Wagatha Christie

Wagatha Christie is a popular name given to a dispute between the British media personalities Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney, which culminated in a 2022 libel case in the English High Court, Vardy v Rooney.

In 2019, Rooney announced on Twitter that Vardy's Instagram account was leaking posts from Rooney's private account to the newspaper The Sun. In 2020, Vardy sued Rooney for libel, and the case came to trial in London in May 2022. On 29 July, the court dismissed Vardy's claim on the basis that Rooney's statements were substantially true. Vardy was ordered to pay a substantial proportion of Rooney's legal expenses, which, together with her own legal costs, were estimated to total £3 million.

The dispute and trial attracted significant media attention, in part because Vardy and Rooney are "WAGs", an acronym applied by the British media to the wives and girlfriends of prominent British footballers. The case acquired its popular name, a portmanteau of WAG and the name of the whodunit fiction writer Agatha Christie, because of the steps taken by Rooney to investigate the source of the leaks.