Cody Rhodes says he left AEW due to a “personal issue”

The new Cody Rhodes documentary, “American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes,” is now streaming on Peacock.

The documentary details Cody’s journey back to WWE, and it had to deal with Rhodes’s departure from AEW last year. In an unedited clip, Rhodes said that he left AEW due to a “personal issue.”

“This is my one request in this entire documentary,” he said. “This one answer, I don’t want edited in any capacity. Don’t even edit this part. I can’t tell you why I left AEW. I can’t, and I won’t. But I’ll tell you the reasons that were said that didn’t actually matter. I didn’t leave AEW because of money, and I didn’t leave AEW because of other talents. I left AEW because of a personal issue. That’s it. But the byproduct of leaving AEW is the opportunity to go for the biggest dream I ever had and the first dream that I had in my life.”

Rhodes’s quote on leaving AEW wasn’t the only noteworthy excerpt from the documentary.

In the same scene, WWE COO Paul Levesque (Triple H) indicated that Rhodes’s “personal issue” was his desire to be WWE Champion. He also took a shot at AEW in the process, calling it a “secondary promotion.”

“To take that gamble again and say, ‘This is not what I wanted to be; I didn’t grow up dreaming of being the champion and the face of a secondary promotion. I wanted to be the WWE Champion,'” Levesque said.

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