“This is not entertainment,” Rebekah Vardy’s barrister, Hugh Tomlinson QC, declared at the opening of the trial referred to at the Royal Courts of Justice as Vardy v Rooney, but known everywhere else as the Wagatha Christie trial.
To borrow a favourite linguistic flourish of Vardy’s: not being funny, but what are you on, my learned friend? For seven days, I sat in the front row of the multimillion-pound libel trial and, to be honest with you – another favourite phrase of Vardy’s (a phrase that led Coleen Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne QC, to retort, “Well, I’d much rather you’re honest because you are sitting in a witness box”) – in all my many years of covering fashion and celebrities in this paper, this was the purest form of entertainment I have ever seen. Celebrity trials, from OJ Simpson to Johnny Depp, are always fascinating because seeing a famous person in the dock, exposed and vulnerable, forced to answer the most awkward of questions, is like catching them on the toilet. Who can look away? Yet most celebrity trials involve allegations about serious crimes – murder, domestic abuse, sexual assault – which puts a kink in the enjoyability factor. This is where Wagatha triumphs over all previous celebrity trials, and possibly every other celebrity story ever: it is high drama, but with the lowest possible of stakes.
“Why on earth are we here?” Sherborne, a Melvyn Bragg lookalike, asked in his opening statement. The answer, Mr Sherborne, is we are asking who Vardy was referring to in her text messages when she was talking about “a nasty bitch”. We are trying to ascertain whether Vardy deliberately sat in the wrong seats at the 2016 Euros. And, most of all, we are asking, in these Royal Courts of Justice, if Rooney was right to block Vardy on Instagram, or was she being, as Vardy said at the time, “a cunt”? After however many years of non-stop news misery, this trial has been a balm on the soul of Britain. Whoever ultimately wins – and the judge, Mrs Justice Karen Steyn, is expected to give her verdict in several weeks – the Queen should give damehoods to both Rooney and Vardy for services to their country.
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‘Vardy dressed in an emphatically un-Waggy way, all centre partings and jackets with too sharp shoulders. Rooney stayed truer to her usual style, in girlish dresses and high street suits.’ Photographs: Neil Mockford/GC Images; Karwai Tang/WireImage
Wagatha (despite Rooney’s insistence that she thinks the term is “ridiculous”, I’m afraid there is no other name for this glorious hullaballoo) is about many things: it’s about social media, the tabloid press, the Football Association (FA), celebrity. (Sidenote: it’s incredible to me how often I’ve heard people denigrate the case as an embarrassing guilty pleasure. Is Wagatha silly? Absolutely. Is it irrelevant? Absolutely not.) But it’s also about something else, and it was only by being in the courtroom that I understood it was about something bigger, something almost – no – genuinely mythic. Wagatha is not just about the Wags (a term that is, Rooney said in her testimony, “not disrespectful”, so consider that the canonical ruling). Wagatha is about all of us.
Before we get to us, let’s talk about them: on one side of the bench, there was Rooney – small, pretty and strong as absolute nails – and on the other, there was Vardy, sleek and highly strung, a Siamese cat in shoulder pads. The two women had matching pouts and contoured cheek makeup, but the differences between them were as glaring as the shine off Vardy’s poker-straight hair. Rooney gazed serenely at Vardy during the three days she was in the witness box; Vardy looked at Rooney only once throughout the whole trial, when she was asked under oath if Rooney was right to describe her as a leaker. “No, she was wrong!” Vardy replied fiercely, whirling towards Rooney.
