But I’m hopping up in down on the apron trying to gauge if I can trust my knee. Sure enough, it was sketchy at best. I was like, 'Oh God, well, I’m in a match with Bianca, Charlotte, Chelsea, it’s a tag match, no less. I’m not about to change the entire match right now on live TV.' So I was getting the comeback run on me and I had another eight minutes to wrestle. So I was like, we just got to do this. So Chelsea tagged me in for the hot tag. I had two comebacks ran on me. We did some falsies, I think a superplex. The whole time I was like, 'Oh my God, I hope I don’t fall flat on my face.' Sure enough, we made it to the end and I limped back, I got my rental car, went to my hotel, tried to pretend like it didn’t happen, because in this business, no one wants to be injured and out of play. Because I just won my first title. I was so sad, I was like, It’s fine. It’s just a sprain, I’ll wrap it. Long story short, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I fell face-first into the wall. I was like, Oh, I think something’s wrong," Deville said.
Deville then looked back on having to relinquish the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship and said that giving up the title was devastating. She described how winning the gold had made her so happy, and she wanted to elevate the titles before she got hurt.
“I was so devastated. I mean, I’d been with the company for nine years. Of course, part of being in the WWE is to one day grab that brass ring and get gold around your waist and that’s what I had been striving for, of course. So I finally got my first championship and I was so happy. I was so elated. I was ready to make those titles mean more than ever before. [Then] The injury came, which is probably why I ran back to my hotel and hid in my room and didn’t tell anyone I was injured," Deville said.
Deville returned to WWE on the May 20 episode of WWE Raw. More information is available here.
Deville landed a movie role during her time away from the ring. More information is available here.
Thanks to Chris Van Vliet for sharing the quotes in this article.
