Maria Kanellis turned heads with her Playboy shoot in April 2008.
Now, she is revealing how much she was paid compared to what WWE was paying her at the time.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Kanellis explained how much banked from the shoot.
“One shoot [for Playboy] was more than the year [in WWE] but it was a different time. That was what we were fighting for at the time. There was such a discrepancy, and everybody knew that there was a discrepancy, and luckily that’s changed. It took time but it also ended up being a very good story and a very, very big motivator in my life,” she said.
She had a lot of fun modeling.
“I liked modeling and to me it was just an extension of that. I can look back on those photos when I’m 80 years old and go, ‘Wow, look at that bod!’ I think it was just fun. It’s just fun. I’ve never been taken care of so well as I was when I was on that shoot. It didn’t feel like it was anything salacious. It just felt like another editorial shoot,” she said. “It was so much fun. I had to call my sister, though, because she was still in high school, and be like, ‘Hey, so they asked me to do Playboy. Are you okay with that?’ She’s like, ‘How much are they paying you?’ Then she was fine with it.”
Kanellis hasn’t told her kids just yet though.
“They don’t know I pose for Playboy. My daughter’s eight so she’s just now getting to the age that she might have reference but they don’t do Safari or Google. They’re not on social media. They won’t be on social media for a long, long time. They won’t have their own cell phones for a long, long time. So in that sense, no. Will somebody bring it up to him at school? Probably at some point, and then we’ll have that conversation,” she said.
She is also prepared on what she will tell them when she is asked about it.
“I think it looks like your mom is incredibly proud of what she was able to accomplish in her career, and I don’t think that you should ever be ashamed about your body, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or hurting anybody else, and you’re of age, you should be able to do what you want. I think that’s real feminism, being able to accept if somebody wants to run a company or if somebody wants to pose for Playboy, if somebody wants to be an influencer or if they want to be a doctor. I think really at the end of the day, people should be able to do what they want,” she said.
