And the Wagatha loser is... Rebekah Vardy
Footballer’s wife maintains judge ‘got it wrong’ as she loses high-profile libel trial and lands a £3 m legal bill
Rebekah Vardy yesterday lost her High Court libel case against Coleen Rooney and is now facing a legal bill of up to £3million. The wife of England and Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy remained defiant after the so-called “Wagatha Christie” case concluded, saying the judge had “got it wrong”. Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that Mrs Vardy, 40, had been “implausible”, “evasive” and had destroyed evidence as she tried to prove she was not the source of tabloid leaks about Mrs Rooney.
ANYONE who followed the Wagatha Christie libel trial will know that Rebekah Vardy is not a woman to go quietly.
Yesterday, after learning that she had lost her High Court battle against Coleen Rooney – and now facing a legal bill of up to £3million she remained characteristically defiant. The judge, she declared, had “got it wrong”.
Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that as a witness, Mrs Vardy, 40, the wife of England and Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, had been “implausible”, “not credible” and “evasive”.
The footballer’s wife, the judge said, had destroyed evidence as she tried to prove that she was not the source of tabloid leaks about Mrs Rooney.
Her reputation is now in tatters, over a case that she herself brought.
“I am extremely sad and disappointed at the decision that the judge has reached. It is not the result that I had expected, nor believe was just.
“I brought this action to vindicate my reputation and am devastated by the judge’s finding,” she said in a statement.
She noted that the judge had found in her favour on two ancillary points.
“But as for the rest of her judgment, she got it wrong and this is something I cannot accept,” Mrs Vardy said. She has 14 days to apply for permission to appeal. Mrs Vardy will also have to pay Mrs Rooney’s legal fees.
The case centred on a 2019 Instagram post in which Mrs Rooney revealed that she had turned sleuth to discover who was leaking her social media posts to The Sun.
The sting operation involved placing a number of fake stories – about seeking gender selection in Mexico for a fifth child, a flood in the basement of her Cheshire home, and plans for a TV career – in order to smoke out the culprit.
The post – viewed more than 30 million times on Twitter – ended with the big reveal: “It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account.” Mrs Rooney had secretly restricted access to some posts and Mrs Vardy was unaware that hers was the only account able to view them.
Mrs Justice Steyn found Mrs Vardy and her then agent, Caroline Watt, jointly responsible for the leaks.
The judge said it was “likely that Ms Watt undertook the direct act, in relation to each post, of passing information to a journalist at The Sun, but found that the claimant [Vardy] knew of, condoned and was actively engaged in this process.”
Whatsapp conversations pertaining to the case were due to be presented as evidence. But Mrs Vardy claimed that she had accidentally deleted them while trying to export them via her laptop – something a computer expert described as “impossible” – while Ms Watt claimed that she lost her mobile phone in the sea during a boat trip.
Mrs Justice Steyn said she considered neither of these losses to be accidental.
But the judge also said that Mrs Vardy was “genuinely offended” by Mrs Rooney’s post accusing her of wrongdoing.
“This is not because she was not involved in disclosing information from the private instagram account: I have found that she was,” the judge said.
“Rather, her indignation at the accusation flows, in my judgment, from a combination of factors. Mrs Vardy’s part in disclosing information to The Sun was, it seems to me, unthinking rather than part of a considered and concerted business practice.
“Consequently, there has been a degree of self-deception on her part regarding the extent to which she was involved, as well as a degree of justified resentment at the exaggerated way in which her role has, at times, been presented during the litigation.”
During her second day on the witness stand during the May trial, Mrs Vardy began to cry. Perhaps that was the moment she realised things were not going her way.
Cross-examination by Mrs Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne, had shown glaring inconsistencies in her evidence.
In one surviving Whatsapp exchange, Mrs Vardy and Ms Watt discussed Mrs Rooney’s pronouncement that someone she trusted had been selling stories about her. “It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me,” said Ms Watt. Mrs Vardy claimed that she had not read that message properly because she was watching Dancing On Ice.
Mrs Justice Steyn said in her judgment: “I find that it is, unfortunately, necessary to treat Ms Vardy’s evidence with very considerable caution.”
By contrast, Mrs Rooney was “an honest and reliable witness”.
Mrs Rooney, 36, released a statement saying: “Naturally, I am pleased that the judge has found in my favour with her judgment.
“I made constant efforts to avoid the need for such a public and drawn-out court case. But all of my efforts were knocked back by Mrs Vardy and her lawyers.
“I never believed it should have gone to court, at such expense, in times of hardship for so many people when the money could have been far better spent helping others,” said Mrs Rooney, whose husband has an estimated fortune of £93million.
The case illustrated the limits of social media privacy. Mrs Rooney had a public Instagram account with 900,000 followers, but maintained a private account on which she posted pictures and messages about her family life to around 300 friends and family members. Mrs Vardy’s barrister argued that they could have leaked stories.
The judge said Mrs Vardy was “genuine in her belief ” that other people were tipping off the press about Mrs Rooney and aggrieved because she thought she had been made a scapegoat.
Most legal experts agreed that the case had been a disaster for Mrs Vardy.
Matthew Gill, senior associate in media litigation at Howard Kennedy LLP, said: “Vardy has scored an embarrassing own goal.”
Matthew Dando, partner at Wiggin LLP, said: “It is hard to imagine a stronger judicial condemnation of her evidence. The judgment has dealt a crushing blow to her reputation, the very thing that the libel action was designed to protect.”
But Ayesha Vardags, who runs her eponymous firm, said: “There’s a lot being written about how Vardy did the wrong thing bringing this case – [that she] should just have issued a statement saying that lots of people have access to her account and she’s looking into it. Then it would all have gone away.
“But … nowadays, celebrities run their lives around Instagram and Twitter. Saying ‘no comment’ so as not to give a story oxygen isn’t really an option, because social media generates its own oxygen.” All publicity is good publicity, according to Ms Vardags – and Channel 4, inevitably, is turning the saga into a docu-drama.
‘I am devastated by the judge’s finding and cannot accept it’