Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah's Witnesses and Me, Channel 4, review ...

You can’t keep Rebekah Vardy down. Other WAGs humiliated in the High Court during the most mocked legal case in recent memory might have retreated to a life of Profumo-like good works out of the public eye. But here she is in Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me (Channel 4), relaunching herself as a serious person.

She certainly has a story to tell, startlingly at odds with her image. Vardy spent the first 15 years of her life as a Jehovah’s Witness, brought up to believe that “if I wasn’t perfect, I would die at Armageddon”. There was no Christmas, no birthday celebrations. She was bullied at school for her beliefs and the only security she knew was found at the Kingdom Hall. But when she was sexually abused – an ordeal that began at the age of 12 – Vardy claims that church elders blamed her and manipulated her into believing that she should not go to the police. The church denies her claims, one of many denials included during the course of this documentary.

This was not just a personal story, but a wider investigation into allegations against the church. A mother told a terribly sad story of her shy, anxious son becoming a Witness aged 19 after meeting a woman online. She claimed that he took up smoking to deal with his anxiety and, when he could not give up within the timeframe specified by the church – Jehovah’s Witnesses consider smoking to be a sin – he was “disfellowshipped” and shunned by the community he had thought of as friends. He took his own life, leaving a diary entry in which he wrote: “If I stay alive, I’ll carry on letting Jehovah down.” The church would not comment on the case but denied in a statement that their beliefs or the “so-called shunning” could contribute to suicide.

Vardy said she was seeking more information about her own story. She cannot ask her mother, because the two are estranged. The church would not help her – towards the end she visited its vast UK headquarters and rang the buzzer, only to be turned away. This sort of thing is always a cheap shot in documentaries, because no organisation in its right mind would allow a film crew to walk in off the street.

There was little here to cause surprise – the restrictive aspects of the Jehovah's Witnesses are well-documented. Allegations of covering up sexual abuse have been explored in-depth elsewhere, including an award-winning, year-long Telegraph investigation. It was an interesting insight into a secretive sect, but the film functioned best as a psychological study – we can now view Vardy’s behaviour as an adult in light of her awful childhood. It explains a lot.

And as a presenter, Vardy isn’t half bad: listening thoughtfully to other people’s stories and asking insightful questions. Could she have a new career in TV? Don’t rule it out.