Sat alone in her favourite Alderley Edge café in Cheshire, coffee and notepad to hand, Coleen Rooney recreates the moment she decided to tweet what would set in motion the most scandalous WAG row of all time. Back in October 2019, she had just finished the school run and stopped for breakfast when she decided she’d had enough: she was going to publicly out the account that had been secretly selling stories from her private Instagram to The Sun. It was... Rebekah Vardy’s account. (Vardy has always denied the leaking of stories.)
Hearing her narrate the now infamous tweet for her new docu-series on Disney+, Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, is comical but also striking – because if this show proves anything, it’s that the saga was nowhere near as trivial or entertaining to Rooney as it was to the many commentators who ridiculed the ordeal.
In fact, that tweet was the conclusion of a months-long, lonesome investigation by Rooney, time she spent questioning her own friends and family, while dealing with the fallout of her private affairs being splashed across front pages. In total, from the first leak from her private Instagram to the end of the defamation court case (which she won) that followed her very public accusation, the so-called Wagatha Christie drama dominated four-and-a-half years of her life. ‘There’s a lot more to this story than people thought. It made Coleen feel paranoid for years and it’s all happening at quite a vulnerable time in her marriage, so she wants people to understand this was not just two women having a catfight,’ explains Lucy Bowden, who directed the docu-series and spent months building a relationship with Rooney while filming. ‘It was really important for her and what she found quite cathartic about the trial, even though it was obviously very stressful, was that it was an opportunity to lay everything out.’
From false stereotypes about her glamorous WAG lifestyle (‘I live in the car, back and forth to school with the kids,’ Rooney says in one scene) to the many accusations of infidelity levied against her husband, football manager Wayne, over he years, she certainly does use the docu-series as a platform to speak candidly. ‘The moments where I think I don’t know him are when he’s been drinking, and that’s when he’s a totally different person,’ she reveals. While Wayne doesn’t feature heavily, he does sit down to deny cheating (in a 2017 incident, where he was caught driving another woman’s car while drunk, which saw him banned from driving for two years).
Viewers might also be shocked to learn that Rooney didn’t tell anyone, not even her husband, about her investigation into Vardy (‘I was so shocked about that,’ says show producer Julia Nottingham – also behind Netflix’s hit documentary Pamela: A Love Story) or that she and Vardy were never close to begin with. This one might hurt, but she also doesn’t find the Wagatha Christie moniker funny (given how trivial it made the whole saga seem).
What shouldn’t come as a surprise, but may well do given the way WAGs have been portrayed in popular culture, is how impressive Rooney is in the programme: smart, down to earth, funny and determined – she reclaims her narrative like never before.
‘I really want the world to know the real Coleen,’ says Nottingham. ‘She’s existed in the media for so long as this version of [her] according to the tabloids, but I do think the world might fall in love with her through this.’
‘Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story’ is on Disney+ from 18 October