The gates look normal enough, at least for this corner of Cheshire’s “golden triangle”. Black and impenetrable, they are perhaps a tad more sizeable than most – and, yes, there are the security cameras – but, as I exit my minicab and push the buzzer, I still can’t quite believe that they will actually open.
Then – click – it happens. No voice on the intercom, no guard giving me the once over, just the hush of pure privacy as I re-enter the car, and it makes its way along the sort of drive I didn’t think people had anymore. It takes literal minutes to motor to the main house, over a bridge, across a reeded lake, all of it bordered by acre upon acre of lawns mown to cartoon perfection. Finally, eyes bugging at this point, one arrives at High Lake Manor itself – newly built after an Edwardian style, to the tune of some £20 million according to the tabloids, and finished only last year. It looks like a child’s drawing of a millionaire’s perfect home, I think, as I crunch across the gravel, up some ultra-clean stone steps to find that the front door is already opening.
And there she is: Coleen. A woman who, by twin accidents of falling in love with a boy from school more than 20 years ago and, more recently, finding herself on one side of the foremost social media beef the country has ever witnessed, became, for a moment, one of the most famous, most mysterious, most ardently discussed, and perhaps most generally well-liked people in Britain. The woman who, of course, became synonymous with Wagatha Christie.
“Hi,” she says, and offers her hand. She is barefoot, wearing a little white sundress with some lace inlay that she bought in Amsterdam while she was travelling to watch her son, Kai, play football. She’s tanned and ponytailed and smiley, yet top notes of restraint and common sense remain. She offers a cup of tea, and looks grateful and relieved when I say I’ll definitely take my shoes off because that new carpet of hers looks wow. Her husband, Wayne – legendary striker (does legendary begin to cover it?), now head coach at DC United in Washington, DC – is in the States and the four boys are at school, so aside from the Rooneys’ charming mega-agent Paul Stretford popping by to say hello, the manor is serenely empty. Even the Disney+ crew who have been trailing her for the past few months are absent. “It’s brought up a lot of emotions,” she says of filming the new, still-untitled documentary. “I felt like everyone else has spoken about it except me,” she says. “And it’s my story to tell.”
Honestly, it’s taking every ounce of my willpower to not write a thousand more words here on the decor (bear with, I’ll have her take us on a little tour later), but for now I’ll just say that she guides us to the formal sitting room she says she never goes in, with its cluster of four – four! – crystal chandeliers, each the height of a goalkeeper, hanging above a profusion of grey and white soft furnishings that are so luxe and shimmery they appear almost pearlescent. With nothing but the distant hum of her gardeners’ strimming to disturb us, she places some pastel-coloured macarons and what I swear is a plate of M&S mini Swiss rolls between us, then says six magic words in her most delicious of Scouse accents: “Go on then, ask me anything.”
Reader, where do we begin? With the tweet, of course! It was 9 October 2019 – a quiet news day if memory serves – when out of nowhere Mrs Rooney, whose social media presence had hitherto been limited to snaps of family holidays and the occasional selfie, decided to detonate the internet from the comfort of her own home. “I feel like a lot of people still don’t understand what happened, from beginning to end,” she says now, of the years that preceded (her turmoil at leaked stories) then succeeded (the court case) the fateful morning she decided to publicly name Rebekah Vardy, wife of footballer Jamie, as a person who had been leaking stories about her to the press. Now, though, she says matter-of-factly: “What I said in that post, I still stick by today.”
That post, written by Rooney and disseminated to her scores of combined followers on Twitter and Instagram, detailed how since around 2017, Coleen, now 37, had become increasingly bewildered by the number of stories appearing about the (often banal) goings on in her and Wayne’s home life in The Sun (an outlet that, despite the rough and tumble of football fame, the Liverpudlian Rooneys, living in the long shadow of that newspaper’s reporting on the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy, had no relationship with).
She worked out pretty quickly that the info was being gleaned from her private Instagram (the sort of alt account people keep for sharing more causal piccies from their day-to-day lives with a small number of those they know in real life). But the leaks kept coming. So Coleen did an ingenious thing. Over a period of some months, she began systematically blocking her friends and family from seeing the stories on her private account, to weed out the culprit. Then she went one further. She posted fake news.
