Rebekah Vardy has said she was sexually abused while growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, an ordeal her former community failed to protect her from.
Vardy, 41, opened up about her upbringing in a Channel 4 documentary titled Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me, which will air on 16 May.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Christian denomination with about 8.5 million active members. A primary tenet of the religion is that the world’s destruction is imminent.
In the documentary, Vardy returns to her home town of Norwich, where several practising family members still reside. She left the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the age of 15, after she was “shamed” for being sexually abused and seeing her family shunned for her parents’ divorce.
“I was brought up in a strict and controlling religious organisation,” Vardy said. “What happened to me during my childhood still affects me every single day.”
Vardy said a person in the community had sexually abused her between the ages of 11 and 15, something that she said was covered up by “elders”, senior male religious leaders.
“From the age of around 12 years old I was being abused and instead of being supported I was blamed, manipulated into believing it wasn’t the best thing to take it to the police,” she said.
“I told my mum about the abuse that I was experiencing. She cried, but didn’t believe me,” she said. “I told numerous members of my family, Jehovah’s Witness community, and they called a meeting. I think I was about 15. It was suggested that I had misinterpreted the abuse for a form of affection.”
She added: “I knew that I hadn’t. I was well aware of what was right and what was wrong, and it was explained that I could bring shame on my family, and I was basically manipulated into believing it wasn’t the best thing to do to take it any further and take it to the police.
“It’s hard to see how I survived that.”
Vardy, who is married to the Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy, said her childhood was spent believing she would die during Armageddon if she was not “perfect”, recalling “upsetting” images depicting the end of the world that were shown to her. She said they still caused her nightmares as an adult.
When she was 11, her family was ostracised by the community after her parents’ divorce, with relatives and friends forbidden from associating with them.
The documentary also records Vardy meeting former Jehovah’s Witnesses, including a child-abuse survivor and the mother of a man who took his own life after the organisation expelled him.
Vardy said she had initially “closed Pandora’s box” on her experience, and until the documentary she “didn’t want to revisit that”.
Asked whether the documentary had given her closure on her childhood experiences, Vardy said: “Definitely. I think this chapter has closed.
“It already really was, but I really wanted to do this when Channel 4 approached me, because I was fascinated by it,” she said.
“Knowing that I had a voice, knowing that my voice could help, and hopefully there will be more people who come forward to share their experiences.”
