Valentina Rossi Says She Didn’t Sign With WOW Because Contract Wouldn’t Allow Her To Work Elsewhere

WOW Women of Wrestling is set to premiere the weekend of September 17 in syndication on CBS-affiliated networks. 

Valentina Rossi, who has worked multiple AEW Dark tapings, went to the casting call for WOW and came up with the character Adriana Gambino, playing up her New Jersey roots. 

Speaking to Steve Fall of SEScoops, Rossi explained why she ultimately didn’t sign with the promotion. 

“They’re also very, like strict about like, the name thing because like, I’m Adriana Gambino there. And like I came up with the name, but they own it. So it’s like, it’s fine. I’ll just use a different name. Um, so I wasn’t at this last taping because they did tape this month. I did the taping before. Yes. So they, they’re kind of exclusive. You can’t do other TV tapings if you’re with WOW. So, I would have had to like given up NXT and Dark, which I wasn’t ready to do yet. So yeah, I didn’t go back this past week and I was actually at Dark during the WOW tapings,” she said.

Rossi continued, “I think they want just like people who are only gonna wrestle for WOW because they did have like this, because they’ve been around for like 20 years. And a lot of people don’t know that because they’re like, they’re just starting to, you know, really get well known, and they pretty much did go on like a hiatus for a little bit. That’s probably just like, the only reason why I was like, I just really can’t sign this contract because what if you guys go on hiatus again and I’m under contract for however many years. But I know that they like- something similar happened with IMPACT. So, I know that they were like using girls from IMPACT for a while when they were both in AXS. And then as of recently, they don’t use people from IMPACT anymore. I think it was just like contract stuff. They want people who were like, homegrown so that they can say like, we train them there are people you know.”

Alex Garcia also noted how “tapings and restrictions” led to her decision to leave WOW. You can find her full comments by clicking here. 

Fans can learn more about the premiere of WOW by clicking here.