Two English football WAGs faced off in court today at the start of a $3.7 million defamation trial dubbed “Wagatha Christie” by the British media.
Coleen Rooney, wife of ex-England captain Wayne Rooney, have accused Rebekah Vardy, wife of ex-England player Jamie Vardy, of leaking stories from her private Instagram account following a “sting operation” that led to her being nicknamed “Wagatha Christie” after the British crime writer Agatha Christie.
Rebekah has denied the claims, suggesting Coleen’s account was hacked, and is now suing her former friend for libel.
Coleen, 36, walked into court wearing a $2,000 Mugler blazer and a plastic boot on her fractured left foot, accompanied by husband Wayne, the former Manchester United striker who also played for US soccer team DC United from 2018 to 2020. Rebekah, 40, arrived in a striking purple coat, white stiletto heels and sunglasses.
The warring wives sat 10-feet apart in the front row of the High Court in London, as Rebekah’s lawyer stated that she is suing her rival to “establish her innocence and vindicate her reputation.”
Rebekah told how she felt the “whole world was caving in on me” after Coleen made her bombshell revelations.
“I started to get really hot and suffered from strange palpitations. Loads of messages started coming through on my mobile phone and I was seeing these messages on Instagram calling me names — ‘f***ing rat,’ ‘f***ing b***h’ … I was in such a heightened state of emotion because I was heavily pregnant. I must have been shocked. I remember getting out of the car and I was shaking and thought I was going to be sick,” she said in a statement to the court.
Rebekah said Coleen “showed no remorse” when she called her to reject her allegations.
She said: “I found it very chilling and quite threatening. She seemed completely unbothered about the fact of the abuse we were suffering at that very minute saying only that she had done what she needed to do. Finding out about Coleen’s campaign for her to secretly target me was extremely upsetting. It made me feel like someone had been monitoring me and putting me under surveillance without my permission.”
The trial comes three years after Coleen, a mother-of-four, became suspicious that one of her Instagram followers was selling her personal stories to the press. She fought back with a sting, planting fake stories on her ella Instagram account, and secretly started blocking all of her ella followers except Rebekah.
When the fake stories appeared in the UK’s Sun newspaper, Coleen went public with an incendiary post on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to her two million followers.
Writing from her $25 million mansion in the north of England, Coleen posted: “For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The Sun newspaper of my private posts and stories.”
Of the fake stories, she added: “Now I know for certain which account/individual it’s come from. I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It’s… Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Since Coleen fingered her as the leaker, Rebekah has been “jeered and heckled” at soccer matches, “made the butt of endless jokes” and even been blackmailed, her lawyer Ian Tomlinson QC said. The mother-of-five, whose husband Jamie still plays for Leicester City football club, has been called “an evil rat face b***h” while another post said that her then unborn baby “should put an incinerator,” the court was told. She also received a message from a blackmailer who claimed to have naked pictures and sex videos of her, and threatened to leak them online if she refused to pay $37,000, Tomlinson said.
Meanwhile, Coleen “reveled” at being compared to Agatha Christie and even mocked up a photo of herself as Miss Marple, one of the author’s most famous amateur sleuths, he said.
Coleen’s lawyer David Sherborne told the court that the case was “essentially about betrayal” and claimed that Rebekah had deliberately destroyed evidence before the trial, calling her cover-up efforts “flagrant and beyond belief.”
Rebekah’s agent Caroline Watt has claimed that she accidentally dropped her iPhone into the North Sea during a boat trip in Scotland last August soon after Coleen requested information from the device. Rebekah’s IT expert claimed that the passwords he thought he had changed to back up information on her two iPhones no longer worked and that he cannot access the data on them. Furthermore, all conversations on Jamie Vardy’s WhatsApp account were deleted after Coleen’s team asked to inspect the messages.
Rebekah, who was in Dubai when Coleen first outed her, said in her court statement: “The thing that really gets me is the fact she knew I was pregnant and must have realized the impact a public claim of betrayal would have on me. I will never forgive Coleen for the way in which she ruined the last two months of my pregnancy…I was in such a state of anxiety that I found it really difficult to relax and enjoy what should have been a special time. This is time I will never get back.”
.