There’s a certain kind of woman who shows up to a bar fight in heels, lip gloss fresh, smile sharper than a box cutter. That was Summer Rae. All six feet of her. Equal parts homecoming queen and brass-knuckled opportunist. Danielle Moinet didn’t just play the wrestling game—she seduced it, danced with it, dropkicked it in the teeth, and then left it whispering her name in the dark like an ex who should’ve known better.
Before she was Summer Rae, she was a quarterback. Literally. Playing for the Chicago Bliss in the Lingerie Football League, flinging spirals and leading women into violent collisions while the crowd hooted through beers and broke dreams. She wasn’t just a gimmick in shoulder pads. She was team captain. Field general. The woman calling audibles in fishnets and command boots. They handed her a ridiculous concept and she made it matter.
And just when you thought she might settle into this pseudo-sporting limelight, she pivoted. Wrestling came calling.
WWE saw her in 2011 and didn’t quite know what to do with her at first. Ring announcer? General manager? Eye candy with mic skills? She did it all in developmental, in FCW and NXT, laying the groundwork for the chaos that would follow. Summer Rae was never just another blonde trying to stay on-brand. She was ambition in stilettos. A silent assassin armed with dance moves and a side-eye that could salt the earth.
When she finally hit the main roster in 2013, she debuted not with pyro or a suplex, but with a cha-cha. Paired with Fandango, she was introduced as his dance partner—a polished blonde with legs for days and an attitude like a bottle rocket in a basement. She could’ve been a one-note character, but instead she became something more: a scene-stealer.
She brawled with Natalya, bumped her way through pay-per-view matches, and carried feuds with the sort of spiteful elegance normally reserved for classic Hollywood starlets. If Lana was the ice queen and Nikki Bella the bombshell, Summer Rae was the chess player—moving three steps ahead, smiling sweetly while kicking shins under the table.
And she could work. Maybe she wasn’t Bret Hart in the ring, but she understood timing, psychology, heat. Her feud with Layla was a tornado of slapstick and betrayal. Her alliance with the Beautiful Fierce Females in NXT (alongside Sasha Banks and Charlotte) helped lay the foundation for what fans now call the Women’s Evolution. She was the mouthpiece, the manipulator, the velvet hammer behind the velvet curtain.
But WWE never quite knew what to make of her. They tossed her into feuds like she was glitter in a wind tunnel—shiny, but never quite landing. First Fandango dumped her for Layla. Then she jumped into a ridiculous love quadrangle with Rusev, Lana, and Dolph Ziggler that burned out like a bar napkin in a bonfire. There was even a Tyler Breeze pairing, which started hot and fizzled out with no explanation—just another plotline left to die on the road between SmackDown and catering.
Still, Rae kept showing up. No matter how absurd the angle, no matter how little ring time she got, she turned crumbs into caviar. She made awkward dance-offs matter. She made “Total Divas” catfights feel like Shakespeare in a tanning bed. She even made her film debut in The Marine 4: Moving Target, proving she could act, punch, and emote—all while wearing enough eyeliner to kill a small bird.
Then the injuries started piling up like unpaid bills. A knee here, a back there. WWE drafted her to Raw in 2016, but she never appeared again. The writing was on the wall, written in Sharpie, and by 2017, she was gone. No farewell. No retirement speech. Just an Instagram post and a cold goodbye.
But she wasn’t done.
Danielle Moinet resurfaced on the independent scene, losing to Ivelisse in Australia in 2018 but showing she still had the fire. She returned to WWE briefly in 2022 for the Royal Rumble—eliminated in under a minute, but making an entrance loud enough to wake the ghosts of Total Divas past.
Outside the ring, she turned herself into a brand. Modeling. Influencing. Financial ventures. She even sat on the board of a cryptocurrency firm called Prime Trust—a high-stakes world that would make even Vince McMahon blush. It eventually imploded in 2023, with regulators knocking down the door and $80 million vanishing into the ether. Moinet wasn’t named in the core fallout, but her name was there—etched into another spectacle of ambition gone sideways.
Because that’s the story of Summer Rae: spectacle, ambition, reinvention. She never held a title. Never main-evented WrestleMania. But she was a thread in the tapestry—glittery, controversial, unforgettable.
She was the woman who flirted with the hard cam and danced circles around forgettable gimmicks. The one who turned a dance partner role into a career. The one who strutted through the carnage of wrestling’s weirdest storylines with poise and precision. A quarterback turned ring general. A diva in the purest, most chaotic sense of the word.
Danielle Moinet didn’t rewrite wrestling history. She added her own footnote, bolded it, and made sure it wore heels.
She was Summer Rae.
And she was nobody’s afterthought.