Purrazzo speaks candidly.
The last time that Deonna Purrazzo wrestled on AEW television was on a January 2025 edition of Collision. She dove into her absence from AEW TV while speaking to MuscleManMalcolm.
Purrazzo is now back competing under the Ring of Honor banner and said she thinks there was always an idea for her to be involved with the Women's Pure Championship. She feels that even though she's been with AEW for a year and some change, the audience still does not know what she's about.
She added that as far as she knows, she's still in the Women's Pure Title tournament. The tournament was originally supposed to start at Supercard of Honor in April, but the event has been moved to July 11th.
“I mean, I think that they just announced this Ring of Honor Pure Women’s Championship Title tournament and I think that there was always an idea maybe for me to be in that. It was just a matter of when that was going to happen so, there was some conversations had about, like, we’re just waiting for this and the belt and things like that. But, I feel like, I’m just at the point of my career where I just want to wrestle. Win, lose, draw, tell a good story, not. I just want to be utilized and wrestling and if there’s anything that comes out of that, even better but, I think the key with any kind of TV company, televised product right now is just consistency. There’s so much wrestling every single week, and Monday Night Raw happens on Monday and then Tuesday, we’re rolling over to SmackDown and then Wednesday -- so it’s really hard to keep interest if you’re not featured 24/7 basically and so, for me, I just wanna keep consistent. I wanna keep consistent with the AEW audience, I want them to get to know The Virtuosa because I feel like even though I’m a year and a half in, they still don’t necessarily (know) all that I’m about, and whether that’s on Dynamite or Collision or Ring of Honor, I’m just trying to take all those opportunities and capitalize on them.
Yeah (I’m still part of the ROH Pure Women’s Title tournament). As far as I know, as of Saturday (she laughed). I know that there was scheduling conflict and things like that but I think they’re trying to actively work on when this tournament will happen and when we’ll film it and things like that so, as far as I know, I’m still in the running to become the inaugural Women’s Pure Champion.”
She went on to speak about her disconnect with the AEW audience. Purrazzo feels it started with her debut because she was guaranteed to get a good reaction. It was in her hometown of New Jersey, but after that, there was no definition provided on what 'The Virtuosa' is.
“I think, for me, it started when I came in. I think I had such a phenomenal debut and it was in New Jersey and my family was there and I’m from New Jersey so we got that easy -- not necessarily cheap pop because I’m from there but, you know what I mean? It was a built-in, knew we were gonna have a great reaction, and so I think after that is when it got difficult because we didn’t explain to the AEW audience right away what the word ‘Virtuosa’ meant and I think that’s something I’ve struggled with my entire career and so I had a lot of different ideas from day one of how do we introduce this character to a brand-new audience? Because TNA, while now is exploding in popularity, at the time was still really niche and not every household in America has AXS TV and I didn’t want to neglect that fact that the casual AEW fan might not know who I am and what I’ve done and what I’m about, and unfortunately, there just wasn’t time for it and we never got to explaining what it meant to be The Virtuosa and so that’s a large part why back last summer, this time, when I was feuding with Thunder Rosa and we were working towards our Texas Bullrope match, I went and I had a series of three vignettes made on my own and I produced them and I had a videographer edit them and stuff and I gave them to AEW and I said, ‘I still don’t think we’ve explained to the audience why they don’t like me’ and there’s only so much interaction and so much of this (flicking them off) I can do to get them to boo me. But they need to understand from a character standpoint what I’m about and so, I kind of took that upon myself to do. But then that was almost a year ago and we’ve not had consistent follow-up yet so, I think, for me, it’s just that consistency that I’ve not had and a reason to really hate me.”
At an ROH TV taping on June 21st, Purrazzo bested Rachael Ellering in a Pure Rules match. That bout is going to air on a future episode of ROH on HonorClub.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit MuscleManMalcolm with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.
