‘Coleen wants to regain her status’
a Virginia airport last December.
Wayne had reportedly pledged to be on his best behaviour before the arrest, after he’d been caught drunk at the wheel of party girl Laura Simpson’s car in Cheshire just 18 months earlier – which saw him slapped with a two-year driving ban and sentenced to 100 hours of community service.
Coleen took off her wedding ring following the incident – sparking speculation the marriage was hanging by a thread. She addressed her decision to remove her ring by saying on Facebook, “I see it as a sign of commitment, and I was unsure what was happening.” After she publicly forgave him months later, the family relocated to Washington after footballer Wayne’s transfer to D.C. United.
But Closer previously reported how Coleen has often felt homesick in Washington, being thousands of miles away from her family and friends back in the UK, and now a source reveals she is weighing up how to deal with the latest controversy.
CAREER MOVES
The source says, “Coleen doesn’t want to take the boys out of school and disrupt them again if she doesn’t have to, but she is seriously considering all her options in Washington. If they’re going to stay there, then she wants to make more of a life for herself. She wants to make more of an effort to make friends, to consider potential career moves for herself and have things in her life that she can focus on that don’t centre around Wayne and his work.”
Coleen shot to fame as the 16-year- old schoolgirl sweetheart of Wayne, after he made his professional debut for Everton in 2002, and for a number of years enjoyed a media career that made her a star in her own right.
The down-to-earth WAG was Closer’s columnist and in 2008 fronted her own ITV makeover show, Coleen’s Real Women, in which she was labelled “the nation’s favourite girl next door”. She also released a hugely successful workout DVD and fronted multi-million-pound advertising campaigns for ASDA and Littlewoods.
However, in recent years, Coleen put all that on the back-burner for Wayne and raising their four boys.
TIME TO SHINE
Meanwhile, Wayne’s footballing career has gone from strength to strength, despite his personal issues, and he signed a £300,000a-week deal to play for US team D.C. United last year.
But pals say that Coleen is now keen to recapture the high profile she had.
The source adds, “Coleen wants to regain her star status and remind the public she has a voice of her own. She doesn’t see herself as Wayne’s long-suffering wife at all. In fact, as the mother of four boys starting a new life abroad, she feels like a warrior most days. She wants to get herself back on TV. She feels as though it’s her time to shine.”
❛ SHE DOESN’T SEE HERSELF AS WAYNE’S LONG-SUFFERING WIFE ❜