Coleen Rooney broke her silence on her husband Wayne’s infidelity in her candid interview with British Vogue.
The WAG, 37, admitted that keeping their marriage together has been ‘a battle’ at times, but insisted she’s ‘never backed away’ from the challenges they’ve faced.
Wayne and Coleen met when they were just teenagers at school in Liverpool, and tied the knot in 2008.
The couple have been dogged by reports of Wayne’s infidelity during his football career, with him previously apologising for visiting brothels and paying two prostitutes for a threesome.
Coleen told the publication: ‘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.’
Insight: Coleen Rooney has broken her silence on her husband Wayne’s infidelity, admitting that despite their struggles ‘she knows what he’s doing’
Explosive: In her interview with British Vogue, she admitted that keeping their marriage together has been ‘a battle’ at times, but she’s ‘never backed away’ from the challenges
She went onto joke that she’s well-prepared to handle her husband’s misbehaviour due to his previous infidelities.
‘We’ve never backed away from it,’ she continued. ‘
‘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, but I know. People lie to themselves.’
Coleen and Wayne, 37, who both grew up on Liverpool’s Croxteth estate met when they were 12 and began dating when they were 16.
The couple went on to marry in a lavish ceremony in Italy aged 22 and went on to welcome four sons Kai, 13, Klay, 10, Kit, seven, and Cass, five.
Wayne and Coleen’s 20-year relationship has been marred with various cheating scandals – with the footballer making national headlines when he was found to have visited three prostitutes as a teenager.
In 2004 after Wayne, then aged 18, moved to Manchester United, it was discovered that the teenager paid £140 for sex with prostitute Charlotte Glover, 21.
It was also claimed that at a brothel in Liverpool he slept with Gina McCarrick, then 37, and grandmother Patricia Tierney, then 48.
Marriage: The couple have been dogged by reports of Wayne’s infidelity, with him previously apologising for visiting brothels and paying two prostitutes for a threesome
Candid: She went onto joke that she’s well-prepared to handle her husband’s misbehaviour due to his previous infidelities
Devastated Coleen stood by her man but didn’t comment publicly on the claims – though later admitted that when the scandal came out she hadn’t yet slept with Wayne herself.
The pair worked through their troubles and wed four years later, though their newlywed bliss was short-lived, as it emerged in 2010 that the footballer had slept with two more prostitutes while Coleen was pregnant with their first son, Kai.
More incidences with other women followed in 2017 and 2019, while in 2021 Wayne hit headlines once again after pictures emerged of the star partying and falling asleep in a hotel room with young women.
After overcoming Wayne’s last scandal, Coleen admitted that this year’s Wagatha Christie trial nearly broke her marriage to Wayne because she was ‘hurt, short-tempered and he didn’t think she was the same person anymore’.
Rebekah had sued Coleen over an accusation she had leaked details of Coleen’s private life to the press after Coleen had staged an elaborate sting operation to find out who was passing on stories about her to The Sun.
And while Coleen won the £3million libel case, she admitted that things weren’t plain sailing at home and she felt like the stress of it was draining the life out of her.
She told that while the football coach was ‘supportive’, the trial ‘took its toll’ on their romance as she put her focus on winning the court battle.
Coleen admitted the pair had ‘disagreements’ because she was ‘quite short-tempered’ and found herself with little time for him.
Coleen also confessed that she was forced to spend hours on the phone with her legal team meaning her family had to step in to help with their four sons.
It comes after last year, Coleen explained how she had to block out other people’s opinions on her marriage to Wayne.
Speaking in the Amazon Prime documentary on her husband’s life and football career, Coleen candidly discussed her husband’s cheating for the the first time on camera.
The mum of four credited her parents Colette and Tony for their support, as she admits part of the reason she chose to stay in her marriage during Wayne’s various cheating and drinking scandals was for their children.
Speaking in the new documentary, Coleen says she relied on the support of her family and her own instincts to help her decide on whether to stay in the relationship, pointing out:
‘When you’re making those decisions you’ve got to focus on what you want and not other people because you have so many people saying different things to you. ‘Oh why is she getting back with him?”
‘Obviously I listen to the people that matter to me, my mum and dad always give me a positive outlook on things. There’s nothing that we can’t deal with and that’s my way in a situation – let’s sit down and see what we can do and can we make it work? And we have. We’re not the lovey-dovey type anyway, we like to have a laugh and we work well together.’
She adds that there is some element of truth to the idea that they stayed together for their four boys, explaining: ‘That was part of it but also we still love each other.’
‘Hopefully he’s learnt and he doesn’t get himself into any of those horrible situations again. But it’s happened and I’ve got to live with it, if I couldn’t cope with living with it I would have ended the relationship.’
Following the release of Coleen’s bombshell interview, Rebekah Vardy hit back by blasting her rival as ‘boring’ and ‘publicity-seeking’.
The WAG took to Instagram on Thursday to share a stunning bikini snap, just hours after posting a pouting selfie during her family holiday to Portugal.
