Rebekah Vardy has lost her ‘Wagatha Christie’ defamation case against Coleen Rooney, in a dramatic self-inflicted legal defeat that leaves her reputation in tatters.
Three years ago, Rooney carried out a “sting” operation to find out who was leaking stories from his private Instagram account to Sun reporters. Rooney identified the culprit with the now infamous words: “It was Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Vardy flatly denied passing information to the Sun and sued Rooney for defamation in a bid to restore his reputation, leading to a multi-million pound high court case in May.
On Friday, Judge Steyn ruled that Vardy’s defamation claim had failed, meaning it was all for naught.
Bringing the case meant that Vardy, the wife of Leicester City footballer Jamie, endured days of painful cross-examination in front of the world’s media at the High Court in central London. This covered everything from her history of selling kiss-and-tell stories to tabloids about singer Peter Andre, allegations that she had leaked details of her husband’s relationship with teammates and her own record of transmitting information to the Sun. Instead of clearing his name, the case has left him nursing a nasty defeat and a tarnished reputation.
Coleen Rooney leaves the court during the trial. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
During the seven-day trial, the court heard about sickening personal WhatsApp messages sent by Vardy against Rooney, details of his intention to sell a story about a drink-driving arrest involving Chelsea footballer Danny Drinkwater to the Sun, and their attempts to change the situation. blames the Rooney leaks on his own former agent Caroline Watt.
In particular, there was widespread mockery in court of the loss of potentially crucial evidence by Vardy and those around him. In one case, WhatsApp messages saved on a phone were lost after the device was dropped on the side of a ship in the North Sea shortly after a request was made to retrieve it. Vardy’s copy of the same messages was lost while being backed up. Other files also disappeared, leading Rooney’s lawyers to invoke a legal precedent from 1722 to argue that, in the absence of evidence, the judge should assume the worst.
Rooney’s legal team, the wife of ex-Manchester United footballer Wayne, admitted in court that they did not have a single smoking gun to definitively prove that Vardy was responsible for the leaks. However, they defended the claim on two grounds: first, that the allegation was true based on circumstantial evidence available to Rooney; and secondly, that it was in the public interest for Rooney to make the allegation against Vardy.
Because juries have been abolished for defamation trials in England and Wales, there was no instant verdict on who won the case when the hearings ended in May.
Vardy’s team had told the court her life had been made hell by Rooney’s public accusation, which left her open to widespread taunts, abuse on social media and negative chants when her husband played to football
His lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said his client must have been “very clever or very cynical” to have carried out the manual deletion of WhatsApp messages. He said it would be an “extraordinarily complicated conspiracy” to have erased all the evidence.
The case has become a major cultural talking point, with several television projects based on the court case currently in the works.