Coleen Rooney has spoken out about husband Wayne’s nights with prostitutes - saying she stayed with him partly because of their children - and painfully admitting: “I’ve got to live with it.”
Coleen, who has been married for over 13 years and together with the footballer since she was 16, talked about how Wayne’s nights out with other women who he paid for sex, pushed their relationship to breaking point.
As a teenager, stories emerged in 2004 saying Wayne, who was an Everton star at the time, had visited a brothel multiple times with pals on drunken nights out.
Then after he married Coleen in 2008, further stories emerged in 2010 about a threesome with escorts Jenny Thompson and Helen Wood which happened the previous year, as well as date nights out with Jenny.
There were rows after Wayne’s cheating, but mum-of-four Coleen ultimately stood by ex-England striker Wayne and they are now trying to draw a line under the incidents in a new Amazon documentary.
Asked why she stayed with him, 35-year-old Coleen says: “When you’re making them decisions, you’ve got to focus on what you want and not what else, because you have so many people saying different things to you. Oh ‘Why is she getting back with him? She should’ve got rid of him ages ago’.
“Obviously I listen to the people that matter to me, my mum and dad, they’ve always given me a positive outlook on things.
“There’s nothing that we can’t deal with, and that’s my way. We’re in a situation, let’s sit down, let’s see what we can do, and can you make it work? And we have.
“We’re not the lovey-dovey type anyway, we like to have a laugh together and we work well together, and we’ve got four kids.
“I know people say, ‘were they just staying together to keep the family unit together?’
“That was part of it, but also we still love each other. Hopefully he’s learnt and he doesn’t get himself into any of them horrible situations again. But it’s happened and I’ve got to live with it and if I couldn’t cope with living with it, I would’ve ended the relationship.”
In the new Amazon documentary ‘Rooney’, Coleen bravely tells of her anger and shame following Wayne’s antics as a youngster on drunken nights out.
She puts some of his early mistakes down to alcohol, including the visits to brothels in Liverpool on boozy nights out.
The Sunday Mirror reported in 2004 that a teenage Rooney had cheated on his then-girlfriend Coleen with a 21-year-old prostitute called Charlotte Glover. He’d paid her £140 for sex before leaving her a signed photograph as a souvenir.
A month later, it was reported that he’d paid at least 10 late-night visits to a £45-a-time brothel in Liverpool where he’d slept with Gina McCarrick, then 37, as well as Patricia Tierney, a 48-year-old grandmother nicknamed the ‘Auld Slapper’ who wore a rubber catsuit.
She later denied these claims, while Rooney went on to admit to sleeping with unnamed prostitutes.
He said at the time: “Foolish as it now seems I did on occasions visit massage parlours and prostitutes. I now regret it deeply and hope people may understand that it was the sort of mistake you make when you are young and stupid. It was at a time when I was very young and immature.”
In the new film about his life, Wayne admits to making “bad decisions” whilst drunk and Coleen says alcohol can be a problem for the former striker.
Coleen says: “I think the first time, we were young so there was a lot of arguing.
“I knew groups that Wayne were hanging round with that weren’t good for him.
“Lovely people, but together with alcohol, not good. I told him that from day one.
“I didn’t want him to stop being friends with them, but I just didn’t want him to go out in situations with them because they got themselves into bad situations. But I do think alcohol has a lot[of blame], and still has from things that have happened recently.
“It’s not a good thing for Wayne to be unsupervised.”
Wayne himself tells the cameras: “I put myself in the wrong place. And when you’re in the wrong place and there’s alcohol involved, then you’re going to make bad decisions.
“And you’re going to have to suffer and deal with consequences. That’s what happens. It doesn’t take away any of my love for Coleen.
“It happened, it was a wrong decision to make. I held my hands up and that’s it, we worked through it.”
Later in the Amazon documentary Coleen appears alongside Wayne as they put the finishing touches to the new house they have been designing which will be home to them and sons Kai, 12, Klay, eight, Kit, six, and Cass, who turns four next week.
