Coleen stands firm in ‘Wagatha Christie’ row
Footballer’s wife Rooney insists she was right to name celebrity allegedly caught selling her stories
COLEEN ROONEY has a c c use d Rebekah Vardy of “habitually” leaking stories to the press, arguing in court documents that naming and shaming her was “a legitimate matter of public interest”.
The 34-year-old wife of the former England striker Wayne Rooney, is set to face Mrs Vardy at the High Court next year as they lock horns in a £1 million libel battle.
The mother- of-four was dubbed “Wagatha Christie” after revealing that she spent five months investigating who had been selling stories about her to a tabloid newspaper before dramatically alleging that the culprit was Mrs Vardy, who is married to the Leicester City and England striker, Jamie Vardy.
Mrs Vardy, 38, protested her innocence and she is now suing Mrs Rooney whose defence was laid out in a 55-page document lodged at the High Court yesterday.
The papers include details of the spoof Instagram posts she published in a bid to snare the alleged traitor. The photographs Mrs Rooney posted as part of the sting, published for the first time, include one suggesting she was heading abroad to find out about “gender selection” for a baby and another claimed she was considering a TV opportunity in Australia. A third shows a bottle of white wine and a scrunched face emoji after Coleen described the trauma of a fictitious flooded basement.
Mrs Rooney claims she temporarily blocked all of her Instagram followers except for Mrs Vardy, meaning she was the only one who saw the posts.
A reporter from The Sun is said to have contacted Mrs Rooney’s PR representative about the gender selection story four months after it was posted.
The other two posts also ended up as stories in the tabloid, the document alleges.
Mrs Rooney told her 1.2 million followers that she had invented the tales in a bid to work out who was sharing stories. The court papers accuse Mrs Vardy of fostering a close relationship with several journalists and habitually passing on private information to promote herself.
They also claim that she is the writer behind The Sun’s “Secret Wag” column.
The defence papers state that Mrs Rooney’s post naming Mrs Vardy was a “legitimate matter of public interest”. They add: “The fact that information from her private Instagram account had been provided to and published in The Sun for millions of people to read was an issue which the defendant was forced to make public on her social media.
“Her post was necessary because the very public disclosure of her private information had continued despite previous warnings she had put out publicly that someone with access to her private Instagram account was providing this information to The Sun for it to publish. “No credible or verified ‘alternative’ explanation has been provided by the claimant as to how the defendant’s private information, which was shared only with her, could have been and was in fact given to The Sun.”
A spokesman for Mrs Rooney told The Daily Tele Telegraph: “Coleen has always been confident of her position, although she takes no pleasure in now having to set out in public court documents the reasons why.
“It remai remains a matter of deep regret to her that Rebekah seems determined to persist with court action despite Coleen’s offers of private mediation.”
Paul Lunt, Mrs Rooney’s solicitor, said: “Coleen has always said that this co could and should have been resolved face-to-face without the need for court proceedings.” Mrs Vardy’s representatives were contacted for a comment.