A new drama based on court transcripts explores the libel battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney. Decca Aitkenhead reports.
I watched an advance preview of Vardy v Rooney: A Courtroom Drama with my two sons, who are 13 and 11. Neither had heard of either side before, or indeed anything about the trial. The Wagatha Christie pun meant nothing to them; they didn’t know what a WAG was. They do not have Instagram accounts; for that matter, they don’t even have mobile phones. Both boys sat spellbound through both episodes, back to back, glued to the screen.
I, on the other hand, had followed every twist of the Wagatha saga ever since Coleen Rooney first posted her incendiary accusation that Rebekah Vardy had been leaking stories from her private Instagram account to The Sun. To recap: back in 2019 the wives of the former England football captain Wayne Rooney and the Leicester City and former England striker Jamie Vardy were nominally friends. Within the hierarchy of footballers’ wives and girlfriends (WAGs), however, Vardy was the fame-hungry challenger to Rooney’s crown and the latter had become increasingly distrustful of her motives.
Stories kept appearing in The Sun that Rooney believed only one of her 300 or so private Instagram account followers could have leaked. Her suspicion fell on Vardy. Without telling a soul, she devised a trap, posting a series of fake stories and adjusting her account settings to allow only Vardy to see them. When a number of these duly appeared in the tabloid, in October 2019 she announced her sting operation to her 1.2 million followers on Twitter, signing off with the now legendary line, “It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
The crowd went wild. “Coleen Rooney: WAGatha Christie”, tweeted a comedian called Dan Atkinson. Google the word “Wagatha” today and you will get more than 1 million results. A quick-witted stylist who reprinted the phrase on T-shirts made £50,000 in 24 hours. Sleuth-inspired memes flew around the planet. Newsrooms all over the world reported Rooney’s tweet.
Blindsided while on holiday in Dubai with her family, heavily pregnant with her fifth child, Vardy was deluged with online abuse. She furiously denied Rooney’s allegation, but the trolling became so relentless and ugly (“You dirty ROTTEN SLAG BAG f***ing horse face C*** wait til I see you”, was fairly typical) she suffered anxiety attacks and feared losing her baby. Football fans chanted “Jamie Vardy, your wife’s a grass” at her husband; her children were bullied; Rooney refused to talk to her. “I thought she was my friend,” Vardy told the Daily Mail, “but she completely annihilated me.” The following summer Vardy launched libel proceedings.
Both sides hired ruinously expensive QCs. Mobile phones and laptops were requested for examination; forensic computer experts were enlisted. More than 3000 pages of evidence were compiled, consisting mostly of WhatsApp messages, social media posts and tabloid articles. Rooney’s attempts to settle out of court were rebuffed. And so, in May this year, the two WAGs, their husbands, their barristers and a salivating press pack gathered in room 13 of the Royal Courts of Justice for what headline writers billed “The trial of the century”. It did not disappoint.
For seven heady days the public followed court reports in disbelief as first David Sherborne, acting for Rooney, and then Hugh Tomlinson, for Vardy, tore the two women to ribbons. WhatsApp exchanges between Vardy and her former agent Caroline Watt were read out in court, in which the pair plotted to sell private information about Rooney — a “c***”, in Vardy’s words — and other celebrities to The Sun. Most of the pair’s WhatsApp conversations had mysteriously disappeared, with Watt claiming to have accidentally dropped her mobile phone into the North Sea and Vardy claiming she had inadvertently deleted their exchanges. Rooney was accused of deliberately setting trolls on Vardy and was forced to discuss one of her husband Wayne’s many and tawdry infidelities. As one Guardian columnist memorably noted, “very few things in this life are more horrifyingly overrated than ‘having your day in court’“.
Six weeks after the trial concluded the judge ruled that Vardy’s testimony was “evasive” and “implausible”, and dismissed her libel claim outright. Five days later Vardy gave an interview to TalkTV, swearing blind she was innocent. “I will say that till I’m blue in the face. I did not do it.”
