Rebekah Vardy, wife of Leicester City soccer player Jamie Vardy, arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice
(Picture: REUTERS)Rebekah Vardy has denied being the “Secret Wag” columnist for The Sun and accused Coleen Rooney of “revelling” in the Wagatha Christie tag as their High Court libel battle started on Tuesday.
However Vardy insists she has been falsely accused and is suing Rooney for libel, claiming her reputation has been trashed and she has been subjected to “horrendous” abuse at football matches and online.
Opening her case, Hugh Tomlinson QC aimed a broadside at Rooney’s claim that Vardy was the source of The Sun’s shortlived “Secret Wag” column, suggesting it may have been invented entirely rather than fuelled by true “insider” knowledge.
He pointed to a Secret Wag story about the Wagatha Christie battle which suggested Rooney had “played a blinder” and will “come out on top”.
“This is apparently a column written by Mrs Vardy”, Mr Tomlinson observed wryly. “Perhaps it’s said it is part of a subtle ploy on her part, trying to put people off the scent by attacking herself.
“That’s absurd.”
He continued: “The Secret Wag column doesn’t contain any private information at all.
“Far be it from me to criticise The Sun, but it’s a recycling of old material from the public domain”, he said.
“There are a few made up stories, generic material of people not named doing some things that are very bad, which sometimes does happen – not any of my clients.”
He said the column “reads like a journalistic invention, it reads like there is no such thing as a Secret Wag.
“Who knows? Mrs Vardy certainly doesn’t. She doesn’t know how the column is put together.
“She doesn’t have a relationship with Sun journalists that involves them revealing the inner most secrets of how they write their material. In the unlikely event that there is a real Secret Wag, it isn’t Mrs Vardy.”
The ‘Wags at War’ saga began when Rooney posted her infamous post on Twitter, revealing she had conducted an investigation into leaks from her private Instagram account and concluding with the words “It’s ……………. Rebekah Vardy’s account”.
Mr Tomlinson said the post, when Vardy was seven months pregnant, sparked “horrific” abuse and she was forced to sue for libel to restore her reputation.
“Someone on social media called her an evil rat face, a bitch, and said she should go on to die and her baby deserves to be put in an incinerator”, he said.
Decrying the fact the libel battle is being treated as “entertainment”, he said merchandise, t-shirts, and Christmas wrapping paper had been created “with Mrs Rooney as Wagatha Christie”.
He said it is a nickname “she appears to have revelled in - she copied on her mobile phone, we have recently discovered, the photographs people had done mocking her up as Agatha Christie and so on”.
In opening written submissions at the start of the trial, Rooney barrister David Sherborne said: “This is a case essentially about betrayal.”
He said High Court judge Mrs Justice Steyn must decide whether “it is Coleen Rooney that was betrayed by Rebekah Vardy because she knew Caroline Watt, her PR and close confidante, was leaking Mrs Rooney’s private information to The Sun and condoned this, as well as directly leaking information herself, or whether, instead, it is Mrs Vardy that was betrayed by Caroline Watt because she had leaked this information without Mrs Vardy knowing it and had lied to her by denying all along that she had leaked anything.”
Rooney insists her allegation that Vardy was behind the leaks is true and intends to call evidence to try to prove it.
Vardy accepts Ms Watt may have been behind leaks to the press about Rooney, but insists it is “not something she knew anything about”, the court heard.
Mr Tomlinson said Vardy had previously maintained that neither her nor Ms Watt had been the “leaker”, but since Ms Watt retracted her statement and withdrew from the case that position as changed.
“She doesn’t know what to think”, he said. “She accepts it’s possible Ms Watt was the source of some details of the stories or had some involvement in leaking information from Mrs Rooney’s private Instagram account.
“As Mrs Rooney must have known, as Mrs Vardy’s PR, Ms Watt had access to her Instagram account.
“If the position is Ms Watt was the source of the stories, that’s not something Mrs Vardy knew anything about and certainly wasn’t something she approved of or authorised Ms Watt to do.
“This doesn’t mean this is the collapse of her case – it actually makes no change to her case.
“It is, and always has been, her case that she didn’t leak Mrs Rooney’s information from her private Instagram account to The Sun, whether directly or using the agency of a third party.
“Previously she was able to say ‘I didn’t do it, Ms Watt didn’t do it, it must have come from someone else’. Now she is not sure of the second part.
“She is not able to say of her friend, she’s the leaker. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know whether Ms Watt was doing it without her knowledge.
“All she can tell the court is what she did and what she knew.”
Vardy is accused by Rooney of orchestrating a “conspiracy of deletion” of WhatsApp messages and potential evidence, said Mr Tomlinson, but she insists “there was no such campaign of deletion”.
“The reason there is no direct evidence against Mrs Vardy is because she didn’t do it”, he said.
Rooney, accompanied by husband Wayne, is sat on the front row at court, just a few feet from Vardy.
The trial continues and is expected to last seven days.
