Kip Sabian On Rushing Into Marriage With Penelope Ford, Saraya Recalls Standing Up To WWE
In a recent interview with Sappenin, Kip Sabian revealed why he and Penelope Ford rushed to get married in real life before tying the knot on AEW Dynamite.
Sabian got engaged to Ford in April 2020 and the couple tied the knot on the February 3rd, 2021 episode of AEW Dynamite: Beach Break. Sabian said,
“We got engaged, and then the idea was pitched to us, ‘Do you guys want to do a wrestling wedding?’ ‘Yeah, sounds great.’ As a wrestler, as soon as you’re presented with TV time, you’re probably going to want to take the TV time. We thought we would have plenty of time to get married, but the timeline of the wrestling wedding got shot up. Don’t know of the reason why, but I guess there were changes in plans for stuff down the line, so they had to move it sooner. I’m pretty sure we had maybe three to four weeks to put together the wrestling wedding. I’m very big on bad luck and omens. I didn’t want to get pretend married before we got really married because, to me, it could be a bad omen for our real marriage. We had to rush to get that done. We didn’t want a big wedding anyway, we wanted to put our money into our house as opposed to our wedding. We did a courthouse wedding, but that was almost canceled. That was two days or the day before we got married before the TV wedding. That was almost canceled because there was a snowstorm. The night before we got married, they called us up and said, ‘hey, we can’t do it, the roads aren’t clear.’ We’re panicking. The next morning, we get a call, ‘If you get here within an hour, we can do it.’ We rushed to get ready, we let our family know, we rushed through the snow to the courthouse to do it. Two days later, we got pretend married and [Penelope] nearly broke her face on the cake because it was so hard.”
In a recent interview with Adrian Hernandez, Saraya praised her fellow women wrestlers for knowing their value and taking a stand for themselves in the male-dominated wrestling industry.
Saraya recalled a time when she, Emma, and The Garcia Twins (The Bella Twins) cut their own WWE match short to protest against WWE’s ill-treatment of the women’s division.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On standing up for the women’s division with Emma and the Bella Twins: “Beginning of WWE, it was very hard. You’re very job scared all the time. You feel like you can’t use your voice a lot of the time as a female in the company. It was very difficult a lot of times to get what you wanted and do what you wanted to do. It was really frustrating. At one point, we said, ‘F that.’ Me, the Garcia twins, and Emma took a stand at one point and were like, ‘we’re going to take control.’ They had us do a certain amount of time, and then they cut the time, so we only had four minutes when it was with entrances, exit, and the match. You can’t tell a story. There’s no point. It’s a three-hour show, you can’t give us more than four minutes? It’s ridiculous. Why are the women the ones who get cut? We were like, ‘we put butts in seats too; people come watch us.’ We went out and did two minutes. We were like, ‘f**k this, we’re not here to get our time wasted, so we’re going to waste your time instead.’ Went in there, did a couple of strikes and a roll-up, and got the heck out. Once we got backstage, it was, ‘What the f**k, you had so much time left.’ ‘So, we don’t care.’ It’s crappy.”
On women standing up for themselves: “I’ve seen girls, they were crying because their WrestleMania moment got taken away and that show is even longer. That’s a whole day event. Now it’s two days, but one day was really long. The girls are the ones who get cut because a guy went over time or someone wanted extra time or whatever it was, and the girls get cut, and they’re devastated. They got all the gear made, all the money, time, and energy into the match for them to be completely cut out. It’s bulls**t. It’s awesome when you see girls nowadays use their voices and taking a stand and being like, ‘f**k you, I can do whatever I want to do, and I don’t need you.’”
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