Rhea Ripley
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- Byname of:
- Demi Bennett
- Born:
- October 11, 1996, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Also Known As:
- Demi Bennett
Rhea Ripley (born October 11, 1996, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia) is an Australian professional wrestler with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE; 2017– ) known for her distinctive metalhead aesthetic and her physical strength in the ring. Her signature move is the Riptide.
Bennett was involved in multiple sports as a child, including rugby, swimming, karate, and netball. She was first exposed to professional wrestling on a family holiday. In 2013 she began a pro wrestling career under her own name in her native Adelaide, Australia, with Riot City Wrestling (RCW). When she was still a teenager, she was invited to audition for WWE, the world’s biggest pro wrestling promotion. When the company learned she was below their then-minimum age of 21, however, her invitation was withdrawn.
Bennett subsequently competed throughout Australia and Japan for four years, becoming RCW’s women’s champion in 2014 and again in 2016. In 2017 she finally signed with WWE, making her debut as Rhea Ripley. On August 25, 2017, she appeared as part of a six-person tag match with teammates Ruby Riot and Zeda in a non-televised NXT Live event. Her first televised match—in the inaugural Mae Young Classic, a women-only tournament, where she was pinned in the second round—aired several days later. In August 2018 she again competed in the Mae Young Classic, this time losing in the semifinals to Io Shirai. Soon afterward she was moved to the NXT UK brand, where she competed in the NXT UK Women’s Championship Tournament and made history as the first-ever NXT UK Women’s Champion. She retained the title until January the following year.
In 2019 Ripley competed for multiple WWE brands. She made her first appearance in a WWE pay-per-view event at the 2019 Women’s Royal Rumble, a 30-person match in which contestants enter at timed intervals; the winner earns an opportunity at a title shot at WrestleMania, the biggest annual pro wrestling event. In November she began appearing on Friday Night SmackDown, one of WWE’s main roster shows, and helped lead teams to victory in both NXT’s WarGames and WWE’s Survivor Series pay-per-view, in which the underdog Team NXT defeated Team Raw and Team SmackDown (WWE’s top-level brands) in a three-way tag team match. In December Ripley defeated reigning women’s champion and former MMA (mixed martial arts) star Shayna Baszler to become NXT Women’s Champion.
In 2020 Ripley challenged Superstar and Royal Rumble winner Charlotte Flair to a title match, and the NXT Women’s Championship was contested for the first time ever at a WrestleMania event. Flair defeated Ripley by submission and took the championship. The following year Ripley again appeared in the Royal Rumble, this time finishing in second place to Bianca Belair. After the Royal Rumble, Ripley was moved up to WWE’s main roster full-time with the Raw brand, and in April 2021 she gained the Raw Women’s Championship by defeating Asuka at WrestleMania. Flair took that title from her at the 2021 Money in the Bank pay-per-view event. Later that year Ripley formed a tag team with Nikki A.S.H. (“Almost a Superhero”), and the duo took the Women’s Tag Team Championship.
Ripley joined the wrestling stable The Judgment Day, founded in 2022 by WWE Hall of Fame wrestler Edge and American pro wrestler Damian Priest. With The Judgment Day, Ripley began competing in intergender tag team matches. Generally in such matches, opponents of the same gender are required to tag in at the same time; however, in December 2022 Ripley notably fought in a rare intergender one-on-one match with men’s wrestler Akira Tozawa, opening up the possibility for Ripley or other women to cross the usually strict gender divide in competition.
In 2023 Ripley became the first woman to win a Royal Rumble match after entering at position 1, fighting her way through all 29 other contenders. She battled Flair at WrestleMania 39 and emerged victorious, capturing the SmackDown Women’s Championship for the first time in her career.
