Rebekah Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, has lost her defamation case against Coleen Rooney. Phil Lewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Rebekah Vardy has lost her ‘Wagatha Christie’ defamation trial against Coleen Rooney over a viral social media post.
Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, took Rooney, the wife of England’s record goalscorer Wayne Rooney, to court after she was accused of providing the media with private information about Coleen Rooney. It came after Rooney had organized an elaborate sting operation to find out who was passing on stories about his private life.
Judge Karen Steyn said in a written judgment on Friday that Rooney’s allegation was “substantially true”.
Steyn said it was likely that Vardy’s agent, Caroline Watt, had passed private information to The Sun newspaper and that “Ms Vardy knew and condoned this behaviour”.
The trial was nicknamed Wagatha Christie after the term used by the British media to refer to footballers’ wives and girlfriends — WAG — and Agatha Christie, a popular writer of detective novels.
Rooney said she posted a series of fake stories about herself on Instagram with the goal of finding out who had been leaking information about her, preventing everyone but one person on her account from seeing the posts.
As the stories hit the press, Rooney posted a message about the source of the leak in October 2019 announcing: “It’s ………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Vardy strongly denied leaking the information and sued for defamation “to prove his innocence and vindicate his reputation”, said his lawyer Hugh Tomlinson.
He said Vardy had suffered “widespread hostility and abuse” after Rooney accused him in a post to his nearly 2 million social media followers.
The case sparked a media frenzy during seven days of hearings as the two women appeared in court, along with their husbands, despite judges and legal experts urging them to settle.
The case has reportedly cost each side more than a million pounds in legal fees.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.