Marriage and children She met her future husband,
Wayne Rooney, at age 12 in the Liverpool suburb of
Croxteth. They began a relationship when they were 16, after they left secondary school. Wayne's mother Jeanette worked as a part-time cleaner at
St John Bosco Arts College, which Coleen attended. The couple married in
Portofino, Italy, on 12 June 2008; Britain's
OK! magazine paid them a reported £2.5 million for exclusive wedding information and pictures. The newlyweds, dubbed Wayleen, moved into a new £1.3m mansion in
Formby. They lived in
Prestbury, Cheshire, in a £4 million neo-Georgian mansion, prior to moving to the United States for Wayne Rooney’s career as player and manager for D.C. United. The Rooneys have four sons, Kai (born 2009), Klay (born 2013), Kit (born 2016) and Cass (born 2018). Rooney is a patron of the Liverpool-based
Alder Hey Children's Charity.
Rebekah Vardy dispute On 9 October 2019, Rooney made a
Twitter post explaining that posts from her private
Instagram account were being leaked to
The Sun newspaper. She stated that to discover who was selling the stories, she had restricted access to the posts. She revealed that the only viewer of these posts was an account belonging to
Rebekah Vardy, implying that she was the culprit. The ensuing scandal was dubbed "Wagatha Christie", a
portmanteau of the football term
WAG and mystery writer
Agatha Christie, by the British media. Vardy responded on her own Twitter account, denying the claims and claiming that her Instagram account had been hacked. In June 2020, news broke that Vardy was taking Rooney to court for defamation, with legal costs reportedly set to hit £500,000 on each side. In November 2020,
Mr Justice Warby ruled in favour of Vardy after the libel preliminary hearing at the High Court in London which took place on 19 November 2020. Neither Rooney nor Vardy were at the court in person. Rooney was ordered to pay Vardy almost £23,000 in court costs. The pair were given until 8 February 2021 to make an attempt to mediate their case. In May 2022, Vardy sued Rooney for libel, arguing that the accusation over her Instagram account was false. Following the earlier ruling, it became Rooney’s responsibility to prove Vardy was personally responsible for leaking stories to
The Sun, or convince the judge that publication of the allegation was in the public interest. In July 2022, the judge in the case,
Mrs Justice Steyn, dismissed Mrs Vardy's claim, ruling that Mrs Rooney's accusation was "substantially true". In October 2023, Disney+ released a three-part documentary series titled
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, which explored the legal dispute with Rebekah Vardy and its media coverage. == References ==