WWE's Sonya Deville On 'Bittersweet' Plea Deal For Convicted Stalker Phillip Thomas

In August 2020, Phillip A. Thomas II was arrested after breaking into the home of WWE's Sonya Deville. Since then, Thomas has pled guilty to aggravated stalking, armed burglary, and kidnapping. In an interview with Maria Menounos, she was asked how it felt to see the sentence come down with no trial.

"It's bittersweet. I was mentally prepared to [go to trial], and then it went a different way. I'm very grateful of the outcome, I think it's great and my lawyers are happy with it, so I trusted their advisement and I think it's good. I was just mentally prepared for something else, so that's a little weird thing that I went through recently with it. There's been so much and I haven't talked about this at all yet, so there's just so many [...] layers to it," she said. Deville recalled how she had been preparing herself mentally to potentially relive the events of the break-in during a trial, but that the "goal" had been to avoid a trial. Later, she recalled the feelings she had in the days after the break-in.

"That night after the incident, I thought I was gonna go back into the house and sleep there because I was stubborn, and I was in shock, and I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know left from right at that point, and then the sun goes down. I'm uncontrollably shaking, and I'm in a hotel room under an alias name because I'm so paranoid that, even though he's arrested, he's somehow gonna find me. I have a dresser pushed up against the door, I made Mandy [Rose] slide the dresser in front of the door on the 15th floor of this high-rise hotel."

It's not surprising that Deville vacated her house after the terrifying incident. Deville said that while it was an "unfortunate situation," it led to a "fortunate effect" in the form of renting out the house.

"I was making a thousand-plus dollars a month in profit off this house that I was renting out. So I saw that firsthand and I was like, 'Wait a second, can I just keep doing this?' So I saw the strategy accidentally laid out in front of my face. It was kind of like the real estate gods were like, 'You wanted to jump in, well here you go," she said.

"I slowly started building on that. I acquired a short-term rental, an Airbnb in the Disney area, and then I bought myself another primary residence. [...] Then I met my fiance, she was really into the real estate stuff too, and then we decided to flip a house. We tried house flipping and that's been fun, and now we're looking to open a pizza business. We're kind of just diving in."