Literally no one could put this better than Coleen, so I’m just going to quote her 2019 post here: “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,” she wrote. And then the kicker: “I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It’s ……….Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Wordcraft aside – tempo: perfection; crescendo: flawless – given the worlds of football and celebrity typically demand omertà, the thrill of seeing a household name just put it all out there blew the nation’s mind. Where were you when you wrote it, I ask, because I can remember exactly where I was when I read it. “Well,” she says, allowing herself a smile. “I’d seen the story [about the fake flood in the basement she’d made up to test the Vardy hypothesis a final time] go online the night before.” She knew it would be in the next day’s Sun. “Wayne was away working in America at the time, so I had put the kids to bed and I was watching some TV, sitting on the couch and looking at my phone.” She was sick of it all, she says. Angry. Sad. Over it. “In the night I’d started thinking about what I was going to do. I just wanted these stories to stop.”
So you did a classic firing up of the Notes app at 3am? She laughs. “No. I like a pen and paper – a pencil and a rubber, actually, so I can rub it out. So I started writing what I wanted to say and then the next morning I put it out there. That was the start of something that I would never have expected.” Did you tell anyone you were going to do it? “No,” she says. “[The part] my friends and family were most surprised at me [for was] putting the post up.” iPhone sleuthing? Sure. Ice-cold logic? Absolutely. But a public forum for her knockout blow shocked her kin. She didn’t show it to Wayne or her mum, nor, despite much conjecture, to a lawyer. She woke up, typed it up and put it on the internet. Then she took Kai and one of his friends indoor skydiving.
Her phone exploded. “All these messages of support coming in,” she says. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this has gone extreme.’” In those first hours, she could taste something like redemption. While popcorn heaven for the rest of us, for Rooney it was – at last – a lightning bolt of truth. After years (decades really) of frustration at tabloid mind games, here, finally, beyond the lies, whispers and gaslighting, was proof pure and simple: a source was telling her secrets and an outlet was publishing them. She felt empowered and relieved she’d kept her plans to go public under wraps. “If I want to do sunnin’ – and I know I’ll get talked out of doing sunnin’ – I’ll just go ahead and do it,” she explains. “I didn’t want no one telling me not to do it.”
Alas, euphoria could not hold, but it is pleasing, in this moment, to experience a sense of Coleen that day: determined, relatable, very cool. In the days that followed the initial post, Rebekah Vardy, when asked by The Daily Mail if she had argued over the phone with Coleen in the fallout, remarked: “That would be 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.” Great zinger, though it implies a level of acquaintanceship the women never shared. I wouldn’t argue with Coleen for a far more simple reason: she doesn’t bother unless she’s right.
Oh, Rebekah Vardy. Coleen takes a sip of coffee as the ghost of the I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! contestant and wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy descends. Were you even sort-of mates before all this, I wonder? Did it feel normal to have her on your private Instagram? “Yeah, because I felt like she was in the same world as me,” says Rooney. “She was in the public eye. I thought she would be protective over that kind of thing.”
“I’ve never fell out with another partner before,” she continues, agreeing that, give or take, there are typically good relations between wives and girlfriends when your other half is on a football team, especially the national team. But she didn’t really know Vardy. “We would associate,” she says, “because our husbands had played for England together. But she doesn’t live round here. She wasn’t a friend. I’ve never socialised with her.” Rooney seems to be reaching for the perfect explainer and finds it in: “I’ve never had a drink with her.”
That said, Vardy was obviously keen to get closer to Rooney. There were invitations over the years. “I’ve been invited to a wedding, a baby shower, which at the time, all them years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite nice.’ But the fact is, I don’t know yer. I would not invite her – and that’s not me being horrible – I don’t feel like I’m close enough.”
