Wagatha Christie was the tabloid court trial that gripped Britain. Now, with a TV documentary about to hit screens, Coleen Rooney is ready to give her side of the story.
When Coleen Rooney arrives at the photographer’s studio in central London, fresh off the train from Cheshire, she spots me and makes a cheeky grin of recognition. So I know the first thing I need to say to her: sorry.
The last time Rooney and I were in the same room was last year at the Royal Courts of Justice, when I was covering her trial.
What trial? Wagatha, of course — did any other trials even happen last year? Over two heady weeks in May 2022, Rooney sat in the courtroom, next to her husband, facing a charge of libel after she (very) publicly accused Rebekah Vardy of leaking stories from Rooney’s private Instagram account to the media.
I was there every day, and while covering a legal case is a serious job, I’m afraid I laughed during this trial. Like, a lot. Because while Wagatha involved wild sums of money, with Vardy ultimately being required to stump up an estimated £3 million ($6 million) after the judge found in Rooney’s favour, my God it had its funny moments.
The first day, Rooney’s lawyer — the fabulously grandiose David Sherborne — began his cross-examination of Vardy. He wanted to prove that she had form when it came to passing on stories to the press and used as an example a 2004 tabloid kiss-and-tell she had done about Peter Andre. “‘Peter’s hung like a small chipolata […] the smallest trouser equipment I’ve ever seen,’” he harrumphed, his wig all a-waggle.
I’m really sorry I kept cracking up during the trial, I say to Rooney.
“Ha! I saw you laugh! Ha ha ha! And Wayne, he was clued up about what was going on all around us, and at the end of each day he would say, ‘Did you see ‘em laughing again?’ If it hadn’t been me [in court] probably I might have laughed as well,” she says.
Instead she kept a serenely straight face throughout the trial, even when Vardy swore on the stand that she never leaked anything about anyone, only for Sherborne to read out her texts, in which she said to her agent, Caroline Watt, “Leak the story.” Was she biting her inner lip to keep in the giggles?
“No, because I was so wound up at the time. I’d never been in a courtroom before and I was really nervous. I never spoke on the way to London and every morning in the hotel I didn’t speak — I’d have loved to have had a blow-dry, but I couldn’t face making small talk with a hairdresser. So I felt sorry for Wayne, because he was there with me but I wasn’t with him, because I was just focused on what was gonna happen in that courtroom. I didn’t want to miss a thing.”
As the world now knows, Rooney, 37, doesn’t miss much. For 20 years she has been in the public eye, and for many of them she was derided as a typical WAG: the teenager in the Juicy Couture tracksuits and Moon Boots who became the beleaguered wife, humiliated by her husband’s all-too-public foibles.
A lot of this was sexist, and even more of it was classist (aww, silly working-class Scouse girl!). But as Vardy learned to her (enormous) cost, you underestimate Rooney at your peril. While Vardy was emotional and frequently flustered on the stand, Rooney was focused and unflappable, even when Vardy’s barrister, Hugh Tomlinson KC, brought up Wayne’s infidelities. “Wayne said to me beforehand, ‘You just tell the truth, because no one can go wrong with the truth.’ If you lie, you get nervous and get caught,” she says, referring to absolutely no one in particular at all.
One-on-one, Rooney is even better, and this is what viewers of her keenly awaited Disney+ Original documentary series, Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, will see. All the expected people are in it — Wayne, Coleen’s parents — but it’s Coleen who carries it, describing with calm but passionate eloquence how on earth she ended up in court with another WAG.
“I’ve never fallen out with the partner of another footballer in my life, and I never thought I would,” she tells me. Making the documentary was both cathartic and upsetting, but she wanted to do it because “everyone was saying so many things about the case at the time, including the other side. But I didn’t, because I’m not that type of person. But now it’s my turn to speak.”
She arrives today in a pair of Prada trainers (“My proper shoes are in my bag because of the rain”), khaki combat trousers that she bought in the US, where Wayne has just finished as the head coach for DC United, and a black camisole top by The Kooples (try saying that in a Scouse accent). She is, as she always has been, extremely pretty, her face make-up free and her hair long and loose.
“I’ve had Botox in my forehead, but don’t tell my dad,” she cackles.
Her style has become “simpler” as she has got older, and she focuses now on “things that last and are comfy and I can wear on the school run”, she says. She has minimal childcare for her four boys — her mum and dad have stepped in to help while she’s doing this interview and Wayne is in America — and she makes sure she’s at all their football games. “I want to do it and I’m lucky that I’m able to do it. They know I’m always standing on the sidelines, cheering them on.”
