The HE-ROO of Euro 2004 was a national disgrace: worse, his relationship with his girl was over. Or, at least, that was how The Sun told it the next day, Monday 26 July 2004: ‘ROONEY AND COLEEN SPLIT: SHE SLAPS HIM AND LEAVES OVER HOOKER: Tearful Coleen McLoughlin SLAPPED the 18-year-old soccer sensation when she learned about his sordid romp.’
Worse, Coleen ‘told friends’ – that hoary old familiar – that she told Wayne: ‘How dare you? Fuck off!’
On Tuesday, The Sun had more: ‘COLEEN CHUCKS RING AWAY: £25K ROONEY GEM HURLED TO SQUIRRELS’. The redtop panted that the diamond sparkler may be lost for ever because raging Coleen McLoughlin, 18, hurled it into a densely wooded squirrel sanctuary near the pair’s home in Formby, Merseyside.
The scoop caused a rash of metal-detector-wielding treasure hunters to race off to the red squirrel sanctuary, where they were asked to desist by the National Trust. The other bit of bad news for the luckless treasure hunters was that The Sun’s squirrel sanctuary story was wholly untrue. (Let’s not forget the poor old red squirrels who have never done anyone any harm and are being crowded out of Britain by their bigger, tougher, grey cousins imported from North America. The last thing they needed was their sanctuary being invaded by a bunch of weirdos wearing headphones emitting strange whistling noises while prodding the earth with a metal stick because they were under the mistaken impression that the girlfriend of a millionaire soccer star had chucked her ring away. If I was a red squirrel, I would have been very cross indeed.)
Nor did Coleen leave him.
A tabloid editor broke down in tears and ‘told friends’ how it works:
If a celebrity has been caught at it, normally a bloke with his trousers down, shagging someone he should not have been, then he’s going to be excruciatingly embarrassed. So long as the basic story’s true – he or she is guilty of bonking the wrong person – then you can get away with murder. You can add some extra juicy detail – it may be a load of old cobblers – but you can get away with it. And so we do.
The classic example of a tabloid journo getting away with a little extra detail is the David Mellor exclusive, which hit the headlines in July 1992. Mellor, then the Minister for Fun in John Major’s Cabinet, was involved in a kiss ’n’ tell scandal in which struggling actress Antonia de Sancha sold her story of her affair with Mellor for £30,000. The publicist Max Clifford added the bit about Mellor bonking Antonia in his Chelsea FC kit. The Cabinet minister was hardly in a position to complain. Likewise, Coleen did not lob her ring into the red squirrel sanctuary. But Rooney was in no position to go to war about it.
Neither Wayne nor Coleen touch on the specifics of the ‘Charlotte, I shagged u’ story in their autobiographies. They run it into the general mix of the next Roo bonk story from Graham Johnson, which appeared in the Sunday Mirror the following month: ‘ROO IN A VICE DEN’, about his time with the cowgirl and other lovelies in Diva’s, back in 2002. This story had the bonus of grainy TV footage of the soccer hero wandering through the brothel.
Pure, unadulterated tabloid gold.
In July 2004 Johnson had got a fresh lead about Rooney, back in 2002 – that he’d been caught on CCTV in Diva’s. And someone had kept the tape. Pretty quickly, the Liverpudlian hack suspected that the brothel was, in his words, ‘under the “protection” of a mob boss from a notorious crime family’.
The front woman for the brothel was a woman he calls ‘Blondie’, the money behind it, he says, an anonymous investor, but the people whom everybody didn’t want to upset were the gangsters. Johnson negotiated the deal and eventually ‘a six-figure sum’ – thought to be something around £200,000 – was paid to ‘Blondie’. Johnson reruns the original newspaper articles in his book, but then concludes: ‘Unfortunately, Blondie was given a hard time by some ruffians and her life was made a misery – an awful consequence which I did genuinely regret.’
What Johnson means is that gangsters threatened and intimidated the poor woman in the hope that she would hand over a cut of the newspaper’s cash. Or else.