Hindsight has her wondering too. I float the idea that having Coleen at Vardy’s 2016 wedding – which appeared exclusively in Hello! magazine (as is the way of such things) – would have been good for Vardy’s prospects. She nods. “Over time, as all this was going on, things like that came back and struck me. I thought, ‘Has there always been a plan to get closer to me?’”
The lustre of Rooney’s higher profile seemingly had its effect on Vardy. At the 2016 Euros in France, the latter flouted the FA’s guidance for the England team wives and girlfriends (AKA WAGs) not to sit together, a practice that has existed since the pandemonium of the 2006 World Cup, when a perfect storm of Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Rooney in the stands bumped the men off the front pages and the women on to them. Vardy found herself a seat behind Rooney, and consequently photographs of the pair together made their way into the papers.
It was only a few years later, having sometimes “doubted” some good and loyal members in her friend group, feeling like she was going slowly “mad”, that Coleen would be on her phone watching Vardy’s account watching hers. It’s so unsettling, I say, and she nods.
Perhaps what came next shouldn’t have shocked like it did then. On Wagatha Day, after a few hours of Coleen being the internet’s favourite person ever, Vardy was publicly stating she would be consulting lawyers. Rooney was immediately spooked. She hadn’t pre-legalled her statement; she assumed relaying what had happened to her was allowed. “You see social media people calling people out in such nasty ways and I was thinking I wasn’t that nasty,” she says. But her stomach turned. “I’ve never been in a legal case before so for me it was scary.” She looks haunted by it all still. “What a horrible experience,” she says. “The thing I was dreading the most was actually going to court.”
In June 2020, Vardy began proceedings to sue Rooney for libel at the High Court and, that November, Mr Justice Warby found that Rooney had used defamatory language in her post, opening the door for a trial, which eventually took place in May 2022. Per British law, the onus was now on Rooney to prove that Vardy was the leaker and that the bones of her accusations held up. “It was so weird that first day, actually sitting on a bench together,” says Coleen of the “surreal” experience of finally coming face-to-face with Vardy. She thinks she last saw her when they happened to be in the same restaurant in Portugal some years back.
“I’m friendly – I’ll say hello to anyone – and I wasn’t gonna sit there and have attitude, but…” Let’s be real, I say, and she nods. Her face was a mask of inscrutability during the trial. Coleen was both anxious and fuming that she’d been “dragged to court”. She says: “I found it hard not letting on.”
“It was so difficult in that courtroom,” she continues, “especially watching her on the stand. It was quite painful. I felt uneasy.” Vardy’s position was ropey, to say the least. In response to a court order to hand over their phones, she said much of the relevant info from hers had been lost when doing a back up and no one could remember the new password, while Vardy’s agent Caroline Watt claimed she had accidentally dropped hers into the North Sea while on a family holiday.
Vardy floundered on the stand. “Obviously she was going through it,” says Rooney. “I just thought, ‘Why have you put yourself in this position?’ It was not nice to watch.” To this day she cannot for the life of her understand why Vardy took her to court. She is “odd”.
Yet, empathy aside, the WhatsApp messages between Vardy and Watt that could be salvaged infuriated her. In them, Vardy repeatedly calls Coleen “attention-seeking”, and even uses the c-word. But it was an exchange about Coleen’s late sister, Rosie – who died from Rett syndrome in 2013, aged 14 – in which Vardy and Watt wondered whether Vardy mentioning Rosie to Coleen would be endearing and put her off the scent, that really tipped things.
“The texts knocked me sick,” says Coleen, now. “They were just another level. When I was reading them I was thinking: the evilness and the hatred that they had for someone that they don’t even know.”
The spectacle of what the papers swiftly dubbed “The Scousetrap” was impacting her family too, she says. Coleen had broken her foot a few weeks earlier and was still in a medical boot by the time of the trial. A lifelong fashion fan, unusually she couldn’t be bothered to shop for the cameras. “I’d rather spend money on a holiday wardrobe than a court wardrobe,” she says, so she bought a couple of pairs of trousers and called it a day. If anything, Wayne was the issue on the clothes front. “It was the day before we were going to London and I was like, ‘Where are all your suits?’ He was like, ‘They don’t fit me.’ So I’m like, ‘Shit!’ It had to be a quick fix in Marks & Spencer.”
