Taya Valkyrie Recalls Thinking She Had ‘Let Everyone Down’ After Her WWE Release

In a recent interview on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Taya Valkyrie (aka Franky Monet in WWE NXT) discussed the shift from NXT to NXT 2.0, thinking she had let everyone down after her WWE release, and much more. Here are some highlights (via Fightful):

Taya Valkyrie on the shift from NXT to NXT 2.0 in WWE: “It was night and day. It was an obvious change of energy and obvious feeling because we were hearing all sorts of rumors about what they were looking for compared to last week. I was very confused. ‘What is going on?’ It was like the summer. It was so weird and the most confusing experience of my entire life and having working everywhere, I was just left, ‘what is going on?’ 100% (it felt like walking on eggshells). I think everybody was. I can only speak for myself, but I can say the energy definitely shifted. We were hearing rumors all the time about ‘they are going to be firing people this week’ and the whole week, everyone is scared. We’re all busting our asses. I ended up training with Corino and the boys in the tag class. I loved training with MSK and Imperium because they are pushing me and making me do different stuff. It’s really cool learning from different people from different walks of life and paths. Everything was good and everyone was working really hard. The shift of how they wanted 2.0 to be literally changed from one day to the next. It just made everyone almost like hold your breath.”

On whether Triple H losing power had to do with her WWE release and thinking she had let everyone down: “No one ever said that to me or confirmed anything like that. I don’t know. It was really confusing and I tired to make sense of it for a really long time and I was really angry, but you can’t make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. All I can say is that I worked very hard, I gave everything I could like everywhere I worked before and it was very confusing and I felt like I did something wrong. I’m a sensitive person. When everything went down, it was very confusing and heartbreaking for me because I felt like I let everyone down.

“John was on tour in the UK. Thank God, my friend Heather Monroe picked me up to go shopping when I got the call. I felt like I was representing the over 30 women who are still badasses and look good and do their job, are passionate, and can work, and I feel like I let everyone down. I know I’m putting that on myself, but it’s been really rough. I now know that I did nothing wrong. It just sucks. It sucks when you meet your heroes and you work at a place you dreamed of working forever and it’s something so out of your control,” she said. “Had I not gone there, I would have regretted it forever. I don’t regret going there. I just wish it had been handled differently and I would have been given a chance. I still made really cool friends and got to work with people I probably never would have worked with. Shoutout to all the coaches I got to learn from and the creative team and writers; Road Dogg, William Regal, all these people that really did help me.”