Rooney was crucified. The Sunday Mirror’s headline, ‘I CONFESS’, set out the soccer star’s abject apology: ‘Foolish as it now seems…’
Johnson, in his book, says that the admission was a great relief for his team because it appeased the newspaper’s lawyers, assuring them that they were doubly safe in publishing the story. Rooney had to plead guilty. He had been caught, red handed, unzipped, twice. He was only an idiotic seventeen-year-old lad at the time, and who among us hasn’t done things we were ashamed of when we were that age?
However, Rooney could have held his hands up and fired back. What, to me at least, seems odd is the absolute submission by the Rooney camp. Where was the fight from Rooney, Stretford or Ian ‘Mad’ Monk? There was no pointing out that the people who ran the brothel had broken virtually every rule in the book: flogging their CCTV tapes to the highest bidder; no mention of the likely connections to organised crime; no mention that the Sunday Mirror’s money might have ended up in the hands of organised criminals in order to secure the tapes; no mention of the possibility of blackmail.
‘Publish and be damned’ was Wellington’s terrific response to a sex sting by the nineteenth-century courtesan and blackmailer Harriette Wilson. Why did Team Rooney just put up their hands and meekly accept the slaughter?
In his book Johnson sets out what was going on behind the scenes. Once the deal had been secured with ‘Blondie’, his editor, Tina Weaver, was negotiating with Monk about how to play the story, convincing the Rooney camp that there was no point in taking out an injunction against it. Johnson’s handsome plaudit to Roo’s PR man – ‘Ian Monk is among the best in the world’ – is very kind. But Monk’s past record on Fleet Street is not wholly without blemish. Monk – a slab-sized man sporting a bouffant hairdo, looking like a Walnut Whip in human form – has already popped up in this narrative complaining to me about the ‘crap’ services of his own client’s law firm, Peter Carter-Ruck, when the porn baron Richard Desmond brushed against the Gambino crime family.
But there’s more. Monk fell from a state of grace in 1996, when he was deputy editor of the Daily Express. For reasons best known to itself, the paper was extremely keen to lay its hands on a copy of Allan Starkie’s book Fergie: Her Secret Life, which critics roughly summarised as a load of old bollocks about a royal trout toe-sucking a bald American. The Daily Mail had bought up the British serialisation rights and Monk was charged with doing a spoiler for the Express.
The Express duly ran a spoiling piece on the travails of the former Duchess of York, containing the gist of the wretched book. Just before the Mail’s serialisation – ‘the book Fergie tried to ban’ – and the Express’s counter-attack appeared, a woman telephoned The Sun, offering to sell a bootleg copy. She claimed that she was somehow connected to the book’s Finnish printers and told Charlie Rae, The Sun’s right royal correspondent, she had a copy which she was willing to sell for £5,000. The Sun declined and contacted the publisher, Michael O’Mara, to tip him off. O’Mara immediately telephoned the cops, who arranged to meet the ‘Finnish’ woman at Heathrow and run an undercover sting against her, claiming that they were journalists. Two proof copies of Mr Starkie’s book were found in a holdall. They nicked ‘Miss Finland’ on suspicion of ‘theft and handling stolen property’ – only to discover that her real identity was Anita Monk, wife of Ian, the deputy editor of the Express.
The question that dominated all the milk bars of Fleet Street that night, given that the Fergie book was one of the most closely guarded manuscripts on the planet, was: who had given a bootleg copy to Anita Monk, so that she could sell it on to The Sun?
Who could it have been?
Eh?
The Crown Prosecution Service dithered, but later dropped charges against Mrs Monk. The Express and their deputy editor parted company. According to Private Eye, Monk had nobly told colleagues that he had no idea what his wife was up to and he heaped all the blame on her.
