It was a fierce football rivalry fought not on the pitch but on social media and at the High Courts of Justice in London.
In this episode, we'll explore the fierce rivalry between football wives Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, the libel case that followed, and the rise of WAG culture in Britain.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a fierce footballing rivalry, a rivalry that was fought not on the pitch but on social media, and then the High Courts of Justice in London.
[00:00:35] It’s an amazing story that brings together football, Instagram, celebrities, trademarks, the law, and the most unexpected but brilliant piece of detective work.
[00:00:47] OK then, Vardy vs. Rooney | The Battle Of The Footballers’ Wives.
[00:00:54] On the 29th of July, 2022, almost exactly a year before this episode will be released, two women stood in The High Courts of London, awaiting to hear the decision of the court.
[00:01:09] The case was not criminal, neither stood accused of theft, murder, drug dealing, or anything like that.
[00:01:18] The case was one of libel, the crime of damaging someone’s reputation by writing something untrue about them.
[00:01:27] And the two women were not just any random members of the public.
[00:01:32] They were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy. If you don’t recognise their names, perhaps you might recognise the names of their husbands: Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, two of England’s best known football players.
[00:01:50] This battle was the culmination of an almost three year feud, and the story of everything that happened is quite amazing.
[00:02:00] So, as a bit of background, you probably need no reminder that football in Britain is very popular.
[00:02:08] Premier League footballers are paid hundreds of thousands of Euros a week, the best footballers are treated as serious celebrities, with paparazzi hiding outside their homes, trying to catch a glimpse of their private lives.
[00:02:23] For a long time, the celebrity was restricted to the pitch itself, with limited public interest in footballers' private lives.
[00:02:33] But starting in the mid 2000s, the British press turned its attention off the pitch, to the wives and girlfriends of the country’s top football players.
[00:02:46] There is actually a term for the wives and girlfriends of football players, a popular acronym that came to prominence during the 2006 World Cup, and that’s “WAG”, - W, A, G - short for “wives and girlfriends”.
[00:03:02] Soon enough gossip magazines reported not just on what clothes the WAGs were wearing or who looked like they had had a bit too much to drink at a post-match party, but on rivalries between the WAGs, on the individuals.
[00:03:19] This original “WAG” class contained plenty of women who were famous in their own right, they had successful careers of their own, irrespective of their husbands or boyfriends.
[00:03:32] Victoria Beckham, the wife of David Beckham, was a pop star, she was one of the five Spice Girls, the biggest girl band of the 1990s.
[00:03:41] Then there was Cheryl Cole, who was a pop singer in a band called Girls Aloud and is now probably more famous than her footballer husband, Ashley, now ex-husband I should add.
[00:03:54] And there were, of course, plenty of wives and girlfriends of famous footballers who had no claim to fame themselves, they were just normal non-celebrity members of the public, you know, like you and me.
[00:04:08] But clearly, when you marry a Premier League footballer, and the lens of the paparazzi is on you, you become something of a celebrity in your own right.
[00:04:20] Magazines want to print pictures of you going shopping or out for a coffee. Suddenly you are someone, just because of the person you are with.
[00:04:32] Two such ladies were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy.
[00:04:37] Coleen Rooney was in fact a member of this original “WAG” group. She had met a boy called Wayne when they were both 12 years old, and they had been teenage girlfriend and boyfriend.
[00:04:51] This boy, Wayne, would grow up and become the youngest ever player to play for England when he was 17, then sign for Manchester United at 18.
[00:05:03] He is now retired from the sport as a player, but he enjoyed a long and successful career, starting in 2002 and continuing for almost 20 years.
[00:05:14] Rebekah Vardy joined the world of football a little later. She worked as a nightclub promoter, she met an already successful footballer called Jamie Vardy, the pair got married a couple of years later, in 2016.
[00:05:30] Importantly for our story, Jamie Vardy and Wayne Rooney were England teammates, they played together from 2015 to 2018.
[00:05:42] But, that’s the last we’ll hear, pretty much, about Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, as they are very much minor characters in this story.
[00:05:52] Today, it’s all about their wives, Coleen and Rebekah.
[00:05:57] The two women were reportedly close friends, but they were very different, and had differing ideas about how they wanted to be seen by the press.
[00:06:08] Coleen Rooney had been in the public eye since she was a teenager. As soon as Wayne Rooney, her then boyfriend, became famous, the press turned its attention also to her. She was relatively publicity shy, not courting attention, not looking to be written about or photographed, but she could not escape the photographer’s lens.
[00:06:31] And, given that she spent practically her entire life as a semi-celebrity, there has been plenty of media interest in her as an individual.
[00:06:42] Rebekah Vardy, on the other hand, was not so used to being in the public eye, she was playing catch-up, you could say.
[00:06:51] She was 32 when she met Jame Vardy, she had already been married twice before. Jamie Vardy wasn’t actually the first footballer she had been in a relationship with. She dated another football player from a club called Oxford United.