This end-of-season episode of Footballers’ Wives did not stint on the drama. Vardy dabbed her eyes in the witness box when recalling the mean things people online said about her children, and collapsed entirely when Sherborne pointed to alleged inconsistencies in her claims that she doesn’t leak stories to the Sun; Rooney didn’t even blink when asked, repeatedly, about her husband’s infidelities. Wayne – pink, and perturbed as an undercooked potato – turned up every day, but his gaze never wavered from the middle distance, and the only suggestion that he heard the humiliating questions his wife was forced to answer was his neck gently changing tint from pink to fuchsia. One afternoon, I spotted him outside the court signing autographs for some Everton fans and I asked him what he was thinking about in court all day while he stared into space. “Oh, I don’t want to answer that – I haven’t given any interviews about all this,” he said, alarmed, and ran back to the safer embrace of his fans. Rooney, it’s hard not to suspect, may have called in all of her husband’s many debts to her to make him sit through this.
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In person, Wayne has the sweetly guileless expressions of a six-year-old, and the complexion of a 60-year-old barfly. Given how ubiquitous coverage of Wagatha has been in this country, some laughed at his claim that “sitting in the courtroom this week is the first time I’m hearing almost everything on this case”, but I believe him. “My wife explained she believed the stories from the private Instagram account were getting leaked. I’m not big on social media and I didn’t want to get involved,” he said, and looking at where his wife’s suspicion led them years later, who could blame him? Yet even those who have keenly followed the case from the beginning may well have become lost in the labyrinthine details of this 21st-century Jarndyce v Jarndyce, which now involves every element of modern British culture, from Peter Andre to I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! to Roy Hodgson to Soho Farmhouse. So for those people, and for Wayne, a quick recap of how we got to where we were when this trial began.
Ostensibly, our story begins on 9 October 2019 when Rooney published what the lawyers called the “reveal post” to her millions of social media followers. She wrote that for several years she suspected someone of selling stories from her private Instagram account to the Sun; her outings to private members’ club Soho Farmhouse, for example. Employing heretofore hidden sleuthing brilliance, she posted fake stories on Instagram – she was looking into gender selection for her next baby; the family’s basement had flooded – and alternately blocked and unblocked her followers, restricting access to the fake stories until there was only one account viewing these stories, which then appeared in the Sun. This, Rooney wrote, proved she now had her culprit: “It’s………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.” (The Wags have become associated with many things over the years, from Juicy Couture tracksuits to Balenciaga handbags. This marked the first time a Wag claimed ownership of a form of punctuation. “I use dots a lot,” she confirmed in her court testimony.) Rooney broke the internet with this post, but the internet mended itself fast enough for Vardy to post her denial that she sells stories. “I’m not being funny but I don’t need the money,” she wrote. Given Jamie reportedly earns around £140,000 a week at Leicester City, this is perhaps the only comment she has made about this case that no one has contested.
Rooney refused to back down. So did Vardy, and in June 2020 she launched a high court libel case. In English law, the burden of proof falls on the person who made the defamatory claim, meaning Rooney had to prove what she claimed. Matters did not start well for her when, in November 2020, in the first stage of libel action, Mr Justice Warby declared that it didn’t matter that Rooney had carefully written “Rebekah Vardy’s account”; the “ordinary reader”, the justice said, would still assume Vardy had been selling stories. This made the case look unwinnable for Rooney, as she would now have to prove that Vardy personally passed on stories about her. But the upside to that ruling for Rooney was it meant her lawyers could now focus on Vardy’s interactions with the media, to show that, on balance of probability, Vardy sold stories.
The game evened up in February of this year when WhatsApp messages between Vardy and her agent, Caroline Watt, were disclosed, including texts from Vardy saying “leak the story” and – about one of Rooney’s Instagram stories – “Would love to leak those stories x.” If they weren’t exactly smoking guns, they had – to borrow a phrase from Rooney’s barrister Sherborne – a “whiff of cordite”. And these weren’t even all the messages: only days after Watt was instructed to disclose the messages for the trial she, alas, “dropped her phone in the North Sea while filming the coastline” and many of Vardy’s messages mysteriously vanished when she was trying to send them to her lawyers. Yet some messages did escape Vardy’s IT disaster and the North Sea, such as one from Watt to Vardy after Rooney posted a message on Instagram complaining that someone she trusted was leaking stories about her: “It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me [laughing face emoji].” The cordite thickened. In April, two weeks before the trial, Vardy admitted it was possible that Watt had leaked the stories, but insisted she herself was not involved. Watt did not appear at the trial, citing ill health.
