'I warned her.' Everything we learned from Coleen Rooney’s Wagatha Christie documentary.

When it comes to the British gossip saga aptly dubbed Wagatha Christie, you either know every single detail of the controversy and court case... or you have no clue what anyone is talking about.

For the blissfully unaware, Wagatha Christie is the story of football wife (or WAG) Coleen Rooney, who alleges that another footy wife, Rebekah Vardy, was leaking her private information (which she only shared with a select group of people on Instagram) to tabloid journalists.

Rooney aired her concerns on her Twitter account.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery (this is where the Agatha Christie link comes in), Rooney started purposefully sharing false stories in an Instagram group that only included Vardy. 

And, surprise surprise, the fabricated stories about the wife of English footballer Wayne Rooney ended up surfacing in UK tabloid The Sun. 

Coleen then went a step further, naming and shaming her fellow WAG by telling her followers where she claimed the leak came from.

"I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It's… Rebekah Vardy," she shared on social media in 2019. 

Vardy not only denied passing on any information to The Sun; the wife of Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy then decided to sue Rooney for the social media posts.

The two-week libel trial dominated headlines around the world in 2022, but Vardy lost the case as the high court judge concluded that "significant parts" of Vardy's evidence were not credible and accused the celeb of destroying evidence such as a WhatsApp conversation exchange.

Vardy was ordered to pay approximately $5.7 million (AUD) in legal costs, and at a subsequent hearing, the judge ordered Vardy to pay 90 per cent of Rooney's legal fees.

Despite the ruling, Vardy maintains her innocence and believes the judge "got it wrong".

This stranger-than-fiction saga is now the subject of new Disney+ documentary, Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story.

Watch the trailer here. Post continues after video.

The three-part Disney+ mini-series features Coleen speaking out for the first time since the trial, along with interviews with her husband Wayne and the other players involved in the case. 

Well, minus Rebekah.

We've rounded up some of the biggest learnings from the juicy docuseries.

Coleen Rooney justified publicly outing Rebekah Vardy.

One of the major criticisms levelled at Coleen during the Wagatha saga was her decision to publicly shame Rebekah on social media.

"I was angry. I thought, 'I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to do something about it.' Part of me wanted to say something there and then, but the way it had been done to me, it was so sneaky. It was cheeky," Coleen said.

Ultimately, she wanted to give Rebekah a taste of her own medicine.

"I’d warned time and time again to stop doing this to me, but they never. I didn’t pick up the phone to Rebekah because she’d never respected me in that way, and she'd deny it and make a story out of that.

"I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to do that. She'd done it too many times to me. I felt the only way I could do this was to put it on social media, give it to everyone at the one time and put a stop to it," she said.

Rooney did note that she posted something on Instagram to give her football nemesis a heads up. "As a bit of a hint to Rebekah Vardy, to say, 'I’ve found you out,' I put a quote on my Instagram saying, 'Don’t play games with a girl who can play better.'"

The trial affected Coleen Rooney's mental health.

Coleen says her mental health took a hit during the libel trial.

"Wayne looked at me, he was like, 'Coleen you’re just not you anymore. You look sick,'" she said. "It was just constantly on my mind. I couldn’t get away from it."

Vardy first launched the High Court defamation lawsuit against Rooney in June 2020. The case came to trial in London at the beginning of May 2022, and it took two weeks for the verdict to be reached.

"It made me ill. It completely changed me as a character," Coleen reflected. "I was snapping at the kids. I'm a happy person and I could see people were concerned."

Coleen Rooney said Rebekah Vardy "didn't deserve" the trolling she copped.

Due to the public nature of Coleen and Rebekah's feud, both women were subjected to trolling, but the online hate Rebekah received from the British public was on another level.

During the worst of it, Vardy told The Sun she was sent up to 100 hateful messages each day.

"It was painful watching her, and in a weird way, I felt for her. It wasn’t nice," Coleen said.

"Those comments are disgusting. No one deserves that no matter what. People were saying to me, 'How can you do that to a pregnant woman?' I didn’t put that post up to cause any harm, it's because I'd found out who was leaking the private information and I wanted it to stop."

Rebekah Vardy in 2018. Image: Getty. 

Wayne Rooney's drink-driving charge almost ended their relationship.

The Rooneys are now stronger than ever but their 21-year relationship has not always been smooth sailing.

The couple were rocked in 2017 by Wayne being charged with drink-driving. Wayne was three times over the legal alcohol limit and he was banned from driving for two years after pleading guilty. The story was made extra salacious as, at the time, another woman in her 20s was in the car with him.

Wayne referred to the offence as a "terrible mistake", but Coleen added that, "Some of Wayne’s mistakes are harder to forgive than others.

"You do think, 'Do I know this person?' when things like that happen," said Coleen. "You’re not the person I married and not the person I want you to be…

"He said, 'I’m sorry, I’m sorry,' and I said, 'Well you can’t be sorry because it's wrong what you've done,' and I just kept saying, 'You're stupid, you're so stupid.'"

Wayne expressed remorse for his actions in the documentary. "You get married, you make your vows. I want to spend the rest of my life with Coleen," he said. "To put myself in a position where I could almost throw that away was so silly and stupid of me, and it's not what I want at all."

Coleen, however, had trouble moving on and reached out to the young woman whose car Wayne was driving. 

"Wayne wanted it all to go back to normal but it wasn't as easy as that. I was still mad and didn’t know what the future was for us a couple. I said to him, 'I can’t carry on with this.'

"Over the years, Wayne has got himself into situations where it's caused bad press attention," she said.

"I know Wayne as a person and I know his qualities, I know his downfalls. There are moments when I think I don't know him, when he's been drinking, and that's when he's a totally different person."

Eventually, the couple ended up living apart for a brief period while Coleen moved in with her mother. "I was just heartbroken, I just said, 'I cant stay in the house,'" she said.

Coleen's mother, Colette McLoughlin, also featured in the documentary.

"You’re mad, you’re angry, you're upset… I love [Wayne] but sometimes I don't like him. I feel like shaking him,'" Colette said.

But the Rooneys eventually reunited and got back on track.

Coleen and Wayne Rooney in 2022. Image: Getty. 

Wayne got a vasectomy after their fourth child. 

Coleen said that Wayne "went in and got the snip" after the couple welcomed their fourth child, Cass, who followed older sublings Kai, Klay and Kit.

This was significant to Coleen's case, as in one of her fabricated stories shared on her 'close friends' Instagram, she said the couple were trying have a baby girl through a gender selection clinic.

"I always thought I'd have a few kids, maybe three at the most. And then number four came along and we knew our family was complete," Coleen said. 

"Then me and Wayne talked about him having a vasectomy. He said, 'After this baby, we're not having any more.'"

Coleen has been followed by the paparazzi since she was 16. 

Coleen and Wayne were childhood sweethearts, and were together when Wayne became the youngest player to represent England at 17 years old. This meant that Coleen, then 16, became an instant celebrity.

"It was non-stop. Non-stop," Coleen's mum said. "From one minute she was a grade A student going to school having her exams, to men hiding behind bins, jumping out at her, cameras in her face."

Coleen was shocked to see herself on the cover of newspapers as a teen. "We used to live next door to a newsagent and I remember looking and thinking, 'Oh my goodness that's me. Front page of the newspaper.' And underneath, it was, 'A murderer is on the loose and he's escaped,'" Coleen reflected.

"I remember thinking, 'Why am I half a page on the front of a paper while there were so much more important things going on in the world?'"

Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is streaming on Disney+.

Feature image: Getty/Disney+.