[00:07:08] Oxford United, in case you weren’t aware, isn’t a particularly good team, and her ex-boyfriend would later claim that she was always jealous of the wives and girlfriends of Premier League players - people like Coleen Rooney.
[00:07:23] Now, I don’t want to get too much into gossip and rumour, although it is hard when talking about this particular subject, I just wanted to give you some of the background information, so that you can get a measure of the characters of our two protagonists.
[00:07:39] So, what actually happened?
[00:07:42] Well, for several months, Coleen Rooney had been claiming that someone had been leaking private details about her life to the British press.
[00:07:52] Someone, one of her trusted inner circle, must have spilled the beans, as there were stories published that revealed secrets about her life that she had only told to a select few close friends.
[00:08:07] And on October the 9th, of 2019, there was the bombshell, the big announcement. It was a tweet, and I may as well read you all of it, as you’ll see that Coleen Rooney has quite the knack for drama.
[00:08:23] OK, so here we go. The tweet went:
[00:08:27] For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The SUN newspaper of my private posts and stories.
[00:08:39] There has been so much information given to them about me, my friends and my family - all without my permission or knowledge.
[00:08:48] After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion.
[00:08:57] To try and prove this, I came up with an idea. I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram stories except ONE account. In brackets: [Those on my private account must have been wondering why I haven't had stories on there for a while.] Close brackets.
[00:09:15] Over the past five months I have posted a series of false stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did! The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flooding in my new house.
[00:09:35] It's been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account or individual it's come from.
[00:09:51] I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
[00:10:00] It's ........ Rebekah Vardy's account.
[00:10:05] [sharp intake of breath]
[00:10:08] It was a scandalous accusation. Rebekah Vardy, her supposed great friend, stood accused of selling secrets about Coleen’s private life to the Sun newspaper.
[00:10:22] Rebekah Vardy immediately took to social media to deny this, asking why she would sell secrets on her friends. Her husband earned a hundred and fifty thousand Euros a week as a striker for Leicester City, she didn’t need the money.
[00:10:38] As you might expect, this story was lapped up by the newspapers and gossip magazines, it was the ultimate celebrity spat, a public argument between two people who were no stranger to the gossip pages.
[00:10:55] Coleen Rooney was even dubbed “Wagatha Christie” by one journalist, so a combination of WAG and Agatha Christie, the famous murder mystery novelist.
[00:11:07] This term stuck, “Wagatha Christie”, and the British press hung on every new accusation or denial in this feud, which was fought in public on social media.
[00:11:20] The feud only intensified as Rebekah Vardy not only continued to deny any involvement in it, but in June the following year she revealed that she was going to take Coleen Rooney to court for libel, for accusing her of something in public that damaged her reputation.
[00:11:41] She wanted £1 million in compensation, so that's something like €1.2 million.
[00:11:50] It went to court, and in November of that year a judge ruled in Rebekah Vardy’s favour, saying that an ordinary reader, a normal member of the public, would have understood that Coleen Rooney was accusing Rebekah Vardy personally of having leaked the story, and having besmirched her good name.
[00:12:10] Rooney was ordered to pay just under €30,000 in compensation to Vardy, but this was only the first stage of the process.
[00:12:21] The next stage of the case required Coleen Rooney to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Rebekah Vardy had personally shared this insider information, not just that it came from Rebekah Vardy’s Instagram account. To explain the difference, Vardy had claimed that maybe someone had accessed her Instagram account and sold the stories, she couldn’t be sure, but it was definitely not her.
[00:12:48] So, to chapter two of the story, and here is where it becomes as dramatic as any Agatha Christie novel.
[00:12:57] As the trial dragged into 2021, it took a nasty turn as private messages sent by Rebekah Vardy were read out. In these messages, which were sent before Rooney had publicly accused Vardy, Vardy referred to Rooney as a quote “nasty bitch”, telling her agent that she would love to leak stories about her to the newspapers. So she was calling her these names behind her back while still publicly claiming to be her good friend.
[00:13:30] Vardy’s agent would also be dragged into the case, as a WhatsApp message she sent to Vardy was shown to the court.
[00:13:39] This was a WhatsApp message from early 2019. Vardy’s agent had shared a picture of a tweet from Rooney saying that someone was betraying her, and sent it to Vardy with a laughing face emoji and the text “It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me.”
[00:13:59] Bad news for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:14:01] But it wasn’t definitive proof. To win the case, Coleen Rooney needed to prove that it was Vardy herself that shared the story with The Sun, and this message only showed that the agent had sold the story and that Vardy knew about it.
[00:14:19] Rooney needed more proof, and that proof surely could be found on the agent’s phone. This agent, after all, was clearly not very good at covering her tracks.
[00:14:31] But, in a terrible plot twist reminiscent of an Agatha Christie story, as the agent was on a boat in the North Sea, she mysteriously dropped her phone into the icy waters of the North Sea, with it plunging to the bottom, never to be found again.
[00:14:50] But how about the messages on Rebekah Vardy’s phone, I hear you ask?
