Where were you on 9 October 2019? For many of us, the date alone won’t be significant, but if I asked you where you were when the news broke about “……… Rebekah Vardy’s account” being outed by Coleen Rooney as the source of a leak of personal information from her private Instagram account to The Sun, you might be more likely to remember. 

A defining moment in modern British popular culture (and pre-Covid blissful ignorance), at the time of pressing send on the now-infamous Notes app screenshot to her Twitter timeline, Rooney says she really wasn’t expecting it to get the response it did. “When I put that post out, I’d just had enough; I just wanted [the leaks] to stop. Little did I know it would explode,” she tells Stylist. 

Speaking ahead of the release of the Disney+ documentary Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, Rooney talks calmly and quietly about the rollercoaster ride she’s been on since that post became public property, almost four years ago to the day. “I knew it would get some reaction, but not the level it did. I was blown away by it.” Since that fateful day, Vardy – whose account was implicated – has denied any involvement in the leak, and in June 2020 she launched a £1 million high court defamation lawsuit against Rooney over the accusations. (In July 2022, Vardy lost the high court libel case, and the trial came to an end.)

And, of course, 9 October 2019 gave us more than just the start of a long and drawn-out celebrity court case; it was also when the internet moniker Wagatha Christie was born. Used in relation to the detective-like skills Rooney pulled out of the bag to ‘crack the case’ of how her personal information was being leaked to a tabloid newspaper, the term has become synonymous with the incident. But Rooney tells Stylist she’s only now starting to appreciate the humour behind the nickname. “At the time there was a lot of stuff [on the internet]: there was Wagatha Christie, there were memes, there were a lot of different things. And I just thought it was a bit of a joke that I wasn’t laughing at because it was a serious matter to me, and people were mocking it… At the time, I wasn’t playing. Whereas now I can, you know, take it with a pinch of salt.”

So with the trial over and the dust finally settling on the drama, I ask Rooney: why publish a documentary now? “I just wanted to tell my story from beginning to end to get my truth out there,” she says. “I feel like it’s been a long time coming for me to speak out. However, I didn’t want to rush into things straight away, and as you see in the documentary, that’s my way of doing things in life.” 

The three-part documentary series shows from beginning to end how the case unfolded through Rooney’s lens and explores the ways in which her life has been played out in public for the last 20 years.  The audience is transported all the way back to how (and where) she and her husband, Wayne, met, introducing us to her close family and friends with intimate, often emotional and personal footage from the achieves. 

For her fans, it’s the first time Rooney has opened up such private footage of her life behind the scenes. “I was happy to share that archive with [Disney]. And, you know, it’s just normal everyday stuff.” From the opening footage of her being aggressively papped in her local village while simply trying to buy a coffee one morning to home videos she’s taken of Wayne and their sons playing football inside the house. “We’ve moved house since then,” she laughs. “And it’s definitely no ballgames [inside the house]. We went through two TVs in lockdown, one of them due to a ball getting kicked.” It all sets in stone how much her family and, in turn, their moments of privacy together mean to Rooney. And when that was shattered, it’s why she took matters into her own hands.

“I don’t play a lot of things out through social media,” she tells me. “I’d just had enough and I wanted [the leaks] to stop.”

Thinking about privacy, and talking to Rooney about reasons she gives for wanting to make this documentary, she repeats: “I feel like now’s a good time to get my truth out there.” I wonder, what message does she want the audience to take from the show? “Truth always wins,” she says. “You know, it’s as simple as that. No matter what, always stick to what you believe in.”

Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is out now on Disney+

Images: Disney+