I watched that interview. Last month I attended the opening night of a West End performance, Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial, based on the court transcripts, and watched both episodes of a new Discovery+ documentary about the trial. Disney+ will stream another documentary next year, filmed in collaboration with Rooney for a reportedly multimillion-pound fee, and I’ll probably watch that too. I even listened to the five-part podcast Rooney’s own solicitors have made about the trial. Yet I’m still every bit as mesmerised by the new Channel 4 drama as my sons.
I won’t be alone. “No one,” according to one of the show’s executive producers, Tom Popay, “can look at this story and not be fascinated. It’s a classical drama narrative. It has absolutely everything.” He grins, before adding: “My mum is a professor of sociology and public health. Fasc-in-ate-d.”
The producer woke up to the power of the story after it began to dominate the chat in a WhatsApp group of his thirtysomething male friends. They weren’t just discussing the salacious highlights but debating obscure technicalities of libel law, even drawing parallels with the Leveson inquiry. “And I realised, if a bunch of blokes who get together every week just to watch football and drink beer are analysing the case like this, then the rest of the country must be obsessed.”
Before he got the chance to pitch the idea of making a drama about it to Channel 4, two of the channel’s senior editors suggested the same to him. “They were just as obsessed.” In June Popay approached a writer, Chris Atkins, who was driving to Glastonbury when the call came in.
“I was, like, I know everything about the trial!” Atkins recalls. “I’d followed every tweet from the journalists covering it. I was literally hitting refresh on my computer every second.” He told Popay, “I don’t care what your idea is. Whatever it is, I’m doing it.”
A TV drama can typically take up to five years from inception to broadcast. Channel 4 commissioned this one before Atkins had even written the script. He finished the first draft before the judge delivered her ruling in July. Filming began in August, was wrapped by September and on December 20, barely six months after that initial conversation, Vardy v Rooney: A Courtroom Drama will appear on our screens. As a friend of the other executive producer, Julie Ryan, put it to her: “Just hook it into my vein.”
Everyone involved in making it talks a lot about treating both parties with respect and empathy. No one I speak to takes sides or passes judgment. All decline to engage with the question of whether or not the judge’s ruling was right: it’s not for them to say. They talk about being “mindful” of the heavy responsibility they bear for portraying real people, none of whom they approached while making the drama for fear of introducing bias through personal contact. Scenes they judged at risk of encouraging more trolling were cut.
No amount of diligent duty of care, however, necessarily elevates our obsession with the case above rank nosiness. Is Wagatha ultimately nothing more than a delicious catfight? Or does it say something important about the world?
The Channel 4 drama achieves one thing that the other coverage has not managed. It gives the viewer a viscerally intense sense of what it was like for the two women to be in the witness box. When I talk to its writer, Atkins, I discover why. “Everyone’s going come to something like this with their own history,” he says, “and mine is obviously quite biased.” The Bafta-nominated film-maker has made documentaries for Channel 4′s Dispatches and the BBC’s Panorama, as well as feature-length documentaries about everything from civil liberties to fake news. In 2016, however, he was taken to court for tax evasion, found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
“There’s a public interest,” he argues, “in people knowing what litigation is like. Because cameras are not allowed in British courtrooms and courtroom dramas are not very accurate. They tend to be all plot twists and ‘I put it to you’ and ‘Silence in court!’ And it isn’t like that. In reality the barristers make you wallow in your pain and your discomfort. It’s like you’re in a box and the walls are slowly getting tighter and tighter around you and there’s nowhere to hide.”
His private emails were read out in court. “So I really empathised with Vardy. I didn’t feel like ‘ha ha ha’. I felt like, ‘Oh God, is nothing more humiliating?’ That’s what I wanted to get across. Being in court was the single worst experience of my life. It was worse than going to prison. Going to prison felt good after being on trial. That’s how awful it is.”
The former public schoolboy’s prison diaries, A Bit of a Stretch, about the two and half years he served, paint a grim picture of life behind bars. Trial, he says, was much worse — and not only for him. In jail he would see remand prisoners go off to court every day and “come back absolutely battered. Then they’d come back having been given 10 years with a big smile on their face, going, ‘At least I know now. I can count the days off. I know how I’m going to start trying to deal with this.’ But while you’re waiting for the result you can’t decide any of that. You’re in a world where you have absolutely no control whatsoever.
