Twin sisters, Brie and Nikki Bella became WWE Hall of Fame inductees after surviving abuse and rough times growing up in Arizona with divorced parents and a drug-addicted father.
Realizing they couldn’t escape a childhood of pain, they used it to drag each other forward, the 36-year-old sisters – who are both now pregnant- write in a new memoir, Incomparable, where they open up about their childhood and their rise to wrestling and reality television fame.
Working as waitresses at Hooters in Southern California, an audition for new wrestlers at the WWE turned out to be the fast track to a successful wrestling career. That eventually led them to be stars of the hit E! shows, Total Bellas and Total Divas.
But life wasn’t always so carefree, sexy and glam, dating athletes and actors in the LA club scene.
It was a hazardous route out of Arizona for the two girls with Latina roots with fading dreams, uncertain futures, and divorced, angry parents fighting at home that left the inseparable twins always feeling aggressive.
Nikki and Brie Bella, known as the Bella Twins, are opening up about growing up in Arizona to divorced parents and a drug-addicted father
The tag team wrestling sisters are both former Divas Champions, with Nikki having held the title two times and Brie once
They explain that it’s ‘ironic’ that they fight for a living, but ‘part of the process has been transmuting the pain of our childhood into something productive’
Playing soccer in high school, they were called ‘Sp*c’, ‘Be**er and heard ‘Go back to Mexico’ but their admitted cockiness helped them ignore the insults.
‘I dared any man to f*ck with me without getting a fist to the face’, Nikki writes, but that attitude didn’t save her from being raped and losing her virginity at 15 on the floor of a Hyatt Hotel room.
Their memoir Incomparable is out everywhere on Tuesday
She had passed out from too much booze and woke up with a guy she thought was a friend on top of her and inside of her.
She was raped again while at a modeling competition.
It took wresting to re-direct her anger and teach her how to use her body to fight back as well as use her own addiction to high drama, a leftover from life with father, Jon Garcia.
Born in San Diego in November 1983, Nicole came out of the womb first weighing five pounds.
Her mother, Kathy Colace, had become huge during her pregnancy but doctors didn’t put it together that she might be carrying twins so they cut the umbilical cord leaving Brie still inside and breeched in her mother’s ribs.
An alert attending nurse heard another heartbeat and instructed Kathy to push.
The second baby came out sixteen minutes later not breathing after the cord that delivers the oxygen was cut.
Doctors got the baby’s heart going and Nicole was put in next to twin sister, Brie, to breathe together.
Their mother was only nineteen and needed help with the babies so they left Southern California and headed up to Kathy’s family homestead in Phoenix where her Italian family were itinerant farmers.
The yelling, fighting, door slamming was a constant soundtrack of toxic turbulence between their parents.
The twins made brief escapes to Lake Tahoe with their grandparents where they learned about making tips – pilfering hotel shampoo and lotion and then trying to sell the samples on the beach or dancing around modeling sunglasses in front of a gift shop for tips.
It was a great escape for the fifth graders and they viewed it as a period of peace, like a great summer camp.
It was rough back home and Nikki learned to equate love with pain and required a lot of therapy to get through what Brie calls full-expletive meltdowns they both experienced.
‘We can almost go unconscious in moments of rage and not even remember what we said’, Brie writes. ‘It is probably ironic that we fight for a living. But part of the process has been transmuting the pain of our childhood into something productive’.
It took wresting to re-direct their anger toward their drug-addicted father Jon Garcia (pictured together)
The girls grew up with divorced, angry parents fighting at home that left the inseparable twins always feeling aggressive
The young sisters always loved to entertain and would dress up for their parents’ friends and perform as the Spice Girls
Nikki had dreams of being an entertainer and wanted to be a supermodel like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell.
When friends of her parents came over, the two would dress up as Posh and Sporty Spice and sing the English pop girl group songs.
Nikki acted in school plays but relished violent roles, particularly ones where someone got killed.
She craved the attention until a classmate took an up the skirt shot revealing an ingrown hair on the bottom of her butt. The photo made it look massive and red and it was unfortunately passed around at school.