Raging: Following the release of Coleen’s bombshell interview, Rebekah Vardy hit back by blasting her rival as ‘boring’ and ‘publicity-seeking’
‘Boring’: Taking to Instagram, Rebekah then made a number of digs at Coleen, 37, in the comments and accused her rival of seeking out ‘publicity’ with her bombshell Vogue interview
Arguing: She also became embroiled in a tense exchange with one Instagram user as she protested her innocence in a series of comments about being the ‘bad guy’
Breaking her silence: Rebekah took to Instagram on Thursday to share a stunning bikini snap, just hours after posting a pouting selfie during her family holiday to Portugal
No pal of mine: (Coleen and Rebekah pictured together in 2016) – Coleen said that while their paths crossed, they did not socialise and nor were they friends
Shocking: The post that accused Rebekah Vardy’s social media account of leaking stories. It sparked a £3million legal battle that Rooney has won after the judge agreed it was ‘substantially true’ and therefore not libellous
She shielded her eyes with square sunglasses and showed off her sun-kissed figure, as she soaks up the sun in Portugal with husband Jamie and their children.
And in the comments section of her post, Rebekah did not shy away from hitting out at Coleen for her Vogue interview as she slammed her comments as ‘boring’.
Her fuming words came in response to a fan who commented: ‘I reckon vogue mag being a superstar n all that,’ in reference to Coleen’s interview.
Rebekah then replied: ‘Boring now isn’t it,’ with the fan then adding: ‘Desparate.’
The wife of Jamie Vardy then continued to rage as she slammed Coleen by writing: ‘Don’t give me publicity I’m private but please give me publicity.’
Doubling down, she went on: ‘What I don’t get why you would want to keep bringing it up. It’s boring now! The public doesn’t care and neither do I. She won that’s the end of it! Be happy move on… because I know I have x’
Another fan hit out at Rebekah as they said: ‘You dragged her through the courts to hang yourself so she has a right to tell her side tbh. You made the mistakes here, not her!’
Prompting her to protest her innocence as she argued back: ‘What a year later! Give me a break! And yes I did because I don’t do anything wrong! And I’ll take that to my grave! If I had done it believe me I would have flicked the middle finger and said yeah and what!’
The Instagram user then replied: ‘You were found guilty though by the top suits and you can’t really preach innocence now can you? I know you’d rather it go away but she still has a right to tell her side and her experience of this ordeal too and people want to listen.’
But Rebekah went on: ‘I’ve preached innocence from day one and that won’t change! And are you telling me they don’t get things wrong… because I have a very long list that they fucked up! But it doesn’t suit the narrative! It’s fine I’m cool with being the bad guy! Maybe I’ll just start playing up to that now.’
She also hinted at the drama in her caption as she wrote: ‘take a chill [peace out emoji].’
Rebekah lost her libel case against Coleen in July 2022, was ordered to pay up to £1.5million towards Coleen’s legal fees after losing the case, but she still continues to insist she was not the culprit.
After maintaining a dignified silence, Coleen branded Rebekah ‘odd’ and said her ‘evil’ texts read in court made her sick.
Rebekah had sued Coleen over an accusation she had leaked details of Coleen’s private life to the press after Coleen had staged an elaborate sting operation to find out who was passing on stories about her to The Sun.
She told Vogue how she came up with a plot to foil the person who had been leaking stories, by planting false stories to her private account and only making them visible to Rebekah’s account but didn’t tell a soul what she was up to, not even a lawyer.
Coleen said: ‘I feel like a lot of people still don’t understand what happened, from beginning to end. But what I said in that post, I still stick by today.’
The WAG revealed that her plan to publicly share the leaker on Instagram in October 2019, was all her own.
She said: ‘In the night I started thinking about what I was going to do. I just wanted these stories to stop.’
But did she do a classic firing up of the Notes app at 3am?
She laughed. ‘No. I like a pen and paper – a pencil and 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.’
Coleen said she didn’t tell a soul what she was about to do. ‘No. [The part] my friends and family were most surprised at me [for was] putting the post up.’
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.
She felt empowered and relieved she’d kept her plans to go public under wraps, saying: ‘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. I didn’t want no one telling me not to do it.’
On Becky, who is married to footballer Jamie Vardy, 36, Coleen said: ‘I felt like she was in the same world as me. She was in the public eye. I thought she would be protective over that kind of thing.
‘We could associate because our husbands had played for England together. But she doesn’t live around here. She wasn’t a friend. I’ve never socialised with her.’
Coleen admitted that when Rebekah said she was consulting lawyers, she was spooked. Rooney was immediately spooked.
She hadn’t pre-legalled her statement and had assumed relaying what had happened to her was allowed..
She said: ‘You see social media people calling people out in such nasty ways and I was thinking I wasn’t that nasty.’ But her stomach turned.
Adding: ‘I’ve never been in a legal case before so for me it was scary. What a horrible experience. The thing I was dreading the most was actually going to court.’
Coleen was both anxious and fuming that she’d been ‘dragged to court’, saying: ‘I found it hard not letting on.
‘It was so weird that first day, actually sitting on a bench together. It was so difficult in that courtroom… especially watching her on the stand. It was quite painful. I felt uneasy.
