Coleen Rooney has signed a deal with Disney+ for a three-part TV series in which she'll tell her side of the Wagatha Christie case.
The news was confirmed at the Edinburgh TV Festival by the streaming service, where they announced they had won the exclusive rights to work with Coleen, 36. The show has been given the working title of Wagatha Christie and is also set to explore how Coleen has been in the public spotlight for two decades, having begun dating footballer husband Wayne when they were teenagers.
Describing the project, Disney+ wrote in an announcement: "The three-part series will take viewers from the circumstances that led to her infamous Instagram post that ‘broke the Internet’ all the way to Coleen being a successful defendant in one of the UK’s highest-profile High Court defamation cases brought against her by Rebekah Vardy. In a story for our times, Wagatha Christie will reveal how fiercely determined and resilient Coleen had to be in order to protect her family from the challenges presented by the traditional and social media landscapes."
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Dorothy St Pictures, a production company, has been filming with Rooney for the last two years, chronicling the journey of her legal battle with Vardy working alongside Lorton Entertainment to make a TV show. Cameras even shadowed her during the High Court trial in May, but at this stage it had not been decided which channel or streaming platform would get to screen the results.
The Mirror first broke the story last November that Coleen had signed a £1million deal with Lorton Entertainment to make the doc. Lorton were previously responsible for the highly successful Amazon documentary about Wayne Rooney and have now agreed a contract with Disney+.
Coleen conducted a sting operation in 2019, accusing Vardy online of leaking private stories about her to The Sun. Mrs Vardy has always denied she passed information to the newspaper.
In the High Court at the end of July Mrs Justice Steyn ruled Coleen's accusation was "substantially true" and she effectively won the court battle of the wags. The judge wrote of Vardy's libel action: "The claim has been dismissed. The defendant succeeded in establishing that the essence of the libel was substantially true."
In the case dubbed the 'Wagatha Christie trial' because of the way Coleen put false stories on her social media to prove Vardy was responsible for leaking information, the written judgement said that Coleen Rooney was ''an honest and reliable witness'' when she gave evidence at the High Court in May.
In her 76-page judgment, Mrs Justice Steyn said Vardy's evidence was "manifestly inconsistent" with contemporaneous documentary evidence on "many occasions". The judge added: "I find that it is, unfortunately, necessary to treat Mrs Vardy's evidence with very considerable caution."
Mrs Justice Steyn also said there was "a degree of self-deception" on Rebekah Vardy's part about her role in disclosing information. Coleen's new Disney+ documentary style show was announced at Edinburgh TV Festival alongside other unscripted projects featuring Hollywood stars and fashion icons.
Sean Doyle, Director of Unscripted Content, Disney+, EMEA, said: "Our aim was to find brilliant once-in-a-lifetime stories that showcase a wide range of subjects; and these latest projects truly deliver on that promise. We’re working with our elite creative partners on this slate, reflecting the UK’s status as an unscripted powerhouse and establishing Disney+ as a destination for unscripted titles."
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