‘That was the first bad sexual thing that had ever happened to me,’ she remembered.
While walking home from school thinking about that prank, an old Cadillac drove slowly by grazing her leg, she writes.
The driver was a guy in a trucker hat touching himself as he tried to grab her with the other hand.
‘Get inside and s*ck my d*ck’, he yelled.
That same year Brie was stalked by a guy in a pickup truck who stroked himself as he slowly drove by.
When the left Arizona, they got a job at Hooters. They write that they were part of the ‘Hooters gang that all came from broken homes and pretty unhappy childhoods, we were enjoying our liberation and excited for the next chapter’
The sisters went on to have a successful career in reality TV, with shows of E! Total Divas and Total Bellas
Nikki and Brie decided they needed to get a college degree if they were going to have any kind of future because ‘we never learned how to talk good’, Nicole writes.
So they headed for San Diego, Grossmont Community College and Hooters.
Hooters hired them when they were only seventeen.
They write that they were part of the ‘Hooters gang that all came from broken homes and pretty unhappy childhoods, we were enjoying our liberation and excited for the next chapter’.
They just wanted to now be ‘happy go lucky Cali girls’, the feeling they got from their ‘Hooters family’.
‘All the military guys from Camp Pendleton came hungry and often. And they were amazing tippers: God bless the military,’ they write.
That paid for textbooks, beers at Bennigan’s after their shifts, trips to Tijuana and ‘ho heels’.
Nikki was still wrestling with being needy. Her daddy issues and depression pushed her into marriage with an unfaithful boyfriend, Ken.
He made her feel crazy and evil and she hated the person she was with him so when he was shipped off in military service, she divorced him and moved on to another boyfriend.
Nikki writes about how she was raped multiple times, and how both women were sexually harassed throughout their life and faced racism due to their Latina roots
Wrestling paid for them to travel the world but at the end of their five-year contract in 2012, they were ready for a change and tired of the twin act
But wrestling remained her other love and she viewed herself as a warrior who was learning how to use her body to fight back.
There were locker room rituals and rules at the WWE and storylines that the producers and writers created to get the girls on TV.
One shtick included one twin in the ring and halfway through the match when the other who was hiding under the ring would come in halfway through the match and go for the win.
Wrestling paid for them to travel the world but at the end of their five-year contract in 2012, they were ready for a change and tired of the twin act.
Both girls wanted a shot as solo wrestlers.
WWE created the reality TV show, ‘Total Divas’ about female wrestlers to get the twins back.
They were game to be taken seriously as wrestlers and athletes as well as being called superstars with more match and TV time.
The twins acknowledge that wrestling promoter, Vince McMahon invented the Bella twins and paid for them to travel the world.
Relationships came and went for the twins as well as injuries and surgeries.
Nikki’s neck was broken in the ring and she needed a double bone fusion or end up paralyzed or dead.
The twins want to de-stigmatize the vagina and have created a lingerie and clothing line, Birdiebee (pictured together modeling their brand)
Nikki once wanted to die in the ring until her perilous neck condition made her realize that there is more to life than wrestling – and health comes first.
She is now focused on what she can do to help other women after a twelve year run in the sport.
All of their lives they heard they only got opportunities because some man opened the door for them – and they wanted that had end.
There had been too many sexually mortifying experiences, including one night when Nikki’s legs suddenly went dead when she was having a cocktail and a mortifying experience for Brie when a doctor assumed a vaginal injury occurred from a sex toy.
Nikki was diagnosed with a Bartholin cyst and attributed the cause to slathering Victoria Secret scented lotions everywhere on her privates and even inside her vagina for years.
This started the twins on a mission to teach women not to put strange things in their vagina or use scented tampons, fragranced lotions or even take douches that contained chemicals.
The twins write they want to de-stigmatize the vagina and have created a lingerie and clothing line, Birdiebee, with products made from chemical free, high quality fabrics free having no carcinogens and endocrine disrupters.
The long-term goal for the pregnant sisters is to produce feminine hygiene products such as organic tampons, wipes and lubes that are free from toxins.