Rebekah Vardy: My pain over sick threats
WAG Rebekah Vardy is scared to leave home after vile threats were made against her family.
The wife of England striker Jamie called in police over the online attacks.
Tearful Rebekah, 35, told how disgusting sexual comments were posted on Twitter after she posted a charming snap of her two-year-old daughter Sofia online.
Rebekah said: “We’d been at the football game and she’d been looking really cute. She had a little clip in her hair.
“She was in Jamie’s football kit and I put a picture of her on social media and someone responded…I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as disgusting.
“I was distraught. We just got the police involved straight away.”
In an emotional interview, she said: “I feel like I don’t want to go out of the house, like I don’t want to go anywhere that someone would recognise me, especially if I’m with my children.”
She added: “The most recent one was when a football fan tweeted to say that he wished our son had been born stillborn, which was just awful. I don’t even think our son was two weeks old then.”
The mum has faced abuse for years but it turned even nastier when rumours started swirling Jamie was leaving his club Leicester City.
Some fans were convinced it was Rebekah’s fault.
She said: “We had people trying to get over our wall, ringing our buzzer at all hours, standing outside shouting abuse. It usually tended to be early hours in the morning. The kids would be like ‘what’s going on?’.” There was further abuse online with one tweet reading: “Rebekah Vardy f***ed it for us the slag.”
Rebekah was desperate to see the troll who threatened her daughter brought to justice but police have been unable to prosecute.
She explained: “They traced his IP address to India. I wanted that person to be found and punished for what he had said but if they’re not in this country you can’t.”
Rebekah opens up about her ordeal on Channel 5 series Celeb Trolls: We’re Coming To Get You, which starts on Thursday at 10pm.
She also tells how being the wife of a footballer has other downsides.
She said: “I think people think that it defines you as a person.
“At the end of the day we are still human and it does affect us. It’s no different to how it would affect one of our next door neighbours.”