Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy fight in court

Two English football WAGs faced each other in court today at the start of a $3.7million defamation lawsuit dubbed the “Wagatha Christie” by the British media.

Coleen Rooney, wife of ex-England captain Wayne Rooney, accused Rebekah Vardy, wife of former England player Jamie Vardy, on leaking stories from her private Instagram account following a “stabbing operation” that led to her being nicknamed “Wagatha Christie” after British crime writer Agatha Christie.

Rebekah has denied the claims, claiming that Coleen’s account was hacked and is now suing her former friend for defamation.

Coleen, 36, entered the courtroom wearing a $2,000 Mugler blazer and a plastic boot on her broken left foot, accompanied by husband Wayne, the former Manchester United forward who also played for US soccer team DC from 2018 to 2020 United played. Rebekah, 40, arrived in a statement purple coat, white stilettos and sunglasses.

The bickering wives sat 10 feet apart in the front row of the High Court in London as Rebekah’s lawyer explained she is suing her rival to “prove her innocence and defend her reputation”.

Rebekah shared how she felt like “the whole world was going to collapse on me” after Coleen made her bombastic revelations.

“I became very hot and suffered from strange heart palpitations. Tons of messages were coming in on my phone and I was seeing these messages on Instagram berating me – “f***ing rat”, “f***ing b***h”… I was in such a heightened emotional state because I was heavily pregnant. I must have been in shock. I remember getting out of the car shaking and thinking I was going to be sick,” she said in a statement to the court.

Rebekah said Coleen “showed no remorse” when she called her to deny her allegations.

She said: “I found it very frightening and quite threatening. She seemed totally unfazed by the fact of the abuse we were suffering that minute and just said she did what she had to do. When I found out about Coleen’s campaign secretly trying to target me, it was extremely upsetting. It made me feel like someone was monitoring me and monitoring me without my permission.”

The trial comes three years after Coleen, a mother of four, suspected one of her Instagram followers was selling her personal stories to the press. She fought back with a stab, planted fake stories on her Instagram account, and secretly began blocking all of her followers except Rebekah.

When the fake stories appeared in the British newspaper Sun, Coleen went public with them an arson post on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to her two million followers.

Writing from her $25million mansion in northern England, Coleen said: “For a number of years, someone I have trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been constantly updating The Sun newspaper with my private posts and stories .”

As for the fake stories, she added: “Now I know for sure which account/person it came from. I have saved and screened all the original stories clearly showing that only one person viewed them. It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account.”

Since Coleen called her a leaker, Rebekah has been “taunted and abused”, “joked endlessly” and even blackmailed at football matches, said her lawyer Ian Tomlinson QC. The mother-of-five, whose husband Jamie still plays for Leicester City football club, was called “a nasty rat face b***h”, while another post said her then-unborn baby “should face an incinerator”. , the court was said. She also received a message from a blackmailer who claimed to have nude pictures and sex tapes of her and threatened to post them online if she refused to pay $37,000, Tomlinson said.

Meanwhile, Coleen “luxuriated” at being compared to Agatha Christie, even deriding a photo of herself as Miss Marple, one of the author’s most famous amateur detectives, he said.

Coleen’s attorney, David Sherborne, told the court the case was “essentially a matter of treason,” alleging that Rebekah intentionally destroyed evidence before the trial, calling her cover-up efforts “blatant and unbelievable.”

Rebekah’s agent Caroline Watt has claimed she accidentally dropped her iPhone in the North Sea during a boat trip in Scotland last August, shortly after Coleen requested information from the device. Rebekah’s IT professional claimed that the passwords he believed he changed to secure information on both of their iPhones no longer worked and that he could not access the data on them. Additionally, all conversations on Jamie Vardy’s WhatsApp account were deleted after Coleen’s team asked to review the messages.

Rebekah, who was in Dubai when Coleen first came out, said in her court testimony: “What really shocks me is the fact that she knew I was pregnant and must have realized the implications of a public allegation of treason would have upon me. I will never forgive Coleen for ruining the last two months of my pregnancy…I was in such a state of dread that it was really hard for me to relax and enjoy a special time. This is a time I will never get back.”