Her children’s names — Kai, 13, Klay, 10, Kit, 7, and Cass, 5 — circle her neck as charms on a necklace, and also her wrist on a bracelet. She has Kai’s name tattooed on her wrist (“A 4am Vegas job”), as well as that of her sister, Rosie, who suffered from Rett syndrome and died in 2013. “The other kids keep asking when I’m getting their names, but my tattoo days are over,” she says.
Given that Rooney has been extremely rich and famous for more than half her life, it would be delusional to describe her as relatable. But she is very likeable: funny, warm and clever. As happy discussing fashion (she is especially excited about Isabel Marant’s autumn/winter collection) as she is the legal minutiae about Wagatha. There is something of the keen schoolgirl about her — she read everything I wrote about the case before our interview — and during the trial she frequently wrote in her notebook. What was she writing?
“Oh, I constantly have a notebook. Even on a girls’ trip away I’ll get out the notebook and they’ll go, ‘Ah, just put it away, Coleen!’ But I was writing reminders of things to ask my side about, and things the other side might ask me,” she says. (Vardy also scribbled during the trial and one afternoon I peeked at her pad of paper: it was doodles of flowers.)
Rooney’s fame went stratospheric in 2006, when the 20-year-old Coleen McLoughlin, as she was then, appeared in the now iconic Baden-Baden photos of the WAGs during the World Cup. She was the princess-in-waiting, anointed to take over from the Queen WAG, Victoria Beckham.
But Rooney and Beckham are very different characters. Rooney has deliberately remained “down to earth”, she says, by keeping a tight circle around her, largely made up of her family and friends from school. Wayne falls into both groups, as she has known him since she was 12; Coleen’s loyalties are deep and enduring.
She has some WAG friends, “but they are not in the limelight, and that goes to show, this whole WAG thing, you don’t have to be famous when you’re a footballer’s wife”, she says with gentle pointedness. She has also made some “natural friendships” with fellow mums at her boys’ schools. “But I can tell when someone is trying to force a friendship because of your status. I’m very savvy about that. And I felt like the friendship Rebekah was trying to put on me was unnatural.”
Ah yes, Rebekah. The Wagatha saga began on October 9, 2019, when Rooney put up a post telling her millions of followers that for a while she had suspected someone was selling stories from her private Instagram account to the press. So she started posting fake stories, slowly restructuring the number of followers who could see them until there was only one account.
The Scouse Trap was laid and Rooney knew the source of the stories: “It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account”, she wrote with all the drama of Columbo asking one last question. The whole of Britain gasped as one.
Rooney didn’t tell anyone about her sleuthing, mainly because she prefers to keep things to herself. Initially, when she had her suspicions, she told her husband. “But Wayne said to me, ‘Just get rid of your Instagram.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not the point.’”
So from then on she got on with things on her own: “Wayne’s not a big social media person and keeping things to myself is my coping mechanism. I know people will think, ‘But he’s your husband!’ I know he’s my husband but it’s my battle. What am I going to get out of telling him? There’s nothing he can do. I’ve got to do this by myself.”
Was she surprised when she realised it was Vardy? She thinks carefully before answering: “Obviously Rebekah has lived my life to a degree, in the public eye. So I never thought someone would do that to someone else. But I knew she enjoyed the limelight and would do things only to be in the public eye. And the more I knew, the more I wasn’t surprised.”
Vardy strongly denied Rooney’s allegation and launched the High Court libel case. Rooney worked hard to marshal together all her evidence. “Some nights I’d be in the office trying to figure something out until 2am, and Wayne was waiting on the couch for me to watch something on TV. Then he’d finally come in and say, ‘I’m going to bed.’ It ate up a lot of my time.”
When Vardy was instructed to disclose her electronic communications, she claimed many of them had been lost due to an IT crash. Watt said she had dropped her phone in the North Sea “while filming the coastline”. (The judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, later described the excuses for the loss of the various messages as “improbable”.)
“It was frustrating. But given what they said in the messages we did get, it makes you wonder [what was said in the deleted ones],” Rooney says.
Amid the various exchanges between Watt and Vardy, Rooney says the most hurtful one was when they realised she had blocked Vardy on Instagram. “What a c*** x” Vardy wrote, followed by “Maybe I should say something about Rosie x”, implying that she would use Rooney’s dead sister to find out if she had been deliberately blocked on Instagram.