“For both Rooney and Vardy the stakes were extraordinarily high. There was no draw — someone was going to lose in a spectacularly public way. And that uncertainty, going into court every day, would have been really tough to deal with. So we didn’t put in a whole bunch of the best zingers and quips, and pack in as many laughs as possible. I wanted to show what it’s really like to have your life torn apart and have to sit in the swamp of the confusion of that process.”
He succeeded. The two-part drama is set almost entirely in the courtroom, with dialogue taken verbatim from court transcripts and statements. To embellish it with fictionalised dialogue and scenes “would take away the honesty of what we’re doing”, Popay says. At moments it feels more like documentary than drama and is almost unbearably uncomfortable to watch. Rooney’s lawyer, Sherborne, is portrayed by Michael Sheen as a devastatingly withering force in the courtroom. Sheen is renowned for playing real-life characters, including Tony Blair and David Frost. But this is the first real-life role for the actress Natalia Tena, who plays Vardy, and if she looks scared on screen, that’s because she was.
“I was definitely absolutely terrified. It was the most scary job I’ve ever done,” Tena says. “Playing someone real is so much more terrifying, because there’s public opinion about that person.” She landed the part just one week before filming began, so had very little time to prepare “and I just felt so anxious being on that stand with Michael Sheen interrogating. I barely knew him at that point and everyone was staring at me, so it was very uncomfortable. And the room was boiling hot, we were all dying of heat, and that added to the pressure in the room.” She still feels scared, she adds, braced for the audience reaction on social media: “Is a similar thing that happened to her going to happen to me?”
The other revelation of the drama was how easily the verdict could have gone the other way. Press coverage at the time had made Vardy’s case look unwinnable; the only question appeared to be what she had been thinking to bring it to trial. Atkins thought the same, until he read the full court transcripts.
“The fact that Rebekah had a torrid time in the witness box wasn’t necessarily going to mean Coleen got it over the line,” he says. “Coleen still had to prove her case, the onus was on her … Coleen’s case wasn’t as strong as you might think.”
Rooney never actually proved that Vardy had been The Sun’s source for the stories she listed in her reveal post. Watching the drama, the question you find yourself asking is why were Fleet Street, and the court of public opinion, so eagerly delighted to find Vardy guilty?
If you want to witness the court of public opinion in action, try to get a ticket to the Wagatha play in the West End. Originally intended for one night only, demand was so high that it will now run until mid-January. I took along the only friend of mine who knew next to nothing about the case and he sat beside me open-mouthed as the Sherborne character opened his cross-examination of Vardy by reading aloud a kiss-and-tell interview she gave the News of the World in 2004 about the pop star Peter Andre. “Peter’s hung like a small chipolata …” he quoted, with acid enunciation, “the smallest trouser equipment I’ve ever seen.”
Vardy’s character responded to his observation that her former agent’s phone had taken its secrets to Davy Jones’s locker with “I’m sorry, I don’t know who Davy Jones is”, and admitted telling the Daily Mail that “arguing with Coleen is like arguing with a pigeon. You can tell it that you are right and it is wrong but it’s still going to shit in your hair.” At the point when he asked her to spell out the acronym FFS for the court, my wide-eyed friend whispered: “This cannot all be verbatim.” But it was.
It was a very funny performance. How could it not be? However, for a play ostensibly about that most modern of phenomena, social media, the atmosphere in the auditorium was more like that of an Elizabethan bear pit. I have been in less raucously charged audiences at boxing title fights. Women in sequins shrieked and mocked, middle-aged men roared and whooped; had the director decided to put Vardy in the stocks, rotten eggs would probably have been hurled from the stalls.
Sherborne himself was sitting in the royal circle, thoroughly enjoying himself. I went home feeling a bit grubby, unable to escape the depressing impression that Vardy was punished for the temerity of her ambition to be famous in her own right and Rooney favoured for conforming to the traditional role of the demure, long-suffering wife.
Implicit sexism also seemed to underpin the entertainment value of two very clever, highly educated men making two women look stupid. There was palpable snobbery too, in the gale of laughter that erupted the moment Rooney’s character first opened her mouth in her working-class Liverpudlian accent. She was made to look a fool for caring so deeply about social media, as if her values were literally laughable.