A decade has passed since Wayne was away from home with escorts, and when they discuss it again stood next to each other, it appears time has helped to heal some of the pain it caused.
Coleen says: “I think we’re lucky that we’ve both had the strength and support of each other and people around us to keep going and trying, that’s something that we have had to work at.”
Asked if she had forgiven him, she adds: “I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t forgiven him.
“Life goes on. I’ve not accepted…I’ve moved on. You’ve moved on.
“The behaviour, it’s not acceptable. Forgiveness is different I would say. It’s not acceptable what he’s done, but it’s happened and that was in the stage of life we were in at the time but we’ve moved on.
“I forgive him, but it wasn’t acceptable. But no, if it comes up we talk about it. I haven’t got the anger that I did at the time.”
The second wave of marriage problems came when in July 2009, a month before now wife Coleen gave birth. Jenny Thompson claimed Rooney cheated on Coleen again and she was paid £1,200-a-night. She said he had used untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile phones to arrange at least seven liaisons.
Shortly after the claims about Rooney’s nights with Jenny emerged, the Sunday Mirror reported in 2011 that he had had a threesome with her and another prostitute, Helen Wood.
In the Amazon film, Wayne says: “When these things have happened, we’ve sat down and I’ve explained what’s happened.
“It’s not nice, it’s not a nice thing to have to do. It won’t happen again. I don’t want it to happen again. And for us to get through it, it’s tough. Tough days, tough weeks, tough months. But I feel we’ve been through hard times and it does make you stronger as well.”
The documentary also charts the Rooney’s rise through football as well as their relationship which began very young with Wayne trying to woo her with poetry.
He says: “I think I was about 11 or 12. I knew I wanted to go out with her. I knew I wanted to marry her. And I said to her at the time, ‘When we grow up we’re gonna get married and you’re gonna have our kids.’ She was looking at me like, ‘Yeah, good one’.”
Coleen says: “I always remember he used to hang around by where I lived and every now and again you’d get his mum shouting up and down the street, ‘Wayne!’.
“I am best friends with Wayne’s cousin Claire. My dad and Claire’s dad ran the local boxing gym. Our families have grew up together.
“He’s a charmer, growing up that’s how he won me over. The more I said no, the more he said, ‘I will one day, I will get that date’.”
The pair also discuss moving into a big house after Wayne was a success at Everton and moving away from Croxteth was tough and a tearful Coleen would be left alone in upmarket Formby when Wayne went to play football. They then moved to Manchester soon after that.
Looking back Coleen says: “The thought of it was all fine and great. But then obviously you(Wayne) were away every weekend.
“I used to leave my mum’s and cry all the way home to mine. It was all of a sudden, it was a matter of months. Everything just happened. We’ve always grown up quicker than what we were meant to, I think.”
She says they found the press very hard to deal with and a “nightmare” growing up and adds: “You’ve got to learn quick about it. Accept criticism.
We’ve had some unbelievable times that everyone’s knew about, and then we’ve had some really bad times that everyone’s knew about.
“So it’s not like you can just go and hide away and deal with it yourselves.
“But that’s what our whole world is like. Because people think they know you and then they’ll go and tell someone else and they don’t really know you that well.”
The documentary is the chance for the pair to put on a united front and show how Wayne has matured in recent years. It is clear he feels he has changed.
Asked how he wants to be remembered, Wayne says: “Being a good person. For me it’s important that people in terms of teammates, coaches, friends, family, they remember me for who I am rather than what I have done.
“Stuff which has happened in the past with girls, for instance, that is of course stuff I regret. It’s something which I feel that has stuck against my name.
“I think it’s important because it is part of what happened in my life growing up and it’s something which has stuck and maybe tarnished my reputation as a person. People, (I) still see them, they look at me in a different way. I’m not that person. I’m not that type of person.”
* Rooney launches on Amazon Prime Video on Friday February 11.