This story really began long before 2019. Some future historians may date its origins to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when Vardy and several other Wags were photographed together, which, according to Rooney’s lawyer, Vardy secretly set up with the paparazzi without telling the other women. (Vardy denies this, so it’s unfortunate that on the night the photo was taken, she sent Watt multiple WhatsApps about the women and a photographer: “We may have to walk to the restaurant … Might be a good pic of us walking down x”.) Others will go back a little farther to the now fateful 2016 Euros, when Vardy sat behind Rooney during a game in seats that weren’t hers because, Rooney’s lawyers allege, she knew it would make for a better paparazzi shot. (Vardy also denies this.) But the story really begins at the 2006 World Cup. Back then, photos of Rooney, Victoria Beckham, Alex Curran (wife of Steven Gerrard), Elen Rivas (former partner of Frank Lampard) and Carly Zucker (now Cole, wife of Joe) walking the streets of Baden-Baden suddenly dominated the British media, outraging the FA and changing the life of a 24-year-old woman then called Rebekah Nicholson for ever. That World Cup is when Wag culture became identifiable, aspirational and monetisable. It also became wholly bound up with the tabloids, which printed daily photos of them. And the snowflake that first fell in Baden-Baden became an avalanche, which this month barrelled through Court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice.
Libel cases are not tried in front of a jury, so the other journalists and I were seated in the jury box, about two yards from Vardy and her team of lawyers, three yards from the Rooneys, and facing directly opposite the witness box. This proved a little awkward at times, such as on the first day when Vardy sat on the stand facing me and was asked by an apparently outraged Sherborne why she told the News of the World in 2004 that Peter Andre is “hung like a small chipolata”. “Did you feel particularly strongly about the size of his manhood that it should be made public?” Sherborne thundered. His point was that Vardy has form in selling stories about people’s private lives to the papers, but has there ever been a more innocent bystander in a libel trial than poor Peter Andre? The Rooneys kept admirably straight faces during this – and every – exchange. The journalists were less composed and a mass outbreak of sniggering struck the jury box, and the court, for the first and far from the last time, reprimanded us for laughing.
At one time Vardy seemed to revel in her low-level celebrity status, writing guest columns in the Sun and appearing on reality TV shows such as I’m a Celebrity. But during the trial she dressed in an emphatically un-Waggy way, all centre partings, long dresses and jackets with too sharp shoulders, bought from the Joan of Arc section of Selfridges. Rooney stayed truer to her usual style, in girlish dresses and high street suits, pairing the surgical boot for her fractured foot with a Waggish selection of single Chanel and Gucci loafers.
Much snobbery has been directed at the Wags over the years, but to all the people who laugh at how they dress, I ask you this: have you ever seen a barrister all done up in his powdered wig? Is that really less absurd than a woman from Liverpool with a massive designer handbag? Because this wasn’t just a battle of the Wags, but also of the Wigs, and both sides had their own special lingo. With the Wigs, it’s all “m’lud” this and “your ladyship” that, whereas with Rooney and Vardy, everyone is either “fuming” or “buzzing”. It was like hearing two very different languages spoken towards each other, and Vardy made a small smile whenever the barristers attempted to get their fruity lips around her salty texts: “And then you replied, Mrs Vardy, ‘Fucking ridiculous x,’” Tomlinson quoted solemnly. Tomlinson was one of the founders of Hacked Off, the campaign for reform of the British press, so is unlikely to be a fan of the Sun. Instead, he prefers the works of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, which he occasionally translates, and I wondered if he had been teaching Vardy the finer points of Deleuze when he asked her what she meant when she messaged Watt that she wanted to “leak a story”.
“I didn’t mean leak,” Vardy said.
