Coleen Rooney has said she cannot bring herself to forgive Rebekah Vardy for leaking stories about her to the media.
“I’m a forgive and forget person; I can’t be bothered with things going on and on,” Rooney told Vogue in an interview for the magazine’s September issue. “But this is obviously different.”
Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City and England footballer Jamie, lost her libel case against Rooney, the wife of the former England footballer Wayne, last year. In the “Wagatha Christie” trial, Vardy was suing Rooney for defamation after she had been accused of leaking posts from Rooney’s private Instagram account to the Sun.
Rooney has now spoken about the “surreal” experience of coming face-to-face with Vardy in court. “It was so weird that first day, actually sitting on a bench together … It was so difficult in that courtroom … especially watching her on the stand. It was quite painful. I felt uneasy,” she said.
She said she still struggled to understand why Vardy decided to take her to court. “I just thought: ‘Why have you put yourself in this position?’ It was not nice to watch.”
The saga began four years ago when Rooney conducted a “sting” operation to find out who was leaking stories about her. She posted fabricated tales on her Instagram account and restricted access to only Vardy, whom she already suspected.
The Sun then published these stories, which included claims that the basement of Rooney’s house had flooded, that Rooney had travelled to Mexico for “gender selection” treatment and that she planned to appear on Strictly Come Dancing.
Rooney then identified the culprit with the now infamous words posted on Instagram: “It’s ………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.” Many compared the sequence of events to a well-plotted Agatha Christie whodunnit.
Rooney recalled: “In the night I started thinking about what I was going to do. I just wanted these stories to stop.
“I started writing what I wanted to say and then the next morning I put it out there. That was the start of something that I would never have expected.”
She said she didn’t tell any of her friends or family what she planned to do. “[The part] my friends and family were most surprised at me for was putting the post up.”
Speaking about her prior relationship with Vardy, Rooney said: “I felt like she was in the same world as me. She was in the public eye. I thought she would be protective over that kind of thing … We could associate because our husbands had played for England together. But she doesn’t live around here. She wasn’t a friend. I’ve never socialised with her.”
She said she was sitting in her car in the middle of an industrial estate in Manchester when her lawyer called and told her she’d won the case. “I think all I did was swear for the whole quarter-of-an-hour phone call.”
Even today, she said, strangers still approached her to talk about the case. “It was quite surreal how many people followed it. Not just footballers or the girls. It felt like everyone was reading about it. All ages, all types.”
Rooney has secured a multimillion-pound deal with Disney for an upcoming tell-all documentary based on the saga.
