“I Got the Raw End of That”: Rebekah Vardy on the Long Tail of the Wagatha Christie Saga

The four words, when they arrived across social media platforms in October 2019, landed more explosively than their author could have hoped. Coleen Rooney, the wife of retired British soccer star Wayne, was trying to get to the bottom of who had been leaking the contents of her private Instagram account to The Sun. She blocked all of the accounts following her except her suspect’s. When the tabloid continued to report on her posts, she arrived at her now notorious conclusion:

“It’s ……….Rebekah Vardy’s account.”

And then it was, to a cartoonish extent, a field day for the full array of British tabloids and their long-standing preoccupation with soccer’s wives and girlfriends, or “WAGs.” Vardy is married to Wayne Rooney’s former England teammate Jamie; the spat quickly and universally became known as the “Wagatha Christie” scandal.

The following year, Rebekah Vardy sued Coleen Rooney for defamation. “I have found that Ms. Vardy was party to the disclosure to The Sun of the Marriage, Birthday, Halloween, Pyjamas, Car Crash, Gender Selection, Babysitting, and Flooded Basement Posts,” the judge wrote in her July 2022 verdict, dismissing the claim. Rooney’s Instagram detective work was validated, and, in a comparison echoed across the international press, her lawyer described Vardy’s suit as “probably the most ill-advised legal action since Oscar Wilde put pen to writ.” Vardy was ordered to pay 90% of Rooney’s legal costs—more than 1.4 million British pounds—as well as to cover those incurred by the Sun journalists who were dragged into the proceedings. (A judge recently dismissed an appeal Vardy filed over the amount of her debt to Rooney.)

I was surprised, then, but not entirely perplexed, when Vardy reached out this spring through a representative. I had written about the case as it unfolded in the British courts and, three years later, she wanted to offer an interview about her current life. She had suffered a reputational dent on the highest public order but, having trademarked “Wagatha Christie” in the years since her courtroom spectacle, never seemed particularly cowed by it. When we spoke, she was on vacation in Turkey, and Jamie, who recently wrapped up a 13-year stint at Leicester City that included the unlikeliest title in Premier League history, popped into the frame for a moment to say hi.

Vardy said that she had put Wagatha Christie behind her after a period of feeling silenced. All the same, she felt it was time to reclaim her authenticity, as she put it, and it didn’t take much prodding to elicit her feelings on the case. She stood by her defamation claim before I could ask—“I didn’t sell stories to The Sun newspaper and that really is the end of it”—and insisted that she “got the raw end of that.”

“In fact, I think murderers and pedophiles have faced far less scrutiny than I did,” Vardy said.

As an international phenomenon, WAG culture began in earnest in the 2000s, in some ways mirroring the contemporaneous Hilton-Spears-Lohan axis then consuming American tabloids. Rooney was an original. She traveled in the same circle as Victoria Beckham, the ne plus ultra of the category owing to both her pop music career and her equally telegenic husband. Vardy, by contrast, had the air of an outsider when she arrived on the scene in the mid-2010s. Though her court case featured a well-noted fashion component—an assembly of luxury designers with Rooney adding a sprinkling of high-street—she saw herself as playing a different game.

“I am polar opposite to what you would class as the typical WAG,” Vardy said. “I’m not bothered. I will go out head to toe in Zara where someone else’s wife or girlfriend has to be head to toe in Prada.”

The Vardys met when Rebekah was working as a nightclub events manager in Sheffield, the former industrial center in Northern England where Jamie grew up. It was his 27th birthday party—seven months before he’d make his Premier League debut, a near-total anomaly in a national system in which players are typically tapped as teenagers. Before reaching the top, Jamie split time playing outside of the professional pyramid and making medical splints, and he wore an ankle monitor for six months, including during matches, after he was convicted of assault during a pub fight.

“He rolls up on the night,” Vardy remembered, “and he’s blind, stinking drunk. Absolutely smashed.”

He pursued her for “quite a while,” Vardy said, but she was not initially interested in what she saw as an archetype of an “unhinged” athlete. Jamie’s talent, and his appeal, has always rested on the idea that he was constantly on the verge of chaos: drinking three Red Bulls before a match, or his signature homemade cocktail of Skittles and vodka the night before. Vardy came to see something different in him. “I realized very quickly that Jamie didn’t fit into any of those categories,” she said.

During the Wagatha Christie trial, Wayne Rooney testified that, in the course of the 2016 European Football Championship tournament, he was asked by the team’s management to have a word with Jamie over concerns that Rebekah was causing the team “problems and distractions” with her media presence, particularly with a column she was writing for The Sun. “We all knew that it was an awkward subject,” Rooney said, “so I needed to speak to Mr. Vardy and ask him to speak to his wife, and ask him to ask his wife to calm down.” The column was called “I’m a Celebrity.” Jamie denied such a meeting taking place, saying in a statement at the time that “Wayne is talking nonsense.”

The trial offered a few other glimpses into Vardy’s comportment. When she and her then agent, Caroline Watt, were discussing Rooney over WhatsApp, it was revealed, Vardy described her as a “nasty bitch.”

“Would love to leak those stories,” she wrote.

Watt said she had been touch with a reporter for The Sun. In her witness statement, Rooney wrote, “it was messing with my head that someone who I trusted was doing this to me.”

“It was not someone she trusted,” Watt wrote to Vardy. “It was me.”

The judge found that Vardy and Watt were both party to the transmission of Rooney’s posts to The Sun. (Watt had access to Vardy’s Instagram account.) Watt did not appear at the trial, citing psychiatric illness, and the verdict described the absence as “striking.”

I asked Vardy if she could provide any update on Watt or the state of their relationship. They are in occasional touch, wishing each other’s children a happy birthday. She said that she thought the legal matter caused Watt considerable anguish and that, in serving paperwork to Watt’s home as opposed to through her lawyers, “what the other side’s legal team did to her was unfair and completely unjust.” I said that, given Watt’s silence and Vardy’s continued defense of her case, onlookers would be eager to hear Watt’s side of the story.

“Well, maybe there’s a different version of that completely,” Vardy said. “But we won’t go into that one.” (Watt couldn’t be reached for comment.)

The verdict in the trial noted that Vardy had been subjected to “vile abuse, including messages wishing her, her family, and even her (then unborn) baby, ill in the most awful terms.” As we spoke, she noted a few times that she was at peace. She was looking forward, in particular, to a Netflix documentary about Jamie, expected to be released this fall, that she had participated in—a possible counterpoint to Fisher Stevens’s 2023 series on the Beckhams, in all their his-and-hers glamour. I asked Vardy if, after all she had seen in the lives of soccer players and their wives, she had a theory of the enduring interest in WAGs.

“Do you know what?” she said. “That is the million-dollar question.”

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