[00:14:55] Good question.
[00:14:56] Rebekah Vardy told the court that she had employed an IT expert to help her export all of her conversations from her phone, but in the process all of the messages had been deleted from the phone, and the IT expert couldn’t remember the password for the encrypted device he had backed them up on.
[00:15:17] They too were lost forever.
[00:15:21] What a series of unfortunate events.
[00:15:24] First the agent’s phone fell into the icy North Sea, then Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert permanently forgot the password.
[00:15:33] Both accidents, of course, but they meant that there was no way to retrieve the messages that Coleen Rooney thought would prove conclusive.
[00:15:43] Still, the tide was turning for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:15:47] She had first claimed she had no idea about any of this, then she had been forced to admit that her agent might have been selling stories about Rooney, but without Vardy’s permission, and then she had to admit that her agent might have been accessing her Instagram account and selling stories, but still without her permission, or so she claimed.
[00:16:09] And the agent dropping the phone into the sea and Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert forgetting the password, well it was almost as if Rebekah Vardy was trying to hide something.
[00:16:21] Rooney’s lawyers pounced, and took the opportunity to present Vardy as an unreliable witness who had lied under oath.
[00:16:32] This was technically true, she had, but Rebekah Vardy wasn’t the sort of person to stand in court and be insulted. On the final day of the trial she stormed out of the court.
[00:16:46] And on July the 29th, 2022, almost three years after the first explosive accusation came from Coleen Rooney, the judge announced the court’s decision.
[00:16:58] The court ruled that it believed, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was indeed Rebekah Vardy who had sold the stories; she lost the case.
[00:17:09] Because it was only a libel case, not a criminal one, and it was Vardy who brought the case against Rooney, Rebekah Vardy didn’t have to pay any damages, she was only ordered to pay 90% of Rooney’s legal fees.
[00:17:25] Still, it had been a lengthy process, and Rooney’s fees were an estimated £1.5 million, so almost €2 million. And of course, Vardy had to pay her own fees, which are probably similar to Rooney’s, so the entire case will have cost her somewhere in the region of €4 million.
[00:17:47] Plus, her reputation is in tatters, as one article put it, “she will also have paid millions of pounds for the privilege of being publicly humiliated.”
[00:18:00] Fortunately, her husband is a highly paid footballer, and she also now has a series of licensing and reality TV deals, so it’s not like this will bankrupt Rebekkah and Jamie Vardy, but clearly it's a lot of money.
[00:18:15] However, she does seem to have found a cunning way, potentially, of making some money out of the whole affair.
[00:18:23] Yes, there are the TV appearances, the inevitable book deals and so forth, but it emerged earlier this year that Rebekkah Vardy had trademarked the term “Wagatha Christie”.
[00:18:37] Perhaps this is in an attempt to stop journalists writing about it using that catchy term, perhaps it’s to try to make some money out of merchandise or the film rights to the case, or perhaps it’s to try to sue people who have already used it, and get money out of them who knows?
[00:18:56] One thing is for sure, though.
[00:18:59] In the ongoing battle of the footballer’s wives, the score in this match was 1-0 to Coleen Rooney.
[00:19:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on this unusual case of the warring footballer’s wives..
[00:19:15] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:19] Have there been any similar cases in your country?
[00:19:21] Why do you think we are so obsessed with the partners of celebrities?
[00:19:26] And what is it about footballers in particular that tabloids and gossip magazines love so much?
[00:19:33] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:36] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:43] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:49] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a fierce footballing rivalry, a rivalry that was fought not on the pitch but on social media, and then the High Courts of Justice in London.
[00:00:35] It’s an amazing story that brings together football, Instagram, celebrities, trademarks, the law, and the most unexpected but brilliant piece of detective work.
[00:00:47] OK then, Vardy vs. Rooney | The Battle Of The Footballers’ Wives.
[00:00:54] On the 29th of July, 2022, almost exactly a year before this episode will be released, two women stood in The High Courts of London, awaiting to hear the decision of the court.
[00:01:09] The case was not criminal, neither stood accused of theft, murder, drug dealing, or anything like that.
[00:01:18] The case was one of libel, the crime of damaging someone’s reputation by writing something untrue about them.
[00:01:27] And the two women were not just any random members of the public.
[00:01:32] They were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy. If you don’t recognise their names, perhaps you might recognise the names of their husbands: Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, two of England’s best known football players.
[00:01:50] This battle was the culmination of an almost three year feud, and the story of everything that happened is quite amazing.
[00:02:00] So, as a bit of background, you probably need no reminder that football in Britain is very popular.
[00:02:08] Premier League footballers are paid hundreds of thousands of Euros a week, the best footballers are treated as serious celebrities, with paparazzi hiding outside their homes, trying to catch a glimpse of their private lives.
[00:02:23] For a long time, the celebrity was restricted to the pitch itself, with limited public interest in footballers' private lives.
[00:02:33] But starting in the mid 2000s, the British press turned its attention off the pitch, to the wives and girlfriends of the country’s top football players.