There were moments of mirth. On the eve of the trial, Coleen picked out a black leather Fendi tote – “one of my old favourites” to carry her folders in. Instinctively, on day one, Wayne carried it into court for her, giving rise to the immortal meme: “When PE teachers have to teach a bit of geography.” “We were laughing about that one,” says Rooney, cracking up again now. Wayne carried the bag every day after that. “I think it was a superstition thing,” says Coleen now. Classic footballer.
But it wasn’t plain sailing at home, she says. She felt like the stress of it was draining the life out of her. “He was supportive, you know, but it took its toll. He kept saying all the way throughout it: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’ But there were certain moments where we did have disagreements. Not over the case, but he would get annoyed with me because I was quite short-tempered. You know,” she sighs, “I didn’t have time for him.” She would spend hours on calls with her legal team, and the family stepped in to help with the boys. “I lost my focus,” she explains.
“If you’re in a relationship, obviously that’s one of the main things. You’ve got to have time for each other.” The Rooneys historical marital turbulence is, of course, well-documented. Scandals, sex workers et al. Coleen is captivatingly calm on the subject, happy to talk about the effort she has put into her family. “We’ve had our ups and downs,” she says. “Obviously everybody knows. It’s been hard to go through it in the public eye but there has always been love there. If the love is gone then, you know, it’s pointless. But if not, you’ve got something to work for.”
She smiles, with just the flicker of an eye roll. “It’s been a battle at times. I look at [any] situation we’re in and think, ‘Could we move forward from that? Is it worth moving forward from that?’ I don’t just give up.” She finds herself offering this advice more and more to her friends. “Don’t give up straight away. You’ll get annoyed straight away, but I’ve always given myself time. And there’s been times when it’s taken longer than others to work out what I want. There’s been doubts. ‘Is this going to work?’ I’ve been full of frustration and hurt.”
“But another thing is we’ve never backed away from it. We own it. I remember having a conversation about this with someone and I said: ‘Well, do you know what your wife gets up to every day and night? At least I know what my husband’s doing!’ It mightn’t be good,” she says, laughing, “but I know. People lie to themselves.”
She credits history and teamwork as relationship saviours. “We’ve experienced so much together.” And how. As the fable is told, Coleen McLoughlin met Wayne Rooney when they were 12, though they didn’t start going out till they left school at 16. Wayne, whose mum was a dinner lady at his school, and Coleen, whose dad was a bricklayer, bounced around with the same friend group in Croxteth. Football and Catholicism set the tone, and when Coleen did eventually say yes to a date, their future together seemed inevitable.
Their inner world of family and friends has held for years. For this shoot, Justine Mills – friend and co-owner of Cricket, Liverpool’s famed fashion store – styled Rooney. Coleen also recalls how Cricket’s Linsey Read used to be her boss when she did Saturday shifts at New Look back in the day, the job she got when she started dating Wayne so she could buy him a Christmas present. “Headphones,” she says. “I think I’ve got him headphones every year since. Men.”
If the headphones didn’t change, everything else did. With Wayne at Everton and Manchester United for the bulk of his career, she could at least live within arm’s reach of her family. But riches and scrutiny piled on. “Wayne has never looked for the spotlight,” she says. “He would have loved to just play football and not have the fame thing.” Rooney is honest with herself though, and identifies as more fame-tolerant, perhaps even inclined. Ultimately she says she can give or take it, and would mostly rather not, ta. “When people say, ‘Oh, she’s only in the public eye because of Wayne,’ I’m like, ‘Yeah I am.’”
Yet here she is, talking to Vogue and signing up for a new three-part Disney+ doc due to launch later in the year. While she says these are part of an explicit mission to claim back a sliver of the discourse on her own terms, she also points out that her mind is turning towards her own future. “I’ve always planned to see what was out there when all the kids went to school,” she says. Cass, five, has just finished his reception year. “I took those years out and chose not to do stuff. I’ve been at every sports fixture, every football pick-up and drop-off, and I’ve enjoyed doing that.” The boys are all brilliant at sport (go figure). Kai, 13, and Klay, 10, are both enrolled at Manchester United’s Youth Academy. “But I’m excited for the next chapter.” (Translation: fashion and lifestyle brands, get your offers ready.)
