Rebekah Vardy vs Coleen Rooney drama is the greatest use of Instagram Stories ever
UPDATE: Jul. 29, 2022, 12:13 p.m. CEST Rebekah Vardy sued Coleen Rooney for libel and denied claims that she leaked private details to The Sun newspaper. Vardy lost the ‘Wagatha Christie’ High Court libel battle, with the judge ruling that Rooney's Wagatha Christie post was 'substantially true'.
Agatha Christie might have written some pretty gripping tales of sleuthing in her time, but this British celebrity's tale of intrigue and shock discovery gives Miss Marple a run for her money.
Coleen Rooney, who's one of Britain's most famous WAGs (an acronym for the wives and girlfriends of footballers), shared the results of an investigation she managed to carry out using her Instagram Stories privacy settings.
"For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The Sun newspaper of my private posts and stories," began Rooney, who's married to footballer Wayne Rooney.
Rooney continued by saying that the individual in question has been feeding the British tabloid information about her, her friends, and her family without her "permission or knowledge."
"After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion," she went on.
To prove her suspicions correct, Rooney came up with an ingenious plan. "I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram Stories except ONE account," she explained. She added that people who follow her private Instagram account will have likely spotted that she hasn't been posting stories for some time.
"Over the past five months I have posted a series of fake stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did!" she wrote.
"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."
Those stories were at press time still available on the Sun website:
Per BuzzFeed UK reporter Mark Di Stefano, the stories were temporarily taken down from the Sun website but were later republished with an editors' note:
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Rooney's detective work has paid off, she wrote in her statement. "I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them," she wrote of her findings.
"It's..........Rebekah Vardy's account," she concluded, in what might be the most theatrically gasp-worthy revelation since those of Hercule Poirot.
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The plot thickens.
Who exactly is the accused? Rebekah Vardy is the wife of footballer Jamie Vardy.
30 minutes after Rooney posted her statement, Vardy tweeted her response.
"As I have just said to you on the phone, I wish you had called me if you thought this," she began.
"I never speak to anyone about you as various journalists who have asked me to over the years can vouch for," she added.
"Over the years various people have had access to my insta & just this week I found I was following people I didn't know and have never followed myself," she claimed.
"I'm not being funny but I don't need the money, what would I gain from selling stories on you? I liked you a lot Coleen & I'm so upset that you have chosen to do this, especially when I'm heavily pregnant," she wrote. "You should have called me the first time this happened 💔"
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Mashable reached out to News UK, which owns the Sun newspaper, for a statement. A press officer said they had no on-the-record statement at present but directed us to a story on the Sun website entitled "WAG WARS: Coleen Rooney accuses Rebekah Vardy of ‘leaking stories about her’ – before fellow WAG hits back".
"Each of the stories provided to The Sun was put to Coleen’s representatives before publication, and on each occasion they declined to comment," the story claims.
At the time of press, WAGatha Christie was trending on Twitter in the UK.
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Even Netflix weighed in on the drama...
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That is a documentary many of us would like to see, just FYI.
Topics Celebrities
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