[00:02:46] There is actually a term for the wives and girlfriends of football players, a popular acronym that came to prominence during the 2006 World Cup, and that’s “WAG”, - W, A, G - short for “wives and girlfriends”.
[00:03:02] Soon enough gossip magazines reported not just on what clothes the WAGs were wearing or who looked like they had had a bit too much to drink at a post-match party, but on rivalries between the WAGs, on the individuals.
[00:03:19] This original “WAG” class contained plenty of women who were famous in their own right, they had successful careers of their own, irrespective of their husbands or boyfriends.
[00:03:32] Victoria Beckham, the wife of David Beckham, was a pop star, she was one of the five Spice Girls, the biggest girl band of the 1990s.
[00:03:41] Then there was Cheryl Cole, who was a pop singer in a band called Girls Aloud and is now probably more famous than her footballer husband, Ashley, now ex-husband I should add.
[00:03:54] And there were, of course, plenty of wives and girlfriends of famous footballers who had no claim to fame themselves, they were just normal non-celebrity members of the public, you know, like you and me.
[00:04:08] But clearly, when you marry a Premier League footballer, and the lens of the paparazzi is on you, you become something of a celebrity in your own right.
[00:04:20] Magazines want to print pictures of you going shopping or out for a coffee. Suddenly you are someone, just because of the person you are with.
[00:04:32] Two such ladies were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy.
[00:04:37] Coleen Rooney was in fact a member of this original “WAG” group. She had met a boy called Wayne when they were both 12 years old, and they had been teenage girlfriend and boyfriend.
[00:04:51] This boy, Wayne, would grow up and become the youngest ever player to play for England when he was 17, then sign for Manchester United at 18.
[00:05:03] He is now retired from the sport as a player, but he enjoyed a long and successful career, starting in 2002 and continuing for almost 20 years.
[00:05:14] Rebekah Vardy joined the world of football a little later. She worked as a nightclub promoter, she met an already successful footballer called Jamie Vardy, the pair got married a couple of years later, in 2016.
[00:05:30] Importantly for our story, Jamie Vardy and Wayne Rooney were England teammates, they played together from 2015 to 2018.
[00:05:42] But, that’s the last we’ll hear, pretty much, about Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, as they are very much minor characters in this story.
[00:05:52] Today, it’s all about their wives, Coleen and Rebekah.
[00:05:57] The two women were reportedly close friends, but they were very different, and had differing ideas about how they wanted to be seen by the press.
[00:06:08] Coleen Rooney had been in the public eye since she was a teenager. As soon as Wayne Rooney, her then boyfriend, became famous, the press turned its attention also to her. She was relatively publicity shy, not courting attention, not looking to be written about or photographed, but she could not escape the photographer’s lens.
[00:06:31] And, given that she spent practically her entire life as a semi-celebrity, there has been plenty of media interest in her as an individual.
[00:06:42] Rebekah Vardy, on the other hand, was not so used to being in the public eye, she was playing catch-up, you could say.
[00:06:51] She was 32 when she met Jame Vardy, she had already been married twice before. Jamie Vardy wasn’t actually the first footballer she had been in a relationship with. She dated another football player from a club called Oxford United.
[00:07:08] Oxford United, in case you weren’t aware, isn’t a particularly good team, and her ex-boyfriend would later claim that she was always jealous of the wives and girlfriends of Premier League players - people like Coleen Rooney.
[00:07:23] Now, I don’t want to get too much into gossip and rumour, although it is hard when talking about this particular subject, I just wanted to give you some of the background information, so that you can get a measure of the characters of our two protagonists.
[00:07:39] So, what actually happened?
[00:07:42] Well, for several months, Coleen Rooney had been claiming that someone had been leaking private details about her life to the British press.
[00:07:52] Someone, one of her trusted inner circle, must have spilled the beans, as there were stories published that revealed secrets about her life that she had only told to a select few close friends.
[00:08:07] And on October the 9th, of 2019, there was the bombshell, the big announcement. It was a tweet, and I may as well read you all of it, as you’ll see that Coleen Rooney has quite the knack for drama.
[00:08:23] OK, so here we go. The tweet went:
[00:08:27] For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The SUN newspaper of my private posts and stories.
[00:08:39] There has been so much information given to them about me, my friends and my family - all without my permission or knowledge.
[00:08:48] After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion.
[00:08:57] To try and prove this, I came up with an idea. I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram stories except ONE account. In brackets: [Those on my private account must have been wondering why I haven't had stories on there for a while.] Close brackets.
[00:09:15] Over the past five months I have posted a series of false stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did! The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flooding in my new house.
[00:09:35] It's been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account or individual it's come from.
[00:09:51] I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
[00:10:00] It's ........ Rebekah Vardy's account.
[00:10:05] [sharp intake of breath]
[00:10:08] It was a scandalous accusation. Rebekah Vardy, her supposed great friend, stood accused of selling secrets about Coleen’s private life to the Sun newspaper.
