Mike Bennett and his wife Maria Kanellis were among the talents who got released from WWE last week, but months ago they were involved in one of the more controversial storylines over the last few years.
The storyline saw Maria Kanellis claim that Mike was not the father of her baby, and she spent several weeks berating Mike on WWE programming.
However, the storyline was dropped after Mike publicly requested to be released from his WWE contract.
Fightful spoke with Mike about the storyline, and he noted that Paul Heyman initially pitched a different idea, but after Mike and Maria informed him of the pregnancy he went in a very different direction.
Many fans saw the storyline as a burial for Mike, but he admitted that he was fine with doing it so long as it went somewhere.
“We were like, ‘yeah, that’s great.’ The caveat was always as long as this goes somewhere. Like I said, if you give me anything, I’ll run with it but I want there to be a payoff. I don’t want there to be nothing just, you know, some sort of a payoff so when Maria finally leaves to go on maternity leave, I’m not just sitting there as the guy that berated for the last three months and then you can’t do anything with me because I’m a joke. Yeah. We had pitched a lot of the storylines. Then Paul came up with the 24 7 title idea and I thought that was fun. That was fun to me. I was like, ‘wow you’re really building something here. But, yeah. It was always that caveat of we’ll play and we’ll do it and we’ll have fun because again, it’s phony wrestling. Yes, it’s not real life. My name’s Mike Bennett and I’m not my wife’s bitch.”
Mike went on to say that he doesn’t feel the storyline was put together just to embarrass him.
“I don’t think people realize how valuable TV time is and how much money that costs the company. It’s like millions. They’re not going to waste TV time on someone just to embarrass [them.] Maybe a one-off, maybe a one-off embarrassment and that’s it.”
In the end the storyline didn’t go anywhere, but it did get people talking for a few weeks.