‘Obviously she was going through it. ‘I 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’.’
And she revealed how she found out she had won the case.
She said: ‘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,. David Sherborne, her lawyer, came on the line and said ‘We’ve won,’ he said without any build up.’
She laughed: ‘I think all I did was swear for the whole quarter of an hour phone call.
‘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. The positivity I got from it… I’m glad for that, at least.’
Pictured: Rebekah sensationally lost the ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel case with Coleen in July 2022
Coleen was awarded costs by the court and £800,000 of the total amount due was payable immediately.
Vardy was said to have scored one of the worst own goals in British legal history after a High Court judge dismissed her evidence as ‘evasive or implausible’ and accused her of deliberately deleting WhatsApp messages central to the case.
Her agent, Caroline Watt, was also accused of intentionally dropping her phone in the North Sea. During the trial, some of Rebekah’s personal texts to her Caroline were read out.
Coleen said: ‘The texts knocked me sick. 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.’
While Coleen seems to bear no ill-will towards Rebekah, she said: ‘I’m a forgive and forget person, I can’t be bothered with things going on and on. But this is obviously totally different.’
‘You can’t go wrong if you’re telling the truth.’
See the full feature in the September issue of British Vogue, available via digital download and on newsstands from Tuesday August 22.
Coleen Rooney’s three-part documentary will air exclusively on Disney+ later this year.
Wagatha Christie timeline: How Coleen and Rebekah’s war unfolded
September 2017 to October 2019 – The Sun runs a number of articles about Coleen, including that she travelled to Mexico to look into baby ‘gender selection’ treatment, her plan to revive her TV career and the flooding of her basement.
October 9, 2019 – Coleen uses social media to accuse Rebekah of selling stories from her private Instagram account to the tabloids.
Coleen says she spent five months attempting to work out who was sharing information about her and her family based on posts she had made on her personal social media page.
After sharing a series of ‘false’ stories and using a process of elimination, Coleen claims they were viewed by one Instagram account, belonging to Rebekah.
Rebekah, then pregnant with her fifth child, denies the allegations and says various people had access to her Instagram over the years.
She claims to be ‘so upset’ by Coleen’s accusation, later adding: ‘I thought she was my friend but she completely annihilated me.’
The public dispute makes headlines around the world, with the hashtag #WagathaChristie trending.
How it all began: On October 9, 2019, Coleen Rooney, now 36, accused Rebekah Vardy, 40, of leaking ‘false stories’ about her to the press in an Instagram post (above)
February 13, 2020 – In a tearful appearance on ITV’s Loose Women, Rebekah says the stress of the dispute caused her to have severe anxiety attacks and she ‘ended up in hospital three times’. Coleen says in a statement that she does not want to ‘engage in further public debate’.
Shortly after Coleen’s public accusation, Rebekah – who was pregnant and on holiday in Dubai at the time – denied any involvement (above)
June 23, 2020 – It emerges that Rebekah has launched libel proceedings against Coleen.
Rebekah’s lawyers allege she ‘suffered extreme distress, hurt, anxiety and embarrassment as a result of the publication of the post and the events which followed’.
November 19-20, 2020 – The libel battle has its first High Court hearing in London. A judge rules that Coleen’s October 2019 post ‘clearly identified’ Rebekah as being ‘guilty of the serious and consistent breach of trust’.
Mr Justice Warby concludes that the ‘natural and ordinary’ meaning of the posts was that Rebekah had ‘regularly and frequently abused her status as a trusted follower of Coleen’s personal Instagram account by secretly informing The Sun of Coleen’s private posts and stories’.
February 8-9, 2022 – A series of explosive messages between Rebekah and her agent Caroline Watt – which Coleen’s lawyers allege were about her – are revealed at a preliminary court hearing.
The court is told Rebekah was not referring to Coleen when she called someone a ‘nasty bitch’ in one exchange with Ms Watt.
Coleen’s lawyers seek further information from the WhatsApp messages, but the court is told that Ms Watt’s phone fell into the North Sea after a boat she was on hit a wave, before further information could be extracted from it.
February 14 – Coleen is refused permission to bring a High Court claim against Ms Watt for misuse of private information to be heard alongside the libel battle. A High Court judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, says the bid was brought too late and previous opportunities to make the claim had not been taken.
April 13 – Ms Watt is not fit to give oral evidence at the upcoming libel trial, the High Court is told as the case returns for another hearing.
The agent revokes permission for her witness statement to be used, and withdraws her waiver which would have allowed Sun journalists to say whether she was a source of the allegedly leaked stories.
April 29 – Rebekah ‘appears to accept’ that her agent was the source of allegedly leaked stories, Coleen’s barrister David Sherborne tells the High Court. He argues that a new witness statement submitted by Rebekah suggests Ms Watt was the source but Rebekah claims she ‘did not authorise or condone her’.
Rebekah’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson says the statement did not contain ‘any change whatever in the pleaded case’, with her legal team having no communication with Ms Watt.
May 10 onwards – The trial lasts seven days