[00:10:22] Rebekah Vardy immediately took to social media to deny this, asking why she would sell secrets on her friends. Her husband earned a hundred and fifty thousand Euros a week as a striker for Leicester City, she didn’t need the money.
[00:10:38] As you might expect, this story was lapped up by the newspapers and gossip magazines, it was the ultimate celebrity spat, a public argument between two people who were no stranger to the gossip pages.
[00:10:55] Coleen Rooney was even dubbed “Wagatha Christie” by one journalist, so a combination of WAG and Agatha Christie, the famous murder mystery novelist.
[00:11:07] This term stuck, “Wagatha Christie”, and the British press hung on every new accusation or denial in this feud, which was fought in public on social media.
[00:11:20] The feud only intensified as Rebekah Vardy not only continued to deny any involvement in it, but in June the following year she revealed that she was going to take Coleen Rooney to court for libel, for accusing her of something in public that damaged her reputation.
[00:11:41] She wanted £1 million in compensation, so that's something like €1.2 million.
[00:11:50] It went to court, and in November of that year a judge ruled in Rebekah Vardy’s favour, saying that an ordinary reader, a normal member of the public, would have understood that Coleen Rooney was accusing Rebekah Vardy personally of having leaked the story, and having besmirched her good name.
[00:12:10] Rooney was ordered to pay just under €30,000 in compensation to Vardy, but this was only the first stage of the process.
[00:12:21] The next stage of the case required Coleen Rooney to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Rebekah Vardy had personally shared this insider information, not just that it came from Rebekah Vardy’s Instagram account. To explain the difference, Vardy had claimed that maybe someone had accessed her Instagram account and sold the stories, she couldn’t be sure, but it was definitely not her.
[00:12:48] So, to chapter two of the story, and here is where it becomes as dramatic as any Agatha Christie novel.
[00:12:57] As the trial dragged into 2021, it took a nasty turn as private messages sent by Rebekah Vardy were read out. In these messages, which were sent before Rooney had publicly accused Vardy, Vardy referred to Rooney as a quote “nasty bitch”, telling her agent that she would love to leak stories about her to the newspapers. So she was calling her these names behind her back while still publicly claiming to be her good friend.
[00:13:30] Vardy’s agent would also be dragged into the case, as a WhatsApp message she sent to Vardy was shown to the court.
[00:13:39] This was a WhatsApp message from early 2019. Vardy’s agent had shared a picture of a tweet from Rooney saying that someone was betraying her, and sent it to Vardy with a laughing face emoji and the text “It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me.”
[00:13:59] Bad news for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:14:01] But it wasn’t definitive proof. To win the case, Coleen Rooney needed to prove that it was Vardy herself that shared the story with The Sun, and this message only showed that the agent had sold the story and that Vardy knew about it.
[00:14:19] Rooney needed more proof, and that proof surely could be found on the agent’s phone. This agent, after all, was clearly not very good at covering her tracks.
[00:14:31] But, in a terrible plot twist reminiscent of an Agatha Christie story, as the agent was on a boat in the North Sea, she mysteriously dropped her phone into the icy waters of the North Sea, with it plunging to the bottom, never to be found again.
[00:14:50] But how about the messages on Rebekah Vardy’s phone, I hear you ask?
[00:14:55] Good question.
[00:14:56] Rebekah Vardy told the court that she had employed an IT expert to help her export all of her conversations from her phone, but in the process all of the messages had been deleted from the phone, and the IT expert couldn’t remember the password for the encrypted device he had backed them up on.
[00:15:17] They too were lost forever.
[00:15:21] What a series of unfortunate events.
[00:15:24] First the agent’s phone fell into the icy North Sea, then Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert permanently forgot the password.
[00:15:33] Both accidents, of course, but they meant that there was no way to retrieve the messages that Coleen Rooney thought would prove conclusive.
[00:15:43] Still, the tide was turning for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:15:47] She had first claimed she had no idea about any of this, then she had been forced to admit that her agent might have been selling stories about Rooney, but without Vardy’s permission, and then she had to admit that her agent might have been accessing her Instagram account and selling stories, but still without her permission, or so she claimed.
[00:16:09] And the agent dropping the phone into the sea and Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert forgetting the password, well it was almost as if Rebekah Vardy was trying to hide something.
[00:16:21] Rooney’s lawyers pounced, and took the opportunity to present Vardy as an unreliable witness who had lied under oath.
[00:16:32] This was technically true, she had, but Rebekah Vardy wasn’t the sort of person to stand in court and be insulted. On the final day of the trial she stormed out of the court.
[00:16:46] And on July the 29th, 2022, almost three years after the first explosive accusation came from Coleen Rooney, the judge announced the court’s decision.
[00:16:58] The court ruled that it believed, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was indeed Rebekah Vardy who had sold the stories; she lost the case.
[00:17:09] Because it was only a libel case, not a criminal one, and it was Vardy who brought the case against Rooney, Rebekah Vardy didn’t have to pay any damages, she was only ordered to pay 90% of Rooney’s legal fees.