Sherborne later picked up on this on behalf of Rooney and asked her, “Can we agree if a sentence reads that way that’s what it means?”
“No,” Vardy replied. The French philosopher would be proud.
Sherborne is louder, brasher and tanner, with a reputation for defending celebrities (and being photographed with them). He represented Johnny Depp when he lost his libel case against the Sun in November 2020, so he, too, is unlikely to be a fan of the red top. Despite being paid what I was reliably told was “well into the six figures” for this case, both barristers confused Vardy and Rooney’s names (women – so hard to tell apart!), and Tomlinson in particular appeared to struggle to understand the finer details of Instagram, which surely should be within his paygrade. But Sherbourne earned his fee when, on the third day, he managed to keep a straight face as he asked Vardy how she felt about Rooney after the reveal post. Sad, Vardy replied. Really, he huffed, and he then read out an interview Vardy gave the Daily Mail the day after the post: “Arguing with Coleen Rooney would be as pointless as arguing with a pigeon: you can tell it that you are right and it is wrong, but it’s still going to shit in your hair,” he harrumphed. Reader, I laughed (and was again told off by the court). Vardy claimed that some of the quotes attributed to her in the press over the years are “just nonsense”, but I do hope she said that pigeon line.
A large part of this trial was spent trying to untangle the Gordian knot that is footballers, their wives and the media. (Whenever anyone referred to “the press” or “the media” in this trial, they meant the Daily Mail, the Mirror and, most of all, the Sun. These are the only papers on the Wags’ radar, to the point that when Vardy was told by her media adviser that I was from the Guardian, she looked as perplexed as if I was covering the trial for Horse & Hound magazine.) Vardy enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Sun: she posed for paparazzi shots and gave interviews, and they ran puff pieces with her and referred to her as “Queen of the Wags”. This is the quid pro quo of entertainment journalism. By contrast, the Rooneys, being Liverpudlian and more private by nature anyway, never talk to the Sun and are frequently trashed in that paper. Vardy wrote a diary of her time at the 2016 Euros for the Sun and she was suspected by Rooney and some of the other Wags of being the source for the paper’s The Secret Wag column, which described footballers’ infidelities and the Wags’ plastic surgery. Vardy denies this, but it took Sherborne five minutes to get her to admit she passed on a story to Watt about Jamie’s former teammate Danny Drinkwater being arrested for drink-driving so she would leak it to the Sun. But that, she told Sherborne, was because “I’m deeply affected by drink-driving.” (Vardy’s WhatsApp to Watt at the time: “I want paying for this x”.) And OK, she conceded, some of her old WhatsApps look as if she was encouraging Watt to pass on other stories – about her husband’s then teammate Riyad Mahrez; which footballer was shagging which other footballer’s wife; which Wag had a miscarriage – but that was just her “having a gossip”. Sherborne asked what she meant in yet another WhatsApp to Watt when she said “Can we not leak a story x”.
“I meant I wanted to do a story about positive body image,” Vardy replied.
“Do you not know what the word leak means?” Sherborne asked.
As there were no good answers to that question, Vardy wisely stayed silent.
The FA learned at Baden-Baden that a gaggle of Wags (a waggle) is a front page photo, so they began to separate the Wags at games to keep media attention on the sport. But at the 2016 Euros, Vardy sat herself behind Rooney and was duly photographed. Harpreet Robertson, then the family liaison officer for the FA, testified that when she told Vardy she was in the wrong seats, it led an unidentified member of Vardy’s party to reply: “We can sit where we like, fuck off.” When Sherborne asked Vardy about this exchange, she rolled her eyes and said, “Mrs Robertson took an instant dislike to me.”
“Why would she take an instant dislike to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Vardy replied.
