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The Rebekah Vardy vs Coleen Rooney legal battle that has continued for 3 years finally appears to have been settled (The Mirror)
by Mick the Ram
The infamous “Wagatha Christie” row that dominated the UK press almost exactly three years ago, has finally been settled after a specialist costs court decided on a concluding figure for Rebekah Vardy to pay to Coleen Rooney.
The case had captured the imagination of the British public due to the fact that the two women were the wives of famous Premier League footballers: Jamie Vardy of Leicester City and ex-England captain and Manchester United legend, Wayne Rooney.
It was in 2019 that Mrs Rooney announced on Twitter that Mrs Vardy’s Instagram account was leaking posts from her private account to The Sun newspaper.
This led to Mrs Rooney being sued for libel, with the case coming to trial in London in May 2022, but at the end of July that year the court dismissed Mrs Vardy’s claim on the basis that Coleen’s statements were substantially true.
An initial 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs were ordered to be covered and it transpired that she had accumulated a legal bill totalling more than £1.8m, of which Mrs Vardy had agreed to pay £1.19m.
Mrs Rooney’s legal team wanted a further £315,000 in “assessment costs” and after much consideration, Judge Mark Whalan decided it was “reasonable and proportionate” for the additional sum to be £212,266, taking the total payment to just over £1.4m, including interest.
Agatha Christie couldn’t have created better story
The British tabloids had a field day with the legal battle, which gave them weeks of excellent content. The dispute and trial attracted such significant media attention due in the main to the fact that the two women are “WAG’S” – an acronym applied by the UK media to the wives and girlfriends of prominent British footballers.
The case took its nickname (Wagatha Christie) as a nod to the popular fiction writer, Agatha Christie, because of the steps taken by Mrs Rooney to investigate the source of the leaks to the newspaper.
She fabricated stories knowing that only Mrs Vardy had access to them and therefore was the only person able to pass the information onto the press.
Backed into a corner
Mrs Vardy responded by denying the claims and implying her Instagram account had been hacked, before commencing action to sue for defamation, almost out of a realisation that she had created an issue for herself and had no options left open to her.
She gambled that her lawyers could get her out of the mess she had only herself to blame for, but unfortunately for her the ruling went in favour of Mrs Rooney, with the judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, calling Rebekah Vardy’s version of events “manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence, evasive or implausible”.
Her name was in tatters and she was massively out of pocket.
Clutching at straws
The Vardy team claimed it was “unreasonable” for Mrs Rooney to use Stewarts, a London-based law firm, and that she should have sought one near where she lived in north-west England, but even that was flatly rejected by the judge.
“Defamation is still a specialist area and most of the firms who specialise in defamation are based in central London,” he said. It was he added: “a reasonable choice” to instruct a solicitor in central London, given the size of the claim and the “reputations at stake”.
Only had self to blame
Mrs Vardy’s barrister, Juliet Wells, had argued that Mrs Rooney was claiming “grossly disproportionate” costs, recommending they were capped at “no more than £100,000” as the original legal bill included costs to which she had “no entitlement”.
However, in written submissions from Mrs Rooney’s lawyers stated that Mrs Vardy was “the author of her own misfortune” and that she should “reflect upon her approach.”
Reap what you sow
The judge rejected Vardy’s claim that it had been unreasonable for Rooney to consult her barrister on 30 separate occasions, at a cost of nearly £500,000.
He said that Vardy’s conduct – in particular destroying evidence – “adds to the complexity” and “clearly justifies rates in excess of the guidelines” for the most experienced lawyers.
Ridiculous costs accumulated
Neither woman attended the remote hearing, with Judge Whalan declaring they “can both start to put this matter behind them”, adding that he was “generally happy” that the outcome represented a “commercially satisfactory conclusion for both sides.”
He did remark that there had been an “extraordinary expenditure of costs” by all parties involved in the case, before closing by saying: “I do mean it when I say that I hope that this is the end of a long and unhappy road.”
Should never have been allowed to get so far
The trial received international media coverage and has since been dramatised in stage and television adaptations.
It made compelling viewing, but most people agree that it should never have got anywhere near a courtroom.
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