The verdict has been reached in one of the most expensive libel cases in British history: Rebekah Vardy v Coleen Rooney, or to give it its proper name, Wagatha Christie. It was so dramatically nonsensical that for the court to merely put it up on its website feels rather inadequate. The judge should have delivered it in a self-destructing Snapchat, or at the very least, in skywriting.
Nonetheless, here it is: Coleen Rooney won. But before we drill into whether we agree with that, as a newspaper (joking! I speak only for myself, and I do agree with it), here’s a quick recap into what went down between Vardy and Rooney, and the social conditions that created their epic dispute.
Between September 2017 and October 2019, a number of stories appeared in the tabloid newspapers which led Rooney to suspect that a member of her friendship circle had been leaking them. The details veered between the mundane (a flooded basement), the faintly embarrassing (a plan to revive her TV career) and the bizarre and potentially reputation-damaging (she’d travelled to Mexico to look into a gender-selected baby treatment).
Through a complex social media process that probably has a name like “forensic triangulation”, Rooney spent five months considering likely culprits, before restricting her Instagram access to just one, and staging a car crash. She sat back and waited for the fake story to appear in the Sun. It duly did. She then dramatically told the world that the leaks were coming from Rebekah Vardy’s account. I will not trouble you with who these women are married to, it’ll take too long – let’s just say “footballers”.
This all played out in late 2019, and was incredibly gripping, penetrating normally unbreachable barriers such as “I’m not interested in football” and “I’m too depressed about Brexit to be interested in anything”. This was in part because Rooney is a natural digital storyteller, her keen visual sense colliding with an innate understanding of the mechanisms of suspense.
But it’s mainly because the media mines Rooney – indeed all these wives and girlfriends – as constant sources of banal copy. They’re fighting, or they’ve lost weight, or they’ve gained weight, or they’re showcasing a new eye shadow. The stories that are weird enough to be diverting – like that Mexico trip – are unlikely to be true, and the stories that are true usually don’t even pretend to meet a minimum standard of human interest. The women are treated as baubles, their personalities hollowed out by the tedium of the content derived from them.
So then Rooney steps out with a view, a plan, a scheme, some feelings, and it restores her lost selfhood – a bit like staring at the Mona Lisa and her suddenly speaking to you.
As far as Rooney was concerned, her job was done. But by June 2020, Vardy felt that her own reputation had been so profoundly tarnished that her only option was to launch libel proceedings. Perhaps she didn’t heed the advice she was given (she seems not to have been expecting so much damn content to be required by Mrs Justice Steyn in the establishment of the facts). Out they poured, the WhatsApp messages between Vardy and her agent, Caroline Watt. They honestly read like an anxiety dream we must all have had in our worst moments – quick to slur, slow on the uptake, right there in green and white for everyone to see.
The libel case wasn’t a mistake because it was so revealing of Vardy, or because its costs look set to reach £3m, thanks to the reported £800 an hour fees of Rooney and Vardy’s barristers, as each woman raced to match the financial firepower of the other. It was a mistake because the appetite to watch women fighting with each other is infinite, and only ever limited by the finite amount of material. Now we have enough to keep us going for decades.
In a week that could end with England winning the Euros, isn’t it interesting that we don’t care at all what the women’s team’s Habs (husbands and boyfriends) are like, never mind whether they get on with each other? Years ago, I interviewed Kim Cattrall at the height of Sex and the City, when there was a rumour that that four-way ensemble all hated each other, and I asked her about it. She said (I paraphrase) “Our show is made alternately with the Sopranos, and yet I have never seen anyone ask whether they got on with each other.”
It was a fair point, succinctly made: the fascination with a bitch fight is rooted in garden variety sexism, a bid to infantilise women, erode their credibility and minimise their emotional range while amplifying their histrionics. And yet at the same time, I’m not at all interested in whether James Gandolfini got on with Tony Sirico. Just because you recognise that there’s shampoo in the water doesn’t mean you’re not also drinking it.
Many lessons have been learned (by Twitter) through this trial: never do business with the Sun (fair); don’t try to destroy someone’s life with a lie if yours could be destroyed by the truth (couldn’t we all be destroyed by the truth, though, really?); and never, ever go to court if you can possibly avoid it (the soundest advice). I would add “maybe come off social media for a bit”. But that’s easier said than done.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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