There was only one way to announce Rebekah Vardy being confirmed as a contestant for Dancing on Ice, half the world predictably wrote on Twitter this morning. It was a ‘missed opportunity’ not to reveal her name à la Coleen Rooney’s notorious bombshell post……… it’s Rebekah Vardy’s account, according to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Unless you were on a desert island with no internet last year you probably don’t need a recap, but they are referring to the spat that brought the country to a standstill after Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of ‘leaking stories about her’ in October 2019. (Yes, Wagatha Christie is still less than a year old. Take us back to those simple times.) Rebekah immediately denied the allegation.
And now here she is, a year later, signed up to Dancing on Ice, determined to ‘clear her name’. This morning she told Good Morning Britain: 'Look, we tried to sort things out amicably, it just didn't work. I understand people think it's ridiculous, but what was I meant to do? I need to clear my name.
'I want to clear my name. I will do whatever that takes. I hope it's going to be resolved soon. It's just one of the things that has to go through the process unfortunately now.’
You’ve got to give her a gold star (or a glittery ice skate) for effort – signing up to fall flat on your face in front of the nation can’t have been an easy decision - but it's something she obviously felt she needed to do. The sad truth, though, is that she’s probably never going to be able to clear her name because the scandal is all anyone wants to associate her with now, because the world loves a celebrity downfall.
When a name is tarnished in celeb world, that person (or their PR teams) have the impossible task of making the world forget that’s what they have become known for. The solution? Generate a new scandal where you get to dictate the narrative, or attempt a reinvention, where you get to prove there’s so much more to you.
Conveniently for everyone but the person at the centre of a rumour, our attention span doesn’t seem to have the bandwidth to digest the surrounding detail of a story.
Even so, we are more likely to remember the initial event and forget or ignore the apology/denial/correction. How often do you see a correction splashed across a front page in the way a salacious story is?
Conveniently for everyone but the person at the centre of the rumour, our attention span doesn’t seem to have the bandwidth to digest the surrounding detail of a story. We live in a one fact, click-bait obsessed era, where we read the headline - because the top lines are the only bit we care about knowing - and then gossip to our friends.
WhatsApp groups sprang up to dissect the saga last year, while Twitter erupted into a fountain of glee at Wagatha Christie. And look! It’s happening all over again this morning, torturing Rebekah with the same jokes she’ll have drowned in last October.
‘Rebekah Vardy? Oh the one who sold those stories about that other WAG. God what a loser’ is likely to be the line half the country takes when they hear she’ll be joining Dancing on Ice today.
Whether she did or didn’t sell the stories, I don’t know and I’m no position to speculate. According to The Mirror, Rebekah is seeking substantial damages and a subsequent libel trial will begin in November, and she hired a cybersecurity expert to prove her innocence.
But until that libel case reveals the truth, we owe it to Rebekah to listen and let her reinvent herself. She's already spoken about how badly the scandal affected her mental health - we know how vicious social media can be for this.
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In the aftermath of Wagatha Christie, she was badly trolled – all while being heavily pregnant. She shared one of the posts she was sent, which read: ‘Fk you sly ct I hope that baby dies you b***h.’
If today’s jokes are going to lead to a repeat of that we need to watch ourselves. Remember earlier this year when we momentarily decided kindness was the way to go? How about we bear in mind the tidal wave of abuse that can come with every false rumour or joke on Instagram.
If Rebekah Vardy wants to clear her name, let’s give her the chance to, rather than focusing on that thing we don't know whether she did last year.
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