Step aside Line of Duty, because ‘Wagatha Christie’ is the latest crime drama to capture the nation.
The Coleen Rooney/Rebekah Vardy scandal provided top notch gossip and quality meme content, but I want to draw your attention to the unsung hero of celebrity public statements: the Notes app.
If you’re unaware of the story I’m referring to, let me congratulate you on having a life before I briefly fill you in.
On Wednesday, Coleen Rooney released a public statement, which explained that she suspected that someone from her inner circle was leaking stories about her to the press.
Coleen had posted fake stories to her private account to see if they made their way into the papers. They did, and through process of elimination, she discovered the identity of the culprit.
In the most dramatic overuse of ellipsis I have ever seen, Coleen revealed that the leak came from ‘……….Rebekah Vardy’s account’.
To give an anthropological observation on the Rooney drama, the statement wasn’t given through a legal team or PR agency, but via the very modern method of a screenshot of her Notes app.
Once a tool for writing innocuous grocery lists, it is now synonymous with some of the most infamous public statements.
The 140-character limit on Twitter forced public figures to look elsewhere for lengthy announcements, and the Notes app stepped up to the plate and has become the preferred method of submitting evidence to the court of public opinion.
Gone are the days when notes were written on the back of receipts, the envelope of an unopened bill or – heaven forbid – in a notebook. Instead, our mobile phones hold our deepest darkest secrets and the inner workings of our weird little minds.
My phone notes are a concoction of drunk ideas, contextless musings and messages to ex-boyfriends that they will never read.
Sometimes a journal, sometimes a to-do list, but mostly a collection of late-night jottings I don’t understand. I will never really know the meaning behind my 24 July entry at 3.05am titled ‘Do. Do-do, do-do (whispers)’ – and that’s probably a good thing.
But when it comes to public figures, among the confidential detritus are notes curated for the attention of the world.
The app programmers could only have dreamed that their software would be used to make such important announcements – the joy of a pregnancy, the sadness of a resignation or my personal favourite: the shame of a public apology.
Dear Internet, pic.twitter.com/42OCDBhiWg
— Logan Paul (@LoganPaul) January 2, 2018
The past couple of years have given us such classic apologies such as ‘The Ja Rule Fyre Fest Fiasco’, Lena Dunham’s ‘I Promise I’m Still a Feminist’ f*ck-up and Logan Paul’s ‘I Didn’t Think Filming A Dead Man Was Insensitive #subscribe’.
Such pleas have become so commonplace that the Notes app should come with a Microsoft Word-style paperclip assistant to guide the rich and famous: ‘It looks like you’re making a public apology, how can I help?’.
Although Rooney’s statement was far from an apology, it utilises the same medium which, from a PR perspective, makes it sound all the more genuine and heartfelt. It makes it more ‘human’ with that ‘she’s just like us’ appeal.
My guess is that a PR team probably helped draft the message. It cleverly avoids directly accusing Mrs Vardy, stating that is was her account that was responsible for passing on information rather than Rebekah herself and therefore avoiding a potentially messy libel case.
Vardy responded with, you guessed it, another Notes app screenshot.
Written in a font familiar to those who follow celebrity news, she opens her statement with ‘As I have just said to you on the phone…’ which leads me to believe that either Rooney suffers from short-term memory loss or what’s about to follow is all for our benefit.
She goes on to explain that other people have had access to her Instagram account over the years, (widening the suspect pool), she doesn’t need the money (lack of motive) and that she’s currently heavily pregnant (compassionate grounds). She ended it with an emoji: the cornerstone of any relatable public statement.
My hot take on the story is thus: it’s probably quite easy to hack an Instagram account and hackers have done a lot worse for a lot less, so as compelling as the drama may be, an immoral technophile could be to blame.
There is one great irony to this scandal and it involves the newspaper in question. It retracted the false stories it had printed and missed out on the exclusive as Coleen went public on her own.
The only money-making scoop left is the confirmation of the true identity of the leak, which would mean betraying the informant.
Something tells me the journalist in question won’t be revealing their sources anytime soon, but perhaps they’ve already prepared a statement just in case………. somewhere in their notes.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/11/the-unsung-hero-of-celebrity-public-statements-the-notes-app-10897431/
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