As far as Graham Johnson and the Sunday Mirror were concerned, Monk did exactly the right thing in managing the damage of the brothel allegations. He negotiated the capitulation, raised the white flag, sounded the retreat and the circling piranhas closed in. The boy from Croxteth received a savage monstering from all the newspapers that had been hosing him down with treacle only a few weeks before. To make everything worse, it was close season, and he couldn’t knock in a few goals to make things better. He couldn’t even knock a ball around on the back streets of Crocky because his foot was still in a protective boot after his metatarsal break. And he couldn’t be seen in public in Crocky because he would be crucified by Everton fans.
But the worst was yet to come. Rooney’s ruin was being tolled.
‘DON’T FANCY YOURS MUCH WAYNE – REVEALED: PVC GRAN HE BEDDED IN BROTHEL’ was the tabloid front page from hell, running the Wednesday after Johnson’s scoop on Sunday. The Sun’s Julie Moult had tracked down one of lucky Wayne’s conquests and had splashed a photograph of the glamorous lady of the night.
Or not, as the case may be.
The story was not much more than an extended caption, announcing to the world ‘the haggard hooker’ who dressed in PVC to bonk Wayne Rooney. Sun readers were told that the 48-year-old gran – named Trisha but known in the trade as the Auld Slapper – was seen with dyed black hair and a king-sized fag dangling from her mouth; in shapeless tracksuit bottoms, the £45-an-hour prostitute looked anything but tasty. The paper summarised that Trisha had caught the millionaire’s eye by squeezing into a PVC catsuit. She rubbed Rooney’s face in her boobs, then led him to a back room for sex.
The paper quoted ‘an acquaintance’ – that’s even less reliable than ‘a friend’ – who said that she was well known in the business as the Auld Slapper. Apparently, in the prime of her youth, Trisha had been ‘quite a looker’, but Old Father Time was inevitably getting his act together and she had started using that celeb favourite Botox to reduce the wear and tear, to look nice – and because paying punters don’t always appreciate vintage editions. ‘But at the end of the day,’ added our acquaintance, ‘she’s still a gran and she shouldn’t be on the game.’
This was the face that launched a thousand chants – and it summed up something a little bit tacky about Wayne’s World. Far more than Johnson’s splash, The Sun’s follow-up got the biggest laugh in the national panto. The Auld Slapper story hits Britain’s schizophrenia about the tabloid press on the nail. We hate and fear them because they’re fickle, intrusive and have all the maturity of a spotty adolescent who is about to urinate on the bus shelter. But we love them, too, because every now and then they give us a story that mocks the rich, the comfortable, the bad, the silly or the just plain unlikeable. It seems fundamentally wrong and offensive to many people that someone like Wayne Rooney should have become so rich. But what does he do with his dosh? He spends it on a lady of pleasure whose allure is – how to put this in a gentlemanly way? – hard to capture. The joke reaffirms the great hope of ordinary people everywhere, that there is some righteous order to the world, that the bad will come to a bad end and that good will out. Rooney didn’t do anything wrong. He is not a real nasty baddie, but he had made a fool of himself and that was hilarious – and the circle of love–hate schizophrenia about the tabloids is complete.
But what did the lady herself have to say? The story was ‘wholly untrue’, said the woman The Sun said was the Auld Slapper. A year later, she sued for libel. ‘GRANDMOTHER IN LIBEL ACTION OVER CLAIM FOOTBALLER PAID HER FOR SEX’ was just one of the headlines covering what many expected to be the libel trial of the century. (It’s not very old, as centuries go.)
The papers reported the start of the legal battle of Patricia Tierney to clear her name of the charge that she had sex with Rooney at a Liverpool massage parlour. The nation smacked its chops and looked forward to a trial in which the plaintiff, a fifty-year-old grandmother of sixteen, was seeking to get thousands of pounds from The Sun because it accused her of sleeping with Wayne Rooney.
The thrust of Tierney’s case was that she claimed only to have worked at the massage parlour for three weeks as a part-time receptionist, and she never worked as a prostitute. The law, like the Ritz, is free to rich and poor alike. How could a working-class granny from Liverpool take on the paper with one of the biggest sales on the planet? The answer was ‘no win, no fee’.
