WWE: Rhea Ripley credits Edge and The Judgement Day for her growth (2024)

After bouncing around the main roster following a dominant run in NXT, Rhea Ripley found herself in an interesting spot in the later spring and summer of 2022, when she officially joined Edge and Damian Priest in The Judgement Day. Sure, she'd already had a successful run as the RAW Women's Champion and found success in a pair of tag teams with Nikki ASH and Liv Morgan, the former of which won the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship, but Ripley was like oh so many other female WWE Superstars before “The Rated-R Superstar” reached out; stuck firmly in the upper-middle card below the champs and legacy performers like Becky Lynch, Bianca Belair, Ronda Rousey, and Charlotte Flair with no clear path to the top.

Though The Judgement Day didn't initially work out as Edge intended and arguably didn't really get over until Dominik Mysterio joined the group and became a supernova of heat from the crowd, in the months proceeding, it's hard to argue that the faction hasn't become one of the most popular acts in all of WWE, and Ripley, in turn, a performer worthy of dethroning Flair as the SmackDown Women's Champion in the penultimate match of Night 1 of WrestleMania 39.

Discussing her in-ring success since joining the faction, Ripley shouted out the members of The Judgement Day, past and present, for bringing her career to new heights in an interview with Corey Graves and Kevin Patrick on After The Bell.

“I've definitely learned a lot being in The Judgment Day,” Rhea Ripley said via Wrestling News. “The Judgment Day, it just works. I feel like we've all grown individually within the group as well, which has been really, really cool to see. At the start when it was me, Priest, and Edge, I feel like I learned a lot about myself and my own confidence when being in the ring with them boys, especially learning from someone like Edge. He's a legend in his business. I loved him growing up. He was one of my favorites. I cried when he retired. So knowing that I get to go out there and stand in the ring with him and back him up, and he has my back as well, it was really, really cool. It brought me to this other side of the business where like, I do get to be in the ring with the boys and I do get to be around them and listen to how they talk and how they do things. It was a different learning curve for me, which was really fun. It's not super different, but at the same time, like the way that they speak to each other, the way that they plan little bits and pieces, sometimes it's just so intricate, and I was like, ‘Yo, I didn't realize that we could do something like this.' I feel like being with the boys, we get away with a lot more, which I was having fun with.”

“I've been able to learn from people like Finn Balor, Damian Priest, and then also with Dominik. We've been growing in this business. He's been in this business pretty much his whole life, which is wild to even think. But just watching his growth over the last six months, I want to say, it's been so incredible. We weren't even really friends before this. We barely even talked. We just said hello, like, how are you? So to see how much I've bonded with these guys in such a short amount of time, it's been so rewarding, and so much fun. When we're out there, we all just help each other, which is why a lot of the time you don't even see it, like we're slowly or quietly talking to each other telling each other like what we should do, or how we should act, and what the plan is, sort of thing. It’s been a lot of fun.”

Will The Judgement Day survive the forthcoming WWE Draft and stay together long-term, or will one or maybe even more members of the faction find themselves an island on their own away from their friends? Only time will tell, but after learning her lessons from working with the other members of The Judgement Day, it's clear Ripley's career arrow is pointed directly up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNqSCqAh28A

Rhea Ripley shouts out two of her biggest supporters in WWE.

Elsewhere in her interview with Graves and Patrick, Rhea Ripley was asked about her progression as part of the WWE Universe and decided to shout out a pair of WWE stars past and present for helping her along the way.

“The two people that I really like have to give credit to are Raquel Rodriguez,” Ripley replied. “She's my best friend. We went through so much at the Performance Center together. We were the only two girls in Scotty (2 Hotty)'s class. Scott is the other one. Every single day at training he would see me be so depressed and upset and question everything. He would take me to the corner of the ring, tell me to wipe my eyes, and give me a little pep talk sort of thing. He'd be like, ‘You're doing great. Don't listen to people. You're doing fantastic. You're learning, you're improving, it's gonna get better, and you're gonna leave people behind,' and that's exactly what happened. So Scotty and Raquel are the main two.”

Welp, if you had Scotty 2 Hotty training the new SmackDown Women's Champion on your bingo card of wrestling developments, then you, friend, are looking very good right now. And as for Rodriguez? Well, it's safe to say she's going to be wrestling Ripley for a very long time, so it's a good thing the duo get along so well.