Coleen Rooney has finally broken her silence on the libel case she won against Rebekah Vardy in a new interview with British Vogue.
After keeping quiet about the legal fallout, the wife of footballer Wayne Rooney has now said Vardy’s “evil” texts that were read in court made her sick and also branded the 41-year-old “odd”.
In October 2019, Rooney accused Vardy of leaking stories to the press in a now infamous Instagram post after she staged an elaborate sting operation to find the culprit, which was dubbed by media, “Wagatha Christie”.
At the time, the Liverpudlian explained that she had planted false stories to her private account and made them only visible to Vardy account.
Following the claims, Vardy sued her fellow WAG for defamation but lost her libel case.
Speaking to British Vogue, the 37-year-old went into detail about how she came up with her plan to expose the individual, and said she still sticks by it.
Rooney shared: “I feel like a lot of people still don’t understand what happened, from beginning to end. But what I said in that post, I still stick by today…
“In the night I started thinking about what I was going to do. I just wanted these stories to stop.”
When asked by the outlet if she used the Notes app, Rooney laughed and explained: “No. I like a pen and paper – a pencil and rubber, actually, so I can rub it out.
“So 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.”
Rooney also told the publication that she didn’t tell a soul what she was up to, not even a lawyer: “No. [The part] my friends and family were most surprised at me [for was] putting the post up.”
“If I want to do sunnin’ – and I know I’ll get talked out of doing sunnin’ – I’ll just go ahead and do it. I didn’t want no one telling me not to do it.”
Reflecting on the fallout, Rooney admitted she’s not friends with Vardy, who is married to footballer Jamie Vardy, 36, and believed the I’m A Celeb alum would also be “protective” of her private life.
She 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.”
Due to not pre-legalling her social media statement, the mother-of-four admitted that when Vardy said she was consulting her lawyer she was left “scared”.
She added: “You see social media people calling people out in such nasty ways and I was thinking I wasn’t that nasty.
“I’ve never been in a legal case before so for me it was scary. What a horrible experience. The thing I was dreading the most was actually going to court.”
Rooney spoke about their court case and explained how “painful” it was being on the same bench with Vardy after everything that had happened.
She reflected: “I found it hard not letting on.
“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.
“Obviously she was going through it. ‘I thought, “Why have you put yourself in this position?” It was not nice to watch. To this day she cannot for the life of her understand why Vardy took her to court. She is ‘odd’.”
Later in the interview, Rooney revealed how she found out she had won the case on her own in an industrial estate in Manchester – and swore in jubilation over the result.
She laughed: “I think all I did was swear for the whole quarter of an hour phone call.
“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. The positivity I got from it…I’m glad for that, at least.”
Read the full feature in the September issue of British Vogue, available via digital download and on newsstands from Tuesday, August 22.