The husbands visibly, palpably, wanted to stay well out of this fight, and last May, Wayne sent a dove to Jamie via the romantic medium of a newspaper column, in which he wrote that Jamie should be in the England team: “I know some will be surprised at this, especially with the legal case between my wife and Jamie’s wife, but this is my honest football opinion.” But no doves were to be found in the courtroom. In his unexpectedly confident testimony, Wayne said that at the 2016 Euros, Roy Hodgson asked him, as the team’s captain, “to speak to Mr Vardy about issues regarding his wife and to ask his wife to calm down. The FA didn’t want any newspaper columns,” he said, referring to Vardy’s Euro column in the Sun: “I am sat here under oath. I 100% spoke to Mr Vardy,” he said. Alas, the one day Jamie turned up was the day Wayne testified and it was Jamie’s honest football opinion that his former team captain was “talking nonsense … He never spoke to me about Becky’s media work at Euro 2016.” Shortly after issuing that statement – not as a sworn testimony but via the possibly less legally binding method of a press release from his lawyers – he and his wife left the courtroom. When their lawyer explained their absence to the court by saying that Vardy didn’t feel well, Rooney tried and failed to swallow a smile.
In the greatest film ever made about female rivalry, Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 masterpiece Showgirls, one character famously says, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you.” Vardy, now 40, was not younger than Rooney, 36, but she had been hungry for a long time. In her testimony, Rooney said that she struggled when the family moved to the US while her husband played for DC United “because I’d never moved more than 45 minutes down the road from my parents”. Vardy left home at 15 after her relationship with her mother broke down. Rooney has been with Wayne since she was 16. Vardy met Jamie when she was 32 and had already been married twice and had two children. For these reasons and more, she is very different from most of the other Wags who – despite their collective reputation for flashiness – stay largely out of the limelight these days. Sure, they all have Instagram accounts, and they write occasional columns, but these are invariably about their children, or mental health, or wellbeing – all safely controversy-free subjects.
What they very much do not do is write columns that imply they’re as interesting as the players (“Becky Vardy’s Euro Diary!”), or court the paparazzi, because they know the FA doesn’t want that. The world of the Wags is a traditional one, in which the women stay at home with the kids and shop with their husband’s money. Despite Vardy’s insistence that she doesn’t sell stories because she doesn’t “need the money”, in her WhatsApp messages she repeatedly frets about how much she is or isn’t being paid for maybe-or-maybe-not leaking stories. She has denied that she ever sold stories for money (“It was just a fleeting thought”) but, she later testified, “I never wanted to rely on my husband for money.”
The Vardys and the Rooneys have very different marriages. Jamie made it to court only once, but he and Vardy spent the whole time with their arms entwined under the table. The Rooneys sat together but only occasionally conversed, with Rooney frequently writing urgently in her notebook during the testimonies, and Wayne looking happy only when he could get outside and talk with the fans who waited for him every day on the steps. (Vardy refused to sign any autographs the one day he was in court, keeping a tight hold of his wife’s hand instead.) Wayne testified that, during the 2016 Euros, Jamie and Vardy FaceTimed so much, “she was almost there with the team”. By contrast, he said, he and Rooney hadn’t discussed her plan to unmask the leaker because “my wife is an independent woman”. Nevertheless, he was there with her, every day, and he testified on her behalf, while Vardy was left to cry on her lawyers’ shoulders.
