Rebekah Vardy is unable to disclose potentially crucial WhatsApp messages in the ongoing “Wagatha Christie” legal case because an IT expert has “forgotten the password” to the data.
Vardy is suing fellow footballer’s wife Coleen Rooney for libel after Rooney publicly alleged that Vardy leaked private information to the Sun. The wife of Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy strongly denies the claims made by the partner of the Derby County manager, Wayne Rooney.
Lawyers acting for Rooney want to force Vardy to disclose conversations with her agent, Caroline Watt, who they allege acted as a “conduit” who funnelled stories to journalists at the Sun. However, Rooney’s team said they have been frustrated by “a series of unfortunate events” while trying to access the messages.
Barrister David Sherborne, acting for Rooney, told the high court that Vardy had employed an external technology expert to help back up her mobile phone messages as part of the legal proceedings.
Unfortunately, the IT expert tasked with securing the material has since “forgotten the password which he used to encrypt the material”. Sherborne said this meant the messages could not be disclosed to Rooney’s lawyers ahead of a trial, leaving the legal team struggling to make their case.
Sara Mansoori QC, acting for Vardy, confirmed to the court there had been a “corruption issue” with the password required to access the data that had been on Vardy’s phone.
It is the latest data-retrieval issue to affect the long-running legal case. A previous high court hearing heard how Watt accidentally dropped her mobile phone off the side of a boat in the North Sea after Rooney’s lawyers requested to search it.
Rooney was dubbed “Wagatha Christie” after running an elaborate sting operation where she put fake updates on a private Instagram account and waited to see if they ended up as news stories.
The long-running legal case will revolve on whether Rooney can prove that Vardy was leaking information to the Sun. A key part of Rooney’s case is that Watt acted as a “conduit” for such stories, although her legal team recently failed in an attempt to formally add the agent to the legal proceedings.
On Wednesday the court heard that Watt is “in a fragile state and had been expressing serious concerns about giving evidence”. Hugh Tomlinson QC, acting for Vardy, said a consultant forensic psychiatrist had produced a report that concluded the agent was not fit to provide oral evidence at the high court trial.
Rooney’s lawyers insisted Watt was a “key witness” for the trial with “critical” evidence: “Ms Watt is now saying that she is too ill to attend court to be cross-examined on the events and allegations concerning her, although she was and is able to provide a lengthy witness statement about them, provided she is not questioned about it.”
They alleged the real reason Watt was reluctant to take the stand and give evidence was not her psychological state but that she has realised “her evidence is untrue and therefore she is scared of being tested upon it”.
Rooney achieved a partial victory on Wednesday after a judge ordered the owner of the Sun newspaper to disclose communications between Vardy, Watt and the Sun journalist Andy Halls to the legal teams. The judge said Halls was the author of one of the “so-called sting articles” featuring in the libel dispute and concluded that disclosure in relation to the journalist was “necessary” and “proportionate”.
She said she was “not persuaded” that legal tests were met to allow disclosure in relation to a further eight journalists at the Sun.
The case has already cost millions of pounds in legal fees but neither Rooney nor Vardy has been willing to settle, despite judges imploring them to reach a mediated outcome. Unless there is a last-minute change of heart by either side, the libel case is due to go to trial at the high court next month.