[00:17:25] Still, it had been a lengthy process, and Rooney’s fees were an estimated £1.5 million, so almost €2 million. And of course, Vardy had to pay her own fees, which are probably similar to Rooney’s, so the entire case will have cost her somewhere in the region of €4 million.
[00:17:47] Plus, her reputation is in tatters, as one article put it, “she will also have paid millions of pounds for the privilege of being publicly humiliated.”
[00:18:00] Fortunately, her husband is a highly paid footballer, and she also now has a series of licensing and reality TV deals, so it’s not like this will bankrupt Rebekkah and Jamie Vardy, but clearly it's a lot of money.
[00:18:15] However, she does seem to have found a cunning way, potentially, of making some money out of the whole affair.
[00:18:23] Yes, there are the TV appearances, the inevitable book deals and so forth, but it emerged earlier this year that Rebekkah Vardy had trademarked the term “Wagatha Christie”.
[00:18:37] Perhaps this is in an attempt to stop journalists writing about it using that catchy term, perhaps it’s to try to make some money out of merchandise or the film rights to the case, or perhaps it’s to try to sue people who have already used it, and get money out of them who knows?
[00:18:56] One thing is for sure, though.
[00:18:59] In the ongoing battle of the footballer’s wives, the score in this match was 1-0 to Coleen Rooney.
[00:19:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on this unusual case of the warring footballer’s wives..
[00:19:15] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:19] Have there been any similar cases in your country?
[00:19:21] Why do you think we are so obsessed with the partners of celebrities?
[00:19:26] And what is it about footballers in particular that tabloids and gossip magazines love so much?
[00:19:33] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:36] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:43] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:49] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a fierce footballing rivalry, a rivalry that was fought not on the pitch but on social media, and then the High Courts of Justice in London.
[00:00:35] It’s an amazing story that brings together football, Instagram, celebrities, trademarks, the law, and the most unexpected but brilliant piece of detective work.
[00:00:47] OK then, Vardy vs. Rooney | The Battle Of The Footballers’ Wives.
[00:00:54] On the 29th of July, 2022, almost exactly a year before this episode will be released, two women stood in The High Courts of London, awaiting to hear the decision of the court.
[00:01:09] The case was not criminal, neither stood accused of theft, murder, drug dealing, or anything like that.
[00:01:18] The case was one of libel, the crime of damaging someone’s reputation by writing something untrue about them.
[00:01:27] And the two women were not just any random members of the public.
[00:01:32] They were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy. If you don’t recognise their names, perhaps you might recognise the names of their husbands: Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, two of England’s best known football players.
[00:01:50] This battle was the culmination of an almost three year feud, and the story of everything that happened is quite amazing.
[00:02:00] So, as a bit of background, you probably need no reminder that football in Britain is very popular.
[00:02:08] Premier League footballers are paid hundreds of thousands of Euros a week, the best footballers are treated as serious celebrities, with paparazzi hiding outside their homes, trying to catch a glimpse of their private lives.
[00:02:23] For a long time, the celebrity was restricted to the pitch itself, with limited public interest in footballers' private lives.
[00:02:33] But starting in the mid 2000s, the British press turned its attention off the pitch, to the wives and girlfriends of the country’s top football players.
[00:02:46] There is actually a term for the wives and girlfriends of football players, a popular acronym that came to prominence during the 2006 World Cup, and that’s “WAG”, - W, A, G - short for “wives and girlfriends”.
[00:03:02] Soon enough gossip magazines reported not just on what clothes the WAGs were wearing or who looked like they had had a bit too much to drink at a post-match party, but on rivalries between the WAGs, on the individuals.
[00:03:19] This original “WAG” class contained plenty of women who were famous in their own right, they had successful careers of their own, irrespective of their husbands or boyfriends.
[00:03:32] Victoria Beckham, the wife of David Beckham, was a pop star, she was one of the five Spice Girls, the biggest girl band of the 1990s.
[00:03:41] Then there was Cheryl Cole, who was a pop singer in a band called Girls Aloud and is now probably more famous than her footballer husband, Ashley, now ex-husband I should add.
[00:03:54] And there were, of course, plenty of wives and girlfriends of famous footballers who had no claim to fame themselves, they were just normal non-celebrity members of the public, you know, like you and me.
[00:04:08] But clearly, when you marry a Premier League footballer, and the lens of the paparazzi is on you, you become something of a celebrity in your own right.
[00:04:20] Magazines want to print pictures of you going shopping or out for a coffee. Suddenly you are someone, just because of the person you are with.
[00:04:32] Two such ladies were Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy.
[00:04:37] Coleen Rooney was in fact a member of this original “WAG” group. She had met a boy called Wayne when they were both 12 years old, and they had been teenage girlfriend and boyfriend.
[00:04:51] This boy, Wayne, would grow up and become the youngest ever player to play for England when he was 17, then sign for Manchester United at 18.