There is obvious hilarity in celebrity culture colliding with centuries-old jurisprudence; Jarndyce v Jarndyce meets OK! Magazine is always going to be fun. Just as Mandy Rice-Davis’s infamous courtroom retort “Well, he would [say that], wouldn’t he?” came to define the Profumo scandal, so a footballer’s wife explaining how Instagram works to a barrister in a horsehair wig will bring the house down. But practically every journalist who covered the trial claimed it was about much, much more than a salacious spectacle.
“As well as being a great psychodrama,” Atkins agrees, “it drew up lots of big social issues in a way that no other trial had ever done.”
Did it? I ask Tena. She thinks for a moment. “It’s about fighting for reputation. We can laugh about the fact that it is on social media, but that’s what a lot of people’s reputations are on and people have always fought for their reputations. It just happens to be that their battleground was social media.” Men have been glorified throughout history for fighting to defend the honour of their name. Johnny Depp fought not one but two recent libel battles to clear his, Tena points out, “and there was a massive element of sexism and misogyny in the fact that he wasn’t judged every single day for what he was wearing”.
Chanel Cresswell, who plays Rooney, thinks the story is about trust and loyalty. “She thought her close circle was loyal, so when stuff kept getting leaked that was a real breach of trust for Coleen. It would make me feel paranoid if that was me. So of course, for her, it was important to get to the bottom of it.” She points out that the public don’t laugh at phone-hacking victims for being upset. “And this was very similar to phone hacking, just by different means.”
Oonagh Kearney, the director, sees the story through a classical lens. She likens Rooney and Vardy to Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, “two women who had very different temperaments but each had a strong sense of self and her own moral right. Both feeling wronged by the other for different reasons and at loggerheads, with neither of them backing down.” Kearney also references Epic, a poem by Patrick Kavanagh about two old men fighting to the death over a disputed scrap of land, which in turn references Homer’s Iliad and ends with the line: “Gods make their own importance.”
“And we can all relate to that sense of a line being crossed and not backing down,” Kearney says. “I think this is a very old story about humanity and morality.”
Simon Coury, who plays Vardy’s lawyer, Tomlinson, reels off a list of other grand themes: privacy, truth and the law, fame, our relationship with social media. But then he pauses and smiles. “You can overdo how much it’s about great principles. Really, it is the height of gossip, isn’t it?”
In the end I think Atkins may have the most persuasive theory for our fascination with Wagatha. “When I came out of prison, I was actually shocked by how people weren’t that judgmental of me for what I’d done. Rebekah Vardy was accused of selling out a friend and I think to a lot of people, bizarrely, that is actually worse than committing a criminal offence.”
Popay agrees. “For the public I think there was this sense of being able to see how it could play out in their own social circles. They’ve all known friends being betrayed, or falling out, and people could see this happening to themselves. It is quite high school — but it made it all the way to the High Court.”
Atkins sees something not grubby but, on the contrary, very healthy in “pulling back the curtain” of celebrity and media life. Over a decade ago he made a documentary, Starsuckers, in which he sold ludicrous made-up stories to the tabloids — for example, that a member of Girls Aloud was secretly obsessed with quantum physics — to expose the endemic deceit in so much celebrity coverage. “Coleen did what that film did, but kind of better,” he says.
“I’ve learnt one thing over the years, as a journalist and film-maker. So many people think, ‘I’ve just got to get inside that magic circle and everything will be happy.’ And then you actually get into the magic circle and you see that it’s just as banal and frustrating and difficult and messy as the rest of our lives. It’s just they’ve got nicer jewellery, or nicer clothes or nicer cars. But all the f***-ups don’t go away.”
“I suppose the big question is,” the executive producer Ryan reflects, “is it right or wrong that we are watching this? You do have to question if it’s right.” And what is her answer?
“I think I’m on the fence. Because I do think it has brought a smile to a lot of people’s faces. Times are tough, people are looking for a little bit of light relief, and it is making a lot of people very happy. I definitely think it’s a case of sit back, zero cognitive labour, relax and enjoy.”
My grandmother, I tell Atkins, would have been disgusted at me enjoying a show about real people’s humiliation. He grins.
“Yeah, but I bet she’d still have watched.”
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London