Mrs Tierney had come to an arrangement with Liverpool solicitor David Kirwan. He wouldn’t get any money upfront, but if she were to win, then the wicked paper would not only have to pay his usual fees, but also a handsome ‘success fee’ on top for taking the risk of getting nothing if he lost. Before the trial came to court, I met up with Kirwan – a short, dapper, posh-ish Scouser – and took him out for dinner at the Frontline Club in London (motto: ‘All the women have a past; all the men have no future’) and listened to his passionate defence of the woman wronged as ‘the Auld Slapper’.
Kirwan later told me that the allegations had destroyed his ‘blameless’ client’s life and caused her grandchildren to be bullied. Earlier, he had set out his client’s case to the papers:
These utterly false and damaging allegations in The Sun have had a massive impact on my client’s life and that of her family. These dreadful allegations have left her on anti-depressants and barely able to set foot outside of her own home. Mrs Tierney is a married woman, mother of seven children and grandmother of 16. She is not a prostitute and has never been a prostitute, as The Sun alleged. The reality is that she worked part-time as a receptionist in the massage parlour for three weeks in August 2003 before leaving for another job. Since the allegations, she and her family have suffered endless abuse and name-calling.
The Sun newspaper has destroyed the life of a blameless woman in the reckless pursuit of a totally groundless story. Legal action has commenced against the newspaper and, if the case goes to trial at Liverpool High Court, Wayne Rooney will potentially be called as a witness. Since these allegations were first published in August 2004, Patricia Tierney has been through 12 months of hell. Every time the story is mentioned she is reduced to tears and is prevented from trying to reclaim her life and move on.
It was a moving statement by Kirwan. He clearly believed his client was telling him the truth. Otherwise, he would have been a mug to act on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis. In January 2007, the case came before Judge Christopher Clarke at Manchester High Court. For the ‘DON’T FANCY YOURS MUCH WAYNE’ story – and the rest of it – Mrs Tierney was claiming damages for defamation, aggravated damages and exemplary damages. The Sun’s counsel, Anthony Hudson, said that, if successful, she would press for £250,000 in damages while her solicitors, David Kirwan’s firm, would get their fees of between £250,000 and £500,000 – so The Sun would be up to £750,000 poorer. Nice work if you can get it.
Hudson boiled the whole thing down: ‘This is a very straightforward case. There is only one issue. Did the claimant work as a prostitute or not? If she did not, she wins. If she did, she loses.’
The bad news for Mrs Tierney was that The Sun had done a bit of digging and come up with serious dirt. Back in 2002, a creep had come to Diva’s, pretended he was a police officer and demanded sex on the house. The prostitute who dealt with the fake copper was Pat Tierney, then known as Trisha O’Neill, a previous married name. Trisha O’Neill/Pat Tierney had given a seventeen-page statement to Merseyside Police in May 2002, in which she admitted offering sex for £45 a go. She had stated: ‘My role was dual. On some days I would work as a receptionist. On other days I would act as a sex worker. My role would be to provide sexual services for clients.’ She described her ‘working clothes’ of a black thong and bra set – and told how on one night she had sex with five men for money.
It was a case of the curse of the black thong.
The moment solicitor David Kirwan and his team of barristers saw the ‘black thong’ statement, they knew they had trouble. Kirwan told me he confronted his client with the bad news, found her answers unconvincing and the whole team resigned, leaving Mrs Tierney to face the court on her own.
Breaking down in tears in front of the judge, Mrs Tierney asked for time to engage a fresh legal team. She bemoaned her fate and the horrors the case had brought on her: ‘It has destroyed my children, my grandchildren, my husband and myself. What I have done, I have had my reasons, but I did not deserve this. If it had not been Rooney, I would not be here.’
To be fair to Roo, he didn’t write the ‘DON’T FANCY YOURS MUCH WAYNE’ article, still less make the ‘black thong’ statement to the police. Hudson, for The Sun, argued that the case should be struck out immediately. Mrs Tierney had deliberately and knowingly engaged in fraudulent conduct, he said.