[00:05:03] He is now retired from the sport as a player, but he enjoyed a long and successful career, starting in 2002 and continuing for almost 20 years.
[00:05:14] Rebekah Vardy joined the world of football a little later. She worked as a nightclub promoter, she met an already successful footballer called Jamie Vardy, the pair got married a couple of years later, in 2016.
[00:05:30] Importantly for our story, Jamie Vardy and Wayne Rooney were England teammates, they played together from 2015 to 2018.
[00:05:42] But, that’s the last we’ll hear, pretty much, about Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, as they are very much minor characters in this story.
[00:05:52] Today, it’s all about their wives, Coleen and Rebekah.
[00:05:57] The two women were reportedly close friends, but they were very different, and had differing ideas about how they wanted to be seen by the press.
[00:06:08] Coleen Rooney had been in the public eye since she was a teenager. As soon as Wayne Rooney, her then boyfriend, became famous, the press turned its attention also to her. She was relatively publicity shy, not courting attention, not looking to be written about or photographed, but she could not escape the photographer’s lens.
[00:06:31] And, given that she spent practically her entire life as a semi-celebrity, there has been plenty of media interest in her as an individual.
[00:06:42] Rebekah Vardy, on the other hand, was not so used to being in the public eye, she was playing catch-up, you could say.
[00:06:51] She was 32 when she met Jame Vardy, she had already been married twice before. Jamie Vardy wasn’t actually the first footballer she had been in a relationship with. She dated another football player from a club called Oxford United.
[00:07:08] Oxford United, in case you weren’t aware, isn’t a particularly good team, and her ex-boyfriend would later claim that she was always jealous of the wives and girlfriends of Premier League players - people like Coleen Rooney.
[00:07:23] Now, I don’t want to get too much into gossip and rumour, although it is hard when talking about this particular subject, I just wanted to give you some of the background information, so that you can get a measure of the characters of our two protagonists.
[00:07:39] So, what actually happened?
[00:07:42] Well, for several months, Coleen Rooney had been claiming that someone had been leaking private details about her life to the British press.
[00:07:52] Someone, one of her trusted inner circle, must have spilled the beans, as there were stories published that revealed secrets about her life that she had only told to a select few close friends.
[00:08:07] And on October the 9th, of 2019, there was the bombshell, the big announcement. It was a tweet, and I may as well read you all of it, as you’ll see that Coleen Rooney has quite the knack for drama.
[00:08:23] OK, so here we go. The tweet went:
[00:08:27] For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The SUN newspaper of my private posts and stories.
[00:08:39] There has been so much information given to them about me, my friends and my family - all without my permission or knowledge.
[00:08:48] After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion.
[00:08:57] To try and prove this, I came up with an idea. I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram stories except ONE account. In brackets: [Those on my private account must have been wondering why I haven't had stories on there for a while.] Close brackets.
[00:09:15] Over the past five months I have posted a series of false stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did! The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flooding in my new house.
[00:09:35] It's been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account or individual it's come from.
[00:09:51] I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
[00:10:00] It's ........ Rebekah Vardy's account.
[00:10:05] [sharp intake of breath]
[00:10:08] It was a scandalous accusation. Rebekah Vardy, her supposed great friend, stood accused of selling secrets about Coleen’s private life to the Sun newspaper.
[00:10:22] Rebekah Vardy immediately took to social media to deny this, asking why she would sell secrets on her friends. Her husband earned a hundred and fifty thousand Euros a week as a striker for Leicester City, she didn’t need the money.
[00:10:38] As you might expect, this story was lapped up by the newspapers and gossip magazines, it was the ultimate celebrity spat, a public argument between two people who were no stranger to the gossip pages.
[00:10:55] Coleen Rooney was even dubbed “Wagatha Christie” by one journalist, so a combination of WAG and Agatha Christie, the famous murder mystery novelist.
[00:11:07] This term stuck, “Wagatha Christie”, and the British press hung on every new accusation or denial in this feud, which was fought in public on social media.
[00:11:20] The feud only intensified as Rebekah Vardy not only continued to deny any involvement in it, but in June the following year she revealed that she was going to take Coleen Rooney to court for libel, for accusing her of something in public that damaged her reputation.
[00:11:41] She wanted £1 million in compensation, so that's something like €1.2 million.
[00:11:50] It went to court, and in November of that year a judge ruled in Rebekah Vardy’s favour, saying that an ordinary reader, a normal member of the public, would have understood that Coleen Rooney was accusing Rebekah Vardy personally of having leaked the story, and having besmirched her good name.
[00:12:10] Rooney was ordered to pay just under €30,000 in compensation to Vardy, but this was only the first stage of the process.
[00:12:21] The next stage of the case required Coleen Rooney to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Rebekah Vardy had personally shared this insider information, not just that it came from Rebekah Vardy’s Instagram account. To explain the difference, Vardy had claimed that maybe someone had accessed her Instagram account and sold the stories, she couldn’t be sure, but it was definitely not her.
[00:12:48] So, to chapter two of the story, and here is where it becomes as dramatic as any Agatha Christie novel.
