Bryony Gordon's Mad World Podcast with Rebekah Vardy
Rebekah Vardy has spoken about overcoming a series of severe struggles, including childhood abuse, family abandonment and post-natal depression, before she met her husband, the England and Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy.
Speaking to Bryony Gordon for her award-winning podcast, Mad World, the 36-year-old mother-of-four detailed how she felt after the birth of her second child, Taylor, during a six-year relationship with footballer Luke Taylor, years before she met Vardy.
“It wasn’t until I had my second child, that I knew that something really wasn’t right with me. I was scared to take him near a window, because every time I took him near a window I could see him falling and I could see him on the floor, and it used to give me really bad panic attacks, anxiety, and then I started having visions and seeing things,” she said.
“[The visions were] really negative, nasty things that would wake you up in the middle of the night have cold sweats, wondering whether that was going to happen to your child, wondering whether you were capable of hurting your child.”
Known as ‘Becky’ to friends, Vardy went into detail about an early life defined by abuse, including sexual abuse she suffered when she was 13, and domestic abuse in early relationships.
“It’s ingrained in you, but unfortunately you take it into your future because you can’t erase it – it’s what happened to you,” she said of the abusive relationship. “It will always be with me, [so will] what I went through when I was a child.”
Now a frequent contributor to ITV’s Loose Women, Vardy met her husband in 2014, when she was working as a party planner. They have two children together, Sofia and Finlay.
Last year, Rebekah appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, and was one of several camp members accused of bullying radio presenter Iain Lee. Reflecting on her experiences, Vardy said she was “devastated” when she saw how events had been portrayed.
“I was genuinely devastated, I’m not a bully and I never have been a bully… I’m opinionated and there’s a fine line between having an opinion and taking that opinion too far. Personally I don’t think I could have said a lot worse,” she said, before declaring that she and Lee had since bonded over the “tough” readjustment to life outside camp.
“There’s no bad feelings, and in fact Iain and I have had quite a frank conversation about what we’ve been through when we came out, because we both found it really quite tough.
“We used to send each other messages like, ‘Do you feel like this today?’ It’s really hard, going from being so isolated with a group of people, then coming back into the real world having to deal with the negative media.”