Rooney described Vardy’s WhatsApp messages about her as “evil”, and they certainly seemed to be the words of someone whose first instinct is to scrap for what she wants. When Watt messaged her that Rooney had blocked her on Instagram, Vardy replied, “What a cunt x” (if Rooney has claimed ellipses in this case, then Vardy can definitively lay claim to the signoff “x”). Her lowest moment probably came when she and Watt were discussing how to find out if Rooney blocked Vardy because she suspected her of being the leaker. “I never usually message her and say hi … maybe I should say something about Rosie x” Vardy wrote, referring to Rooney’s 14-year-old sister, who passed away in 2013. If using someone’s dead sister to ascertain why they blocked you on social media wasn’t sufficiently punchy, Vardy followed that message up less than two minutes later with, “Not having her bad mouth me to anyone …if she’s doing that my god she will be sorry x”
In Rooney’s witness statement, she has a whole section on Vardy’s “Desire to be Famous”, which she says was as much of a factor in her suspecting Vardy to be the leaker as Vardy’s relationship with the Sun. Vardy said in court that she was “forced” by her ex-husband to do the 2004 kiss’n’tell about Peter Andre, but she was presumably not forced by any of her husbands to appear on I’m a Celebrity in 2017 or Dancing On Ice in 2021. When the original Wags were photographed in Baden-Baden, Vardy was working for a timeshare company and about to get divorced for the second time. This was the era in which being the glamorous girlfriend of a footballer was held up as the ultimate aspiration, and it was at this moment that she seems to have become more focused about what she wanted from life. One year later, she started a relationship with Luke Foster, a lower league footballer. A few years later, she met Jamie Vardy, who was in the early stages of his remarkable rise from non-league striker to late-blooming Premier League superstar, and it was soon after this point that the tabloids, especially the Sun, began to pitch the Vardys as the new Beckhams, the new glamorous King and Queen of football.
But as both the Rooneys emphasised in their testimonies, they have been in this game for a long time, and Coleen not only knows the rules about how Wags should behave, but she – as the wife of England’s best player for a generation – has set them. It’s not a coincidence that, during her reign, the Wags have maintained a greater distance from the press than they did when the Beckhams were on top. In her first 2016 Euros diary for the Sun, Vardy wrote, “I felt like the new girl at school” and it seems as if she thought she could rewrite the rules. She was wrong.
In her WhatsApp messages from the 2018 World Cup, she appears to be fretting that some of the Wags will put the group photo on their Instagram pages before the paparazzi can get it to the press. She was playing with 2006 tools – the tabloids – in a social media era. And while Vardy was swapping messages with journalists from the Sun – none of whom gave oral evidence in her defence – Rooney was setting her trap on Instagram all on her own.
Vardy wanted positive press coverage and to be the Queen Wag; instead, she has been denounced as a leaker. Not since Barbra Streisand sued a photographer to suppress a photo of her house on the internet, thereby bringing the world’s attention to that photo, has a legal case gone so badly for a claimant. Never mind the Streisand Effect, launching misguided legal cases will surely now be known as the Vardy Mentality. Why did she pursue this when she had so much to hide? My theory is she thought she could brazen it out. But Rooney, I think, saw the bigger picture: even if she loses this case, she’s already won the war, and she surely knows it. After the trial was extended, she and Wayne didn’t turn up for final day in court because, their lawyer said, “They had a previous travel arrangement with their children”, ie a holiday. Not even the judge begrudged them that.
Wagatha is such a great insight into 21st-century Britain, with its intersecting relationships between football, celebrity and the tabloids. And to anyone sneering at Vardy for her Instagram messages, or Rooney for her Instagram sleuthing, let he who has never sent a bitchy text cast the first stone; and how else do we find out things about one another these days but through social media? But Wagatha is about something more timeless, too. The Greek myths are full of warnings against the pursuit of self-glory and the dangers of underestimating a rival, and, like Icarus, Vardy flew too close to the Sun. On the last day of the trial, she firmly reprimanded a journalist sitting next to me – who she somehow knew was from the Sun – for running a story about her plans to move to the US, which she said was “cruel” and “untrue”. Throughout the trial, Vardy glanced often at the journalists sitting near her, looking at us to see how we were reacting to Rooney’s testimony, and she panicked when she caught me looking at what she was writing on a pad of paper (it was a doodle of a flower, for the record). Meanwhile, Rooney never even glanced at the press, and she remains on her throne. When you come at the Queen, you’d best not miss. There might always be someone younger and hungrier behind you on the stairs but, as Rooney wrote on her Instagram when she suspected Vardy was leaking stories: “Don’t play games with a girl who can play better.”
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism