Coleen Rooney has suffered a serious setback in her legal battle with Rebekah Vardy, after a high court judge refused to grant permission to add Vardy’s former agent to the legal proceedings.
Rooney’s lawyers had attempted to bring Caroline Watt into the “Wagatha Christie” case, alleging she misused Rooney’s private information and worked in cahoots with Vardy to leak stories to the Sun.
However, Mrs Justice Steyn refused the request to add Watt on the basis that the application had been made too late and would delay the main libel trial by up to a year, which would be unfair on Vardy.
This means the full trial – due to take place in May – is now likely to hinge on whether Rooney can prove it was Vardy who personally leaked stories to the Sun, as opposed to another individual acting on her behalf.
The judge did agree to let Rooney’s lawyers search WhatsApp messages between Vardy and Watt and to make a request to Instagram for relevant data. However, the judge refused Rooney’s request for details of any payments and messages from Sun journalists to Vardy and Watt.
The judge’s 25,000-word ruling followed two days of hearings at the high court last week, where some of the UK’s most expensive lawyers battled over which WhatsApp messages should be admissible evidence, who exactly called whom a “nasty bitch”, and how a mobile phone containing potential evidence was accidentally dropped into the North Sea. The case is due to go to a full trial in May.
Despite repeated pleas by judges for both women to settle the case, neither side has been willing to back down. The total costs have run into millions of pounds – dwarfing any likely financial damages that may be awarded at the end of the case.
The complete collapse in the relationship between the two women began at the end of 2019, when Rooney ran a sting operation to identify who had been leaking stories from her private Instagram to journalists at the Sun newspaper. This led Rooney, the wife of the Derby County manager Wayne Rooney, to make the now-infamous accusation: “It’s……… Rebekah Vardy’s account”.
Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy, strongly denied she was the individual leaking stories to the Sun and responded by suing Rooney for libel over the accusation. More than two years later, the case continues to wind its way through the court system, with ever more excruciating details being revealed to the public.
An earlier ruling in the case found that the meaning of Rooney’s post was that Vardy was herself personally leaking stories to the Sun. As a result, any libel trial could hinge on proving who – if anyone – was using Vardy’s Instagram account to obtain and leak information to the Sun. Rooney’s representatives told the court that if Vardy won her claim on the basis that she was not the specific individual who leaked the information to the Sun, then Rooney would be left without “vindication”.
Last week’s hearings turned the spotlight on Watt, Vardy’s long-term agent, with the court hearing the pair discussed Rooney and whether to leak material to the media. It was told the duo described Rooney as a “cunt” in private WhatsApp messages, had an ongoing financial relationship with the Sun, and discussed providing stories to the newspaper’s journalists.
The court heard Vardy and Watt had discussed a post on Rooney’s private Instagram when her car had been damaged in January 2019. Vardy told Watt she “would love to leak those stories”.
The case has been plagued with issues around lost evidence. Shortly after Rooney’s lawyers asked to search Watt’s mobile phone for potential information, the agent accidentally dropped the device into the North Sea from the side of a boat when it was hit by a wave. Although the rest of her iPhone’s contents were backed up on iCloud, the WhatsApp messages were not.
Data from Vardy’s WhatsApp messages to Watt was also accidentally deleted during the process of uploading it to her solicitors. Vardy’s own digital forensics expert described what occurred as “somewhat surprising” but said it was the possible result of “an unusual combination of actions or events”.
The laptop used by Vardy during the crucial period also “no longer functions”, while messages between Rebekah Vardy and the Sun journalist Andy Halls also appear to have been deleted.
