Rebekah Vardy (néeMiranda; previously Nicholson; born 17 February 1982) is an English media personality who is married to English footballer Jamie Vardy. She was a contestant on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in 2017 and on Dancing on Ice in 2021. In 2022, she lost a well-publicised libel case against Coleen Rooney, dubbed the "Wagatha Christie" trial. It was determined that Vardy did play a role in leaking fabricated stories about Rooney to The Sun, a British tabloid.
Personal life
Vardy was born in Norwich and claims she was abused as a child and made homeless at 15.[1] In her 2023 Channel 4 documentary Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah's Witnesses And Me, Vardy claimed that the abuse had been covered up by leaders of the Christian denomination Jehovah's Witnesses community of which she was a member.[2]
Her parents – Carlos and Alison – divorced when she was 11 and she moved from city to city, living in Norwich, Reading and Oxford. Vardy's father, Carlos Miranda, was born in Madeira, making Vardy half-Portuguese.[3]
At 17, Vardy met electrician Mark Godden and later married him in Mexico.[1]
In 2014, whilst working as a nightclub promoter, Vardy organised footballer Jamie Vardy's 27th birthday party. She fell pregnant three months later with their first child.[4][5] The Vardys married on 25 May 2016 at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire.[6]
Vardy has six children: a daughter (born 2005) and a son (born 2010, fathered by footballer Luke Foster), and a daughter (born 2014), a son (born 2017), and a daughter (born 2019) with her third husband, Vardy.
She is a stepmother to Jamie's daughter from a previous relationship.[7]
Rebekah and Jamie Vardy are both Family ambassadors to Barnardo's.[12][13][14] Vardy is also a patron of The Dorothy Goodman School in Leicestershire.[15][16] She has supported Leicester based homeless charity 'Homelessness to Hope' having officially opened The Hope Centre [17] and has supported the Jeans for Genes charity campaign.[18] Vardy supported the family of Alfie Evans, an infant boy from Liverpool with a then-undiagnosed neurodegenerative disorder, in their campaign to have him sent abroad for further treatment.[19]
On 9 October 2019, Coleen Rooney, the wife of another footballer, Wayne Rooney, made a Twitter post[20] alleging that posts from her private Instagram account were being leaked to the newspaper The Sun. Rooney said that, to catch who was selling the stories, she had restricted access on who could see the posts. She stated that the only viewer of these posts was Vardy's account. This Tweet went viral, being dubbed the 'Wagatha Christie', a portmanteau of the football term WAG and mystery writer Agatha Christie.[21] Vardy responded on her own Twitter account, denying the claims and stating that her Instagram had been hacked.[22]
In June 2020, Vardy sued Rooney for defamation.[23] Although Vardy won a preliminary stage in the case in November 2020,[24] in July 2022, following the full trial, the judge ruled against Vardy and determined that Rooney's claims were "substantially true".[25] The judge described Vardy as "an untrustworthy witness" and found that she probably worked with her agent to leak stories about Rooney to the press.[26] Vardy said she was sad and disappointed with the decision, but stated she would not appeal.[27] In October 2022, Vardy was ordered by the court to pay 90% of Rooney's legal costs, which was reported to be a higher proportion than is usual in such cases. The judge made this decision partly because Vardy had been found to have destroyed relevant evidence prior to the trial. As a result, Vardy was ordered to make an immediate payment to Rooney of £800,000 with the remainder to be assessed with the maximum amount set at £1.5m. Vardy's own legal costs were estimated to have been a similar figure, resulting in the total cost for Vardy of the litigation she commenced but lost being potentially around £3m.[28]
In October 2024, a new ruling on the case dismissed a number of Mrs Vardy’s claims and ruled that Mrs Rooney’s team had not committed any misconduct, and therefore it was "not an appropriate case" to reduce the amount Mrs Vardy had to pay.[29]