Whereas Vardy was done up to the nines every day in court, high heels and sharp shoulders, Rooney’s style was described by the agog media (ie, me) as more girl next door, all sweet dresses and low-key trouser suits, her surgical boot (she had broken a bone in her foot in March) paired with a selection of designer flats. Was that deliberate?
“No, that’s where you all got it wrong! My mind was just on the case, so I wore what I had, like that Zara dress. I had some alterations [done] beforehand so I could wear flats — I’d hoped to wear heels but I couldn’t with the boot and I was gutted about that. But there was no thinking behind it,” she says.
Jamie Vardy only attended court one day (and left early), but Wayne was by Rooney’s side every day. And — unlike Jamie — he testified on his wife’s behalf under oath. Did she twist his arm?
“No, he offered. At first he was gonna stay home with the children, but after I went up to London he called and said, ‘No, I need to be there with you.’ He wanted to be there and he was quite interested in the way the court works. I think he thought he was gonna go on to become a barrister, he had so many opinions about it all. Sometimes I was, like, ‘Be quiet, Wayne, stop talking about the court, we just left!’”
Was she surprised how rarely Jamie attended court?
“Well, I was fortunate because Wayne had finished his season of football. I’m not backing Jamie, but he was still playing. But maybe he could have been there more than he was.”
Wayne was very good on the stand — calm and straight-talking — surprising some of the cynical journalists. But Rooney had never doubted him: “He’s actually a really good talker. People still think of him as that 16-year-old lad having to do press conferences. But he’s professional, and if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be a manager now.”
They started going out when she was 16. Can she remember what drew her to him?
“He was cheeky and that turned into charm, and I fell for it. Would I have thought I’d marry him? Probably no, but I fell in love. I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but it gradually did happen.”
There have been multiple scandals during their marriage involving Wayne and other women. “I think if you’re in the public eye, people look upon you and think they know you, but they don’t actually. We know each other. There’s love there, and if there wasn’t we wouldn’t still be together.
“So I’m not stupid. I know people might say, ‘Oh, I would have left him years ago,’ but why, when you still have something to work at? You can comment on my life all you like, but that’s the way I want to live it. And hopefully that’s how it always will be.” Also, she says, Wayne is great with the boys: “He is the best at bedtime. Like, he gives them a bath, puts them in bed and you literally don’t hear a peep out of them. With me, I can see to everything and I always get, ‘Mummmm!’”
Do they shield the boys from media coverage of them?
“No. If they ask a question, I’ll tell them the truth in a child-friendly way and tell them what’s right and wrong. Then they won’t get a shock when they’re older.”
On July 29, 2022, Rooney got a call that the judgment would be published that day. She had to take her eldest, Kai, to a photoshoot, and at the appointed hour she went out to her car, sat there and waited for Sherborne to call: she had won.
Wayne was in America that day and so that evening she celebrated in classic Rooney style — she had a glass of champagne in the garden with her parents. The next morning her mum looked after the boys so she could have a lie-in. “It took a while to sink in, but when I came downstairs that morning I thought, ‘It got done.’ And that was a nice feeling.”
Life among the other WAGs hasn’t changed much for her since the verdict came out, she says. Everyone is as friendly and supportive as ever. But surely the Vardys are ostracised, now that people know Rebekah was selling stories to the press?
“Well, that’s on them. That’s not my doing. I’ve just brought light to the table.”
Have Jamie and Wayne been in touch at all?
“No. Wayne would have liked to [contact Jamie] during the case, but I said no. And there’s been no contact since.”
Rooney had promised herself that when her youngest, Cass, started school, she would take on more work. But that was last year, most of which was taken up with the fallout from the court case, so her new life starts now.
The documentary, she says, is the first step and, true to form, she keeps her future plans to herself. She has grown up in the public eye and she knows what works for her and what doesn’t, exemplified by her changing style. “I look back [at some photos] and think, ‘What was I doing with my hair? That doesn’t suit me!’ Like, I would never buy a hot-pink Chanel bag now. I’ve still got the yellow Moon Boots. I used to love them with the big puffer, but I wouldn’t do that now.”
How about the Juicy Couture tracksuits?
“Oh, I had so much Juicy Couture! I think those are the few things I didn’t keep.”
Shortly after the Wagatha verdict, Vardy gave an interview on TalkTV in which she said that if she bumped into Rooney, she would “ask her if she wanted to go for a Caffè Nero”. So have the women gone for their latte date yet? Rooney just laughs in response. There’s no need for her to snipe or crow. After all, she won.
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story airs on October 18 on Disney+
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
