If intrusive wall-to-wall coverage of the lives of footballer’s wives and girlfriends (so-called Wags) was a creation of tabloid newspapers in the 2000s, then the “Wagatha Christie” libel trial acted as a season finale for that particular era of celebrity culture.
The endless WhatsApp messages sent by Rebekah Vardy – in which she discussed how she would love to leak stories to newspapers, tipped off the Sun about the drink-driving arrest of a footballer and talked about relations with paparazzi photographers – came across as not only grubby but dated.
As the court heard how Vardy collaborated with her agent, Caroline Watt, it felt more like a historical account than an accurate depiction of the current media world.
It was clear that the duo believed it was enormously beneficial to Vardy’s public profile for her to have a strong relationship with tabloid journalists. What was less clear was why they placed so much emphasis on this. At best, Vardy stood to gain a few thousand pounds for providing a story (she texted her agent with a tip accompanied by the note “i want paying for this x”), or the hope of favourable coverage in future.
Vardy also appeared to be operating in the belief that a legal victory at the high court would clear her in the court of public opinion. Instead, she has found there is no PR agency in the land – and no court ruling – that can compete with the internet’s ability to turn serious legal arguments into a pop-culture event where everyone is forced to take sides.
Almost every quote and piece of evidence from the seven-day trial in May was screen-grabbed or turned into a meme to be rapidly forwarded around the UK’s WhatsApp groups or paraded on Twitter.
The way that Coleen Rooney controlled her public persona felt more in line with the approach taken by the modern influencer-celebrity. Giving evidence, she made clear her loathing for the tabloids and paparazzi photographers who had followed her since she was the teenage girlfriend of Wayne Rooney.
Instead, she set out the expectation of privacy she felt she had with regards to her social media accounts – and exposed how the law struggled to deal with modern internet norms.
Rooney operated a two-stream social strategy. On one side was her private locked Instagram account where a few hundred close acquaintances, including Vardy, were trusted to see her unvarnished family life.
The general public were then allowed to see a handful of sanitised posts on a different Instagram account. In Rooney’s mind it was morally unacceptable that the line between the private and public accounts had been crossed, when stories from the personal account ended up in the Sun.
Even the rollout of Rooney’s public accusation against Vardy was very modern. She told the court she had conducted her sting operation in complete secrecy without telling her husband, writing the statement herself, and only sending it to her brother to format before posting it straight on to Instagram.
While a media lawyer on a mainstream news outlet might have peppered Rooney’s text with a few adjectives such as “allegedly” or “apparently”, it was her direct phrase saying she had concluded one person was responsible – “It’s........... Rebekah Vardy’s account” – that made it infamous.
Yet the law has struggled to keep up with changing public attitudes to privacy and libel law. Based on the public response to the case there is still bafflement among some that Rooney’s social media post could be held to the same journalistic standards as an article on a mainstream news website – even though Rooney’s post was read by far more people than most newspaper articles.
But perhaps more damning for the media is that Rooney and her husband are working on a documentary around the case, with their full collaboration. Celebrities are realising there is no need to collaborate with external media outlets to get their message across and it’s much easier to retain editorial control.
While the modern wife or girlfriend of a footballer still cares about media coverage – and some still pass private information to journalists – they are just as likely to be building a far bigger audience on TikTok and Instagram, where they can profit from sponsored content.
Unfortunately for the public, who delighted in every twist of the Vardy-Rooney libel trial, that means we’re less likely to see a case like Wagatha Christie again in the near future.
