Naomi Explains What Drove Her to Leave WWE and Join Impact Wrestling

By Connor Casey

Former WWE Superstar Naomi, now going by her real name Trinity, walked out of WWE alongside Sasha Banks back in May 2022. The pair were quickly suspended, stripped of their WWE Women's Tag Team Championships and chastized on TV for several weeks, but their futures in the wrestling business remained a mystery for the rest of the year. Banks made the jump to New Japan Pro-Wrestling at the start of the year, while the former SmackDown Women's Champion remained mostly out of the public spotlight. That finally changed during the latest Impact Wrestling TV tapings last week, which saw her debut for the promotion. She'd then win her first match for the company against Kilynn King last Saturday. 

While Banks (albeit somewhat in character) has openly stated she won't explain what led to her and Naomi leaving the WWE, Trinity opted to open up a bit in a new interview with Busted Open Radio on Tuesday. While explaining why she chose Impact out of the multiple US-based promotions, she said (h/t WrestlingNews.co), "The doors are open for me everywhere, literally everywhere but I truly feel like Impact is the best choice for me at this point in my life right now with what I want to do and to just be able to work with the talent there I feel that is where I'll be happiest and most utilized and really get to grow in the ways that I feel that I need to right now on this wrestling journey. Had all of this stuff never happened, there's no way that I would have took that leap but the situation kind of forced me to figure it out."

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She then described her unhappiness during her final months in WWE — "Ultimately, I left that day because of the way I was talked to and handled. Everything kind of just broke me that day. It had nothing to do with anything else, anybody else. That was just it. I had to. To go through all the backlash and the negativity and the lies and the rumors and then to also kind of just feel lost, it broke me. It was probably the lowest I've ever felt in my life. But going through that made me reset and face it head on and figure out how to learn from this experience and grow from it [and] just find myself again in all of it."

Backstage reports released throughout 2022 have indicated WWE wasn't interested in booking the pair to defend their tag titles on pay-per-view after winning them at WrestleMania 39. Despite pitching a title defense for Hell in a Cell, the pair were instead going to be placed in separate singles matches against the two reigning Women's Champions (Bianca Belair and Ronda Rousey) and presumably lose. Frustrated with their concerns falling on deaf ears, the pair reportedly walked out just before an episode of Raw in May

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