The judge went away, thought about it and fired both barrels at the Auld Slapper’s story. He dismissed the claim, telling Manchester High Court: ‘It was a claim conceived in falsehood and continued in deceit. The central plank of the claimant’s case – that she was not and never has been a prostitute and only worked as a receptionist – is rotten.’
The paper reported its triumph with sadistic glee: ‘SUN’S COURT VICTORY OVER ROONEY BROTHEL TART’, and boasted that it had won a historic legal victory after exposing the prostitute in the Wayne Rooney brothel libel case as a ‘LIAR’. It reported that Gran Patricia Tierney, fifty-two, had tried to swindle hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages from the paper, claiming she was just an innocent receptionist. She claimed her life had been ruined by a series of articles identifying her as a hooker known as the Auld Slapper in a Liverpool brothel Rooney used as a teenager. But, the paper said, she left court with a face like thunder after Judge Christopher Clarke heard new evidence proving she was a hooker – and ruled that the case should be struck out.
The Sun reported that its legal manager Tom Crone said that the final bill would be about £750,000. He said Tierney had a no-win, no-fee legal deal, which meant that even though she lost her claim the paper would not be able to recoup a penny in costs as she was in receipt of state benefits. On page eight, a leader stuck the boot in:
GREEDY tart Patricia Tierney pleasured Wayne Rooney for a few quid in a seedy Liverpool brothel. Then she tried to screw the Sun for £750,000, claiming we damaged her reputation by naming her. She insisted she was just a granny helping out at the desk. The case was thrown out because she confessed to police two years earlier that she was a whore. Now she risks jail for contempt of court. Serves her right.
There is something unnecessarily vicious about this leader – smashing the granny who lied – that is troubling. It was right that The Sun won the case, but the way they celebrated their victory makes you wonder, yet again, about the nature of the beast.
Thing is, I am tempted to believe her. She was clearly wrong to claim that she had never been a prostitute, but there’s no hard evidence that the Auld Slapper ever slept with Wayne Rooney. The point about prostitutes (and rent boys) as witnesses is that they are not reliable. If you are willing to sell your body for £45, then your word can’t really be relied upon. If a prostitute tells you ‘And, not only did I sleep with Wayne, but so did that grannie over there’, that’s just hearsay from about the worst possible source. Graham Johnson never put up any serious evidence in his original piece in the Sunday Mirror that Mrs Tierney had slept with Rooney; nor did The Sun a few days later. But by the time The Sun ran the ‘DON’T FANCY YOURS MUCH WAYNE’ story, Rooney had already been nailed by the ‘Charlotte – I shagged u’ billet-doux in July 2004 and again by the still from Diva’s CCTV tape plastered all over the front page of the Sunday Mirror the following month. He’d made a general confession to the Sunday Mirror about being a fool and visiting prozzies. That confession made, Rooney’s reputation was a wide-open goal, just waiting to be David-Mellored. There was no dividend in Rooney going around denying he’d had sex with ‘the Auld Slapper’ – no one would believe him.
Or her. I might be quite wrong about this but my view is that if a lady, whoever she is, chooses to say that she has not had sex with Wayne Rooney then, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, we should give her the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, gallantry in England will be dead.
Of the two – The Sun or the Auld Slapper – who do you believe?
You decide.
Meanwhile, the love story of Roo and Coleen was under massive attack. The tabloids seemed ever so keen to promote a divorce – of a kind – between Roo and Coleen. The two families appeared to divide, a little, the Rooneys uneasily defending the fallen soccer hero – ‘he was just a lad when this happened’ – the McLoughlins tight-lipped but in private seething with anger about his betrayal of ‘our Coleen’.
The fault line running between the Rooneys and the McLoughlins heaved. In the eyes of the McLoughlins, Wayne Rooney stood exposed as a scoundrel who didn’t know where to put his todger. The Rooneys had to bite their lips. The champion was damaged goods and, yet again, they had to concede the high moral ground to the McLoughlins.