First things first, however: the mega-book deal. “I am also working with Penguin on my autobiography, which will be out in time for Christmas, which I’m really excited about,” she reveals. One imagines the thrills will be even more thrilling than her 2008 number one bestseller Welcome to My World. Operation Coleen is underway. Is this the reason Vardy has been trying to trademark the term “Wagatha Christie” herself? A strange move, as she neither coined the term nor is the WAG in question. Coleen does not care to speculate. If there’s one thing she’s learnt it’s don’t poke the bear.
I’ve been dying for a house tour and she gamely obliges. With her pristine French mani-pedi and daytime diamonds all set, we head into the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen – islands the size of snooker tables with dazzling white stone counters – and on into the playroom. Coleen loves a neon sign – the one here reads, Welcome to the Madhouse, which given that the boys smashed their way through three flat-screen tellies during lockdown seems fair. Each of the kids has his own drawer with his name on. It’s super cute. Kai, Klay, Kit and Cass. Why did you drop the “K” for your youngest, I ask? “I never got me girl, so he’s got the same initials as me,” says Coleen. Are you guys finished on the children front? “Oh, definitely. One-hundred per cent. Even when I was pregnant with Cass I knew I was done. No more after that.”
Where were you when you got the call with the judgement, I ask? “My eldest was doing a campaign for Puma and I had to come out to take the phone call, so I’m sitting in me car in the middle of Manchester in an industrial estate on my own,” she recalls. David Sherborne, her lawyer, came on the line: “‘We’ve won,’” he said without any build-up. And what did you say? “I swore,” she says with a laugh. “I think all I did was swear for the whole quarter- of-an-hour phone call.”
The relief was instant. Vardy’s claim was dismissed, and Coleen was awarded costs by the court, of which £800,000 of the total amount due was payable immediately. Pending further legal discussions, as well as her own legal costs, it is thought Vardy’s combined bill could run much higher – for a case that she brought. “The judgement was much more detailed than I thought it was going to be,” says Coleen. “Reading [it] I felt that she got exactly…” she says, then pauses. “Yeah.”
There was a moment, in the autumn of 2021, when Wayne had said, “He felt like I wasn’t me anymore,” says Coleen. She remembers sitting with her father outside the football one afternoon, crying and crying. “You look ill,” he said to her and she wailed that she just wanted it to be over. “So the relief!” she says now. “The relief was everything.”
Her life has been irrevocably altered, though. “It was quite surreal how many people followed it. Not just footballers or the girls. It felt like everyone was reading about it. All ages, all types.” Strangers still come up to her now. “The positivity I got from it…” she thinks about the whole complicated mess for a moment. “I’m glad,” she says. “For that, at least.”
Will you ever forgive Vardy? “I’m a forgive and forget person, I can’t be bothered with things going on and on,” says Rooney, light of tone. Then: “But this is obviously totally different.” (We’ll take this as a no then.)
When all is said and done, would you still have posted your genius detective work on that fateful October morning? It’s the first question that flusters her. “I can’t live in the past. It’s happened now and I move on.” She repeats several versions of this same line, unsure which wording feels most reassuring. “It’s always going to be talked about. It’s part of my life. I can’t think back and be like, ‘What if?’”
It’s not in Rooney’s nature to regret. And perhaps she doesn’t regret it. Or perhaps she won’t in the future. As she always says: give it time. For now, she smiles, and offers me another macaron. “You can’t go wrong if you’re telling the truth.”
Coleen Rooney’s three-part documentary will air exclusively on Disney+ later this year.
Sittings editor: Jessica Gerardi. Hair: Neil Moodie. Make-up: Bari Khalique. Digital artwork: Sheriff Production. With thanks to Oh Me Oh My and Titanic Hotel, Liverpool.
