‘Wagatha Christie’ High Court trial begins
Scene set for war of the Wags, with lawyer saying the libel battle is ‘essentially about betrayal’
The long-awaited court battle between footballers’ wives Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, nicknamed the “Wagatha Christie” case, got under way in London’s High Court yesterday. The defamation case stems from the alleged “leaking” of false stories about Mrs Rooney and her family to the tabloid press by Mrs Vardy. Mrs Vardy is attempting to prove that the accusation from Mrs Rooney, conducted over social media, was “profoundly distressing”.
IN THE long annals of British legal history, few whodunnits have been quite so eagerly anticipated.
Two and a half years in the making, the Wagatha Christie libel case finally got underway at the High Court yesterday, and for fans of a good thriller, it did not disappoint.
The cast of characters in court included Rebekah Vardy – wife of the Leicester City and England striker Jamie Vardy – and Coleen Rooney with her husband, Wayne Rooney, the current manager of Derby County FC and England’s record goal-scorer.
The issue at hand was whether Mrs Rooney, who is being sued by Mrs Vardy, was guilty of defaming her fellow “Wag” with an accusation that Mrs Vardy fed stories about the Rooneys to a tabloid newspaper.
The court was told that the libel battle is “a detective story” that is “essentially about betrayal”. The detective in the case is Mrs Rooney herself, who claimed to have used the social media site Instagram to smoke out the source of stories about herself and her family that appeared in The Sun newspaper.
She is defending herself on the basis that her claims that Mrs Vardy is the leaker are “substantially true”.
The stories at the heart of the case are that the Rooneys travelled to Mexico for gender selection treatment, that Mrs Rooney was in talks to join Strictly Come Dancing, and that the family’s Cheshire home was flooded in a storm.
The court heard that in October 2019 Mrs Rooney, 36, had carried out a “sting operation” and accused Mrs Vardy, 40, of being the source of the leaks.
In a post viewed by her millions of followers, she said: “It’s………..rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Mrs Vardy denies leaking the stories and found the accusation “profoundly distressing”, the court heard.
David Sherborne, Mrs Rooney’s barrister, told the court the leaks could only have come from Mrs Vardy or Caroline Watt, Mrs Vardy’s agent.
He said: “In essence, this is a detective story, and like any good detective story, you never find a person standing over the body with a smoking gun.”
He added: “If [Mrs Vardy] gave Ms Watt the gun and the bullets, told her where to target them, told her what was happening and when, that makes her just as responsible as the person who pulled the trigger. To use an analogy, it is like hiring a hitman or woman.”
He said there were, in text message exchanges between Mrs Vardy and Ms Watt, discussions of leaking other people’s private information.
Mrs Vardy, who arrived at court with a bodyguard, was called as the first witness in the case, and was confronted with a kiss-and-tell story from 2004. In the story, she had told the News of the World about an alleged sexual encounter with the singer Peter Andre, in which she compared his manhood to a “miniature chipolata”.
Mr Sherborne held up a printout of the article, asking Mrs Vardy if it was “respectful” of Mr Andre’s “right not to share this information” about their private encounter with the newspaper.
Mrs Vardy said it was a situation she was “forced” into by her ex-husband and that she “deeply regrets” giving the interview. The mother-of-five remained defiant on the stand, saying she is “not a leaker” and that she “has nothing to hide”.
She and Mrs Rooney, who arrived at court with a protective medical boot on one foot, sat several metres apart in court and avoided eye contact.
At the start of the hearing, Mrs Rooney’s legal team told the court there had been “widespread and significant destruction or loss of evidence” by Mrs Vardy in the build up to the proceedings, including messages being deleted and phones disappearing. The court has previously heard how Ms Watt’s mobile phone fell from a boat into the North Sea “within days” of a judge ordering that it be handed over, while Whatsapp messages on other devices could not be recovered.
The court heard that technology experts described the events as “somewhat surprising”. Mr Sherborne accused Mrs Vardy of carrying out the “manual deletion” of messages and that the failure to hand over evidence amounted to “the most extraordinary series of disclosure misfortunes”.
In legal documents lodged before the court, lawyers for Mrs Rooney said the timing of the phone falling into the North Sea “cannot be coincidental”, adding: “To borrow from Wilde, to lose one significant set of documents may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two, carelessness, but to lose 10? That must be concealment.”
Hugh Tomlinson QC, for Mrs Vardy, rejected the suggestion that evidence had been purposefully withheld, telling the court: “This is untrue. There is no campaign of deletion.”
He added: “The suggestion that there was some sort of conspiracy between Ms Watt and Mrs Vardy to destroy evidence is completely baseless.
“It’s a very well known and common feature in everyone’s life that from time to time electronic documents are lost for all kinds of reasons.”
Mrs Vardy’s legal team said Mrs Rooney had “revelled in” being nicknamed Wagatha Christie and shared posts of herself mocked up as her namesake, crime writer Agatha Christie.
The court heard that “on some occasions” Mrs Vardy authorised information to be passed to the press by her agent Ms Watt.
“A short sentence but an incredibly important one,” Mr Sherborne told the court. “Because we now have an admission that Mrs Vardy authorised Ms Watt to secretly pass on information to The Sun.”
The court heard that Ms Watt will no longer partake in the legal proceedings due to ill health and has withdrawn her witness statement, a development which Mr Sherborne described as a “very dramatic change in this case”.
Mr Tomlinson QC said his client once believed Ms Watt was not the source of the leaks as “she trusted her friend”, but he added: “The result of all these developments is that Mrs Vardy doesn’t know what to think. She accepts that it is possible that it may be that Ms Watt was the source of some or all of the stories.”
The hearing continues.