The ellipses that gripped a nation are back.
Four years after her infamous whodunnit unveiling via a statement posted across her social media channels, Coleen Rooney has her own three-part documentary series taking viewers behind the scenes on the Wagatha Christie saga.
The classic pop culture moment that ignited a legal battle with three words and a dramatically long ellipses, “It’s…….. Rebekah Vardy’s account”, has been given the Disney treatment with a three-part, behind-the-scenes documentary.
It takes us through the story of how the wife of England’s former all-time top scorer Wayne Rooney pointed the finger at fellow England striker Jamie Vardy’s wife Rebekah as the leak of stories from her private life to The Sun newspaper — and how she caught her using impressive levels of Instagram baiting.
Coleen and Rebekah watching England play Wales at Euro 2016 (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is now streaming in the UK on Disney+ and has all the production value of a crime classic, even if it has you questioning whether a documentary was really needed after so much media coverage. For the casual observer of the biggest story to come out of WAG-world since the Baden-Baden saga that dominated much of England’s 2006 World Cup campaign in Germany, more Wagatha content is likely to provoke an eye-roll but it is an enthralling watch as Coleen gets her moment in the spotlight.
Make no mistake, this is about Coleen and she has her audience even if the Venn diagram of ‘football fans’ and ‘Wagatha Christie fans’ is likely to have a limited crossover.
The documentary takes us through Wayne and Coleen’s peak years at the centre of Britain’s Noughties tabloid culture, with the former inheriting David Beckham’s crown as the papers’ favourite fallible England star as Coleen was hounded by paparazzi on her way to school after Wayne’s overnight success for Everton.
Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy on England duty together in 2016 (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
We hear from friends and family on the impact that had on a teenage Coleen, establishing a backdrop of press intrusion so Vardy can enter as the villain later in the series, and it makes for an interesting examination of why we care about the Rooneys, Posh and Becks or, in contemporary terms, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce as people and brands.
But the truth is, we have always been and will continue to be obsessed by sport’s biggest names and everything about their lives — as the inevitable talking head Piers Morgan is quick to tell us in the documentary. His explanation of tabloid culture at the time and the need to know everything about a pair of teenagers not yet old enough to buy a lottery ticket is delivered as some sort of justification for the circus that has followed the Rooneys for their entire adult lives.
Morgan’s questioning of how they would cope with the attention, rather than whether it was truly odd behaviour for newspapers to send middle-aged men to pop out from behind bins to snap photos of Coleen on her way to school, was revealing.
And while none of the Rooneys’ backstory was new information to those who have watched the 2022 Amazon documentary Rooney, this was Coleen’s chance to shine. Time is devoted to Wayne’s well-reported indiscretions, like the time he was banned from driving for 24 months for drink-driving after being arrested while three times over the legal limit in a 29-year-old woman’s Volkswagen Beetle in Cheshire while Coleen was on holiday.
We are not given Wayne’s explanation of what really happened that night, only an admission that he was in the wrong. Coleen, meanwhile, feels like there are times when he becomes a different person — usually when alcohol is involved. Her mother Colette’s assessment is that she loves the 37-year-old but does not always like him.
While the documentary was light on some details, we learned what was really at the crux of the whole Wagatha Christie affair. This was, at its core, about the Rooneys and their relationship with the media in which their choice on what in their lives has remained private and what has been made public has often been out of their control.
Enter Vardy and the background to the big reveal delivered with murder-mystery style cuts between the past and present to simplify the detail of Coleen’s investigation into her nemesis over the course of a few years.
Aerial ** ** shots of the various locations where she laid her traps via social media posts were given the full Disney treatment, ‘Mexico’, ‘Washington DC’, ‘Manchester’ all location-and-date-stamped across dramatic skylines before split-screen cuts to family home videos. Later in the documentary, the Rooney legal team dramatically stick post-it notes detailing the evidence they need to win the court case against Vardy on the glass window of their high-rise Manchester offices.
Recorded re-enactment scenes of Rooney laying her trap as well as staged discussions with lawyers are gloriously camp and border on comical, reaching a peak when friends and family read out Coleen’s now-infamous Instagram post line by line while some struggle to keep a straight face.
The Rooneys leaving the Royal Courts of Justice in May 2022 (Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
It is easy to feel like none of this is serious until we reach the court proceedings, which are the most revealing part of the whole series. Viewers are shown Vardy’s messages to her agent Caroline Watt, who lost her phone containing vital evidence while on a boat in the North Sea, as well as the surreal moment when the Rooneys’ barrister David Sherborne asks Vardy about a kiss-and-tell story from 2004 about singer Peter Andre.
All of this captures the wild ride that the four days in court were to cover as a journalist, with all the key evidence presented in a much clearer format in the documentary without any legal jargon to confuse things. None of the crucial text messages read out at the High Court are missed and each of Rooney’s traps — the Mexico gender-selection story and the flooded basement of their new home — are shown in depth.
We learn of the true mental toll of going to court for the Rooneys without hearing at all from the Vardys, which is to be expected given this is Coleen’s show. Friends describe her car being stuffed with ring binders and legal paperwork as she prepared for court, which clearly took a greater toll on both women than either could have predicted.
Press attention saw the Rooneys retreat to their hotel room each night, stocked with snacks to keep them going through arduous debriefs with lawyers. Wayne is said to have become so interested that he started providing his thoughts to lawyers and considered taking up a course at law school in the wake of the case, although he has not had much time for that since moving into management at Derby County, DC United and now Birmingham City.
We know the outcome of course, with Rooney successful in her defence and Vardy lumbered with a £1.8million ($2.2m) legal bill.
GO DEEPER
Wagatha Christie uncovered: the full story of Rebekah Vardy vs Coleen Rooney
In the end, Coleen’s parting view that “it was a pathetic reason to go to court” show a degree of awareness that she lacked when posting the original statement revealing Vardy as the leak, without considering the potential fallout. The scandal since has been a lesson in the insatiable appetite for WAG-dom and the human cost of press intrusion and online abuse.
It is a constant reminder that however trivial it all was to vast swathes of the population, this was about truth, privacy and reputation for both women. The whole thing is immensely silly and had it been two businessmen ending up in court on similar themes, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But, as Rooney knows only too well, the rules are different for WAGs.
“For me, getting justice for telling the truth is the most important thing,” Rooney says having learned the case is settled and a line drawn in the sand. She set out on a sleuthing mission and she delivered — the documentary provides one final opportunity to marvel at a soap opera for the ages.
(Top photo: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