[00:12:57] As the trial dragged into 2021, it took a nasty turn as private messages sent by Rebekah Vardy were read out. In these messages, which were sent before Rooney had publicly accused Vardy, Vardy referred to Rooney as a quote “nasty bitch”, telling her agent that she would love to leak stories about her to the newspapers. So she was calling her these names behind her back while still publicly claiming to be her good friend.
[00:13:30] Vardy’s agent would also be dragged into the case, as a WhatsApp message she sent to Vardy was shown to the court.
[00:13:39] This was a WhatsApp message from early 2019. Vardy’s agent had shared a picture of a tweet from Rooney saying that someone was betraying her, and sent it to Vardy with a laughing face emoji and the text “It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me.”
[00:13:59] Bad news for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:14:01] But it wasn’t definitive proof. To win the case, Coleen Rooney needed to prove that it was Vardy herself that shared the story with The Sun, and this message only showed that the agent had sold the story and that Vardy knew about it.
[00:14:19] Rooney needed more proof, and that proof surely could be found on the agent’s phone. This agent, after all, was clearly not very good at covering her tracks.
[00:14:31] But, in a terrible plot twist reminiscent of an Agatha Christie story, as the agent was on a boat in the North Sea, she mysteriously dropped her phone into the icy waters of the North Sea, with it plunging to the bottom, never to be found again.
[00:14:50] But how about the messages on Rebekah Vardy’s phone, I hear you ask?
[00:14:55] Good question.
[00:14:56] Rebekah Vardy told the court that she had employed an IT expert to help her export all of her conversations from her phone, but in the process all of the messages had been deleted from the phone, and the IT expert couldn’t remember the password for the encrypted device he had backed them up on.
[00:15:17] They too were lost forever.
[00:15:21] What a series of unfortunate events.
[00:15:24] First the agent’s phone fell into the icy North Sea, then Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert permanently forgot the password.
[00:15:33] Both accidents, of course, but they meant that there was no way to retrieve the messages that Coleen Rooney thought would prove conclusive.
[00:15:43] Still, the tide was turning for Rebekah Vardy.
[00:15:47] She had first claimed she had no idea about any of this, then she had been forced to admit that her agent might have been selling stories about Rooney, but without Vardy’s permission, and then she had to admit that her agent might have been accessing her Instagram account and selling stories, but still without her permission, or so she claimed.
[00:16:09] And the agent dropping the phone into the sea and Rebekah Vardy’s IT expert forgetting the password, well it was almost as if Rebekah Vardy was trying to hide something.
[00:16:21] Rooney’s lawyers pounced, and took the opportunity to present Vardy as an unreliable witness who had lied under oath.
[00:16:32] This was technically true, she had, but Rebekah Vardy wasn’t the sort of person to stand in court and be insulted. On the final day of the trial she stormed out of the court.
[00:16:46] And on July the 29th, 2022, almost three years after the first explosive accusation came from Coleen Rooney, the judge announced the court’s decision.
[00:16:58] The court ruled that it believed, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was indeed Rebekah Vardy who had sold the stories; she lost the case.
[00:17:09] Because it was only a libel case, not a criminal one, and it was Vardy who brought the case against Rooney, Rebekah Vardy didn’t have to pay any damages, she was only ordered to pay 90% of Rooney’s legal fees.
[00:17:25] Still, it had been a lengthy process, and Rooney’s fees were an estimated £1.5 million, so almost €2 million. And of course, Vardy had to pay her own fees, which are probably similar to Rooney’s, so the entire case will have cost her somewhere in the region of €4 million.
[00:17:47] Plus, her reputation is in tatters, as one article put it, “she will also have paid millions of pounds for the privilege of being publicly humiliated.”
[00:18:00] Fortunately, her husband is a highly paid footballer, and she also now has a series of licensing and reality TV deals, so it’s not like this will bankrupt Rebekkah and Jamie Vardy, but clearly it's a lot of money.
[00:18:15] However, she does seem to have found a cunning way, potentially, of making some money out of the whole affair.
[00:18:23] Yes, there are the TV appearances, the inevitable book deals and so forth, but it emerged earlier this year that Rebekkah Vardy had trademarked the term “Wagatha Christie”.
[00:18:37] Perhaps this is in an attempt to stop journalists writing about it using that catchy term, perhaps it’s to try to make some money out of merchandise or the film rights to the case, or perhaps it’s to try to sue people who have already used it, and get money out of them who knows?
[00:18:56] One thing is for sure, though.
[00:18:59] In the ongoing battle of the footballer’s wives, the score in this match was 1-0 to Coleen Rooney.
[00:19:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on this unusual case of the warring footballer’s wives..
[00:19:15] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:19] Have there been any similar cases in your country?
[00:19:21] Why do you think we are so obsessed with the partners of celebrities?
[00:19:26] And what is it about footballers in particular that tabloids and gossip magazines love so much?
[00:19:33] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:36] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:43] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:49] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
