Rebekah Vardy has said she feels there was sexism involved in the coverage of her “Wagatha Christie” libel battle against Coleen Rooney.
The reality TV celebrity and wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy appeared in her first TV interview since losing the high-profile case at the High Court.
Ms Rooney was being sued for accusing her former friend on social media of selling information from her Instagram account to The Sun, but the judge found that the allegation was “substantially true”.
On TalkTV, Ms Vardy was interviewed by journalist Kate McCann, who asked whether she thought the media scrutiny about how she and Ms Rooney dressed during the trial was influenced by sexism.
She replied: “Totally – the whole thing was presented in such a misogynistic way.”
Ms Vardy also compared the reporting on her and Ms Rooney’s case with that of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard libel case in the US, saying that Depp’s clothing was not subjected to the same level of commentary.
She added: “It just seems like women aren’t allowed to defend themselves. Women aren’t allowed to dress nicely. Yeah, there’s a lot of sexism involved in it.”
Ms Vardy also suggested that she had suicidal thoughts at times after Ms Rooney made the social media allegation in October 2019.
She said she had felt she “didn’t even want to be here anymore”, adding: “It was like the worst feeling but at the same time having those feelings, feeling that I shouldn’t be feeling that because to me that was being a failure and that was not an option for me to be seen to be like that, for the kids’ benefit more than anything.”
Previously, the former I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! contestant had revealed that she was admitted to hospital twice to be treated for mental health issues and feels that she is probably suffering from PTSD.
Ms Rooney publicly claimed that Ms Vardy’s account was the source behind three stories in The Sun newspaper featuring fake details she had posted on her private Instagram stories.
Ms Vardy denied leaking stories to the media and sued Ms Rooney for libel. Both women attended a week-long trial at the High Court in London in May.
In the TalkTV interview, Ms Vardy admitted she does regret that the dispute went as far as it did but said that she will say until she is “blue in the face” that she is innocent. She also claimed that the judge “didn’t understand the case”.
Ms Vardy told the channel that she is “disappointed” with the outcome of the trial, saying: “I didn’t expect it to go that way but I think we had a judge that didn’t understand the case and didn’t look at everything.
“It feels like the judge just read what was written in the media and took on their narrative bias.”
Ms Vardy also said that at no point did her legal team advise her to halt the case, adding: “Because they know I didn’t do it and that is the exact reason that I carried on for as long as I did and I will say that ’til I’m blue in the face, I did not do it.”
