A British Person Explains the WAG Wars

On Wednesday, Oct. 9, Americans awoke to the disheartening yet thrilling news that the celebrities had done it again — and this time it was war. The fields of battle were Twitter and Instagram, where Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of leaking stories about her to the tabloids, and revealed that she had orchestrated a monthslong social media sting to catch Ms. Vardy in the act.

The news was incomprehensible, yet shocking. Who were these women, and how dare Rebekah Vardy? Context aside, the story had all the trappings of a juicy celebrity scandal. Screenshots of accusatory statements were shared on both parties’ verified social media accounts. (Ms. Rooney’s appeared to have been composed in the Stickies desktop app of a Mac computer, with the default yellow background swapped out for a dignified gray; Ms. Vardy’s arrived in the standard milieu of frantic public rebuttals: iPhone Notes.)

“This has been a burden in my life for a few years now and finally I have got to the bottom of it......” Ms. Rooney posted on Instagram and Twitter with a screenshot of a statement in which she said that after years of seeing details from her private life reported in the British tabloid The Sun, she hatched a plan to post “a series of false stories” about her life to her “personal” Instagram account, and altered her settings so that only one other account — that of her suspected leaker, Ms. Vardy — could view them. (Among the stories Ms. Rooney identified as “false” that subsequently appeared in The Sun: an account of a fictitious basement flood in Ms. Rooney’s new home, published one day before she went public with her accusation.)

Ms. Vardy, in a response posted to Twitter and Instagram, denied selling stories about Ms. Rooney. She deflected responsibility by saying that “various people” have had access to her Instagram account password for years. She also described herself as “upset,” “disgusted” and “heavily pregnant.”