But for the couple themselves, the public humiliation must have been very tough. Coleen in her book recalls being driven to a family get-together and not being able to get out of the car. She watched everyone go in, all her family, but she didn’t want to face anyone.
To add to the couple’s miseries, as all of Fleet Street’s dogs of chaos were snapping at their gates over the whoring stories, Rooney finally decided to make the break with Everton and leave for Manchester United. The reaction was wholly predictable. Graffiti appeared on the walls of Crocky: ‘JUDAS’, ‘ROONEY SCUM’ and ‘DIE’.
All of that hate, and the man she loved was a national joke for sleeping with a PVC-clad granny, even if he hadn’t.
Coleen forgave him his foolishness. In her book, she makes it quite plain that what Wayne did was utterly wrong, but sets out the timeline that the newspapers had kind of buried. Quite simply, Wayne had been visiting the prostitutes two years before the story exploded on to the front pages – before Coleen was properly going out with him. ‘The truth is, and I’ve never said this before, at that time in our relationship I’d never even slept with Wayne.’
Reflecting on this ghastly experience in her book, she says that not only was she mortified, but the whole experience was surreal, otherworldly. She says that unless you’ve lived through something like this, it’s very difficult to understand, but adds, ‘The strangest thing is that even though it was a horrible time it was also the best of times.’ She writes, ‘The day before the story broke we’d been tipped off’ – presumably by Monk or Stretford reacting to calls from the Sunday Mirror – ‘that it was going to appear.’ Coleen’s parents and brother and sister were all vacationing in Florida at the time. Such was Coleen’s apparent distress that she couldn’t face telling Mum and Dad, so she asked her Auntie Tracey, with whom she was staying, to tell them for her. When they heard, ‘they wanted to come straight back home from holiday,’ she says. But Coleen begged them to stay out; there was, she told them, ‘nothing they could do’.
Back in Crocky, meanwhile, graffiti was sprayed ‘all over the walls near my mum’s house’ – the typical nasty stuff, inciting Judas references, threats of violence and revenge and the rest. To add to the intimidating atmosphere, Fleet Street’s finest were camped outside the front door of her parents’ house. So Coleen and Roo stayed at her auntie’s and, together, they found shelter from the hurricane of contempt. She says that, apart from their closest family members, ‘no one knew we were there. Wayne would go to training at Manchester United in the back of my Uncle Shaun’s little white van, then drive back home in secret.’ The hacks had no idea. For once, they’d been ‘had’ themselves.
This was a pretty impressive achievement by Team Rooney/McLoughlin. The tabloids would have been hunting in every posh hotel in the north-west, tracking big motors with smoked-glass windows. What they wouldn’t have thought of is Roo and Col snuggled up at her auntie’s, and him being chauffeured around Merseyside in the back of her uncle’s white van.
The hacks got close, once. The Sun reported one sighting of the man hiding in the van. The paper said that Rooney vanished after training but surfaced at 1 p.m. in a bizarre incident at an M62 service station. He emerged from the back of a van and jumped into a Merc driven by Paul Stretford. A surprised motorist told The Sun: ‘It was weird. I was just having a sandwich and the next second I’m looking at Rooney leaping out the back of a van.’
The millionaire hero who had everything was reduced to being smuggled around the north-west in the back of a van, on the run: the Crocky Pimpernel. It sounds like a bit of a laugh.
There’s one other thing. When Fleet Street has done its absolute worst and heaped news of your most embarrassing foolishness upon the nation, you feel rocked, broken, smashed up. You still get up, brush your teeth, smile at the things that make you smile. You’d still run into a burning house to save your loved ones, or the neighbour’s cat. You still have it in you to do good. It hurts but you say to yourself: ‘I made a mistake, but I’m not that bad.’ And that is some kind of comfort.
And another thing. Despite all the crap and, worse, the true stuff that had been spouted about them, Roo and Coleen stuck to each other and made it through to the other side – and that, in my book (which this is), is a small victory for the power of love.
Cue Jennifer Rush.