Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney brace for Wagatha Christie showdown at the High Court

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Rebekah Vardy had ‘no choice’ but to sue Coleen Rooney for libel to ‘vindicate her reputation’, her barrister told the High Court today as the £3million ‘Wagatha Christie’ trial finally got underway. 

Both WAGs sat 10ft apart on the front row of the courtroom, with Coleen, 36, accompanied by former England star Wayne, while Rebekah, 40, was without her Leicester City striker husband, Jamie, 35. 

Introducing the case, Rebekah’s barrister, Hugh Tomlinson QC, said his client ‘had no choice’ but to bring the libel claim against Coleen Rooney to ‘establish her innocence and vindicate her reputation’. 

He said Rebekah and her family had been ‘subjected to abuse and threats’ over the accusations, including being ‘jeered and heckled at football matches’ and ‘made the butt of endless jokes’. 

The WAGS have been at war since October 2019 after Coleen accused Rebekah of leaking ‘false stories’ about her private life, before claiming that she uncovered the culprit after carrying out a social media ‘sting operation’.

Coleen publicly claimed her fellow footballer’s wife shared three fake stories she had posted on her personal Instagram with The Sun, a claim Rebekah vehemently denied – leading her to launch the costly libel action. 

Today, Coleen walked into court wearing a plastic boot after fracturing her leg during a fall at her home in March, followed 30 seconds’ later by Rebekah, who was accompanied by two security guards. 

Both women are expected to give evidence in court, as well as Wayne himself. 

Coleen is believed to have agreed for a Netflix documentary to be filmed around her side of the case – reflecting the intense public interest in the proceedings. 

Among the developments at today’s sensational Wagatha Christie showdown –  

Rebekah’s barrister says she ‘had no choice’ but to bring the libel claim against Coleen to ‘establish her innocence and vindicate her reputation’;He tells court she has been ‘jeered and heckled at football matches’ and ‘made the butt of endless jokes’ since the allegations emerged; Called ‘an evil rat face b****’ on social media, and that posts went on to say she ‘should die’ as well as saying ‘her baby should be put in an incinerator’;Coleen’s famous Instagram sting was not a ‘careful investigation’ that produced ‘irrefutable’ evidence as she suggested, Rebekah’s barrister adds; Mrs Justice Steyn grants an 11th-hour appeal by Coleen’s lawyers to introduce evidence from a new witness, FA liaison officer Harpreet Robertson;

At the heart of the dispute are three ‘fake’ stories which Coleen maintains that she posted on her personal Instagram stories as she attempted to discover who was leaking information about her and her family.

These were about Coleen claiming that she was travelling to Mexico to find out about gender selection, making a return to TV and flooding taking place at her new home. All three stories later appeared in The Sun.

In a bid to smoke out the culprit, Coleen said she had altered the privacy settings to make the posts visible to just one person’s account – Rebekah’s.

In a famous post identifying the culprit, Coleen wrote: ‘I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.

‘It’s ………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.’

Addressing the Instagram post, Rebekah’s barrister, Mr Tomlinson, told the High Court today: ‘The allegation in the post was and remains false: Mrs Vardy had not leaked information about Mrs Rooney or her friends and family to the Sun newspaper from her private Instagram account.

‘Mrs Rooney did not have the ‘irrefutable’ evidence that she claimed to have had: her so-called ‘careful investigation’ was nothing of the sort.

‘If anyone had been leaking information from Mrs Rooney’s private Instagram this was not done with Mrs Vardy’s knowledge or approval.’

He continued: ‘Mrs Vardy made strenuous but unsuccessful attempts to settle the case but the post was not taken down.

‘As result, Mrs Vardy had no choice but to bring this libel action to establish her innocence and vindicate her reputation.’

The court previously heard that Rebekah’s agent and friend Caroline Watt’s phone fell into the sea after a boat she was on hit a wave before further information could be extracted from it in August 2021.  

Today, Mr Tomlinson said Rebekah ‘has no personal knowledge’ of the incident and ‘all she knows is what has been said by Ms Watt’.

‘It has not been suggested that Mrs Vardy had any involvement with this and it cannot possibly be relied on as evidence of wrongdoing by Mrs Vardy,’ he said. 

Mr Tomlinson claimed Rebekah knew Coleen was ‘posting fake stories’ to see if they would be leaked to the media. 

‘She did not directly leak any information from Mrs Rooney’s private Instagram account to The Sun, nor did she do so indirectly by ‘approving or condoning’ anyone else to do so on her behalf,’ he said. 

He said that the ‘candid’ WhatsApp messages previously heard in court between Mrs Vardy and her agent Caroline Watt show that while ‘from time to time they did discuss ‘leaking’ information to the press’ only one post is mentioned, in circumstances where journalists already knew the information.

Mr Tomlinson continued: ‘Furthermore, it is plain from the WhatsApp exchanges that Mrs Vardy was aware that Mrs Rooney was posting fake stories in order to see whether anyone would leak them, as well as the fact that she had previously been a suspect.

‘She, like Mrs Rooney, believed that someone was leaking information from Mrs Rooney’s private Instagram but didn’t know who it was and thought it must be her PR as she couldn’t see why anyone would be ‘arsed with selling stories on her’.’  

The court heard Rebekah had suffered ‘enormous distress and upset’ over the allegations.

Mr Tomlinson continued: ‘The fact that the parties are each married to well-known footballers has led to this action being trivialised in some media coverage as ‘WAG wars’.

‘The information alleged to have been leaked was, as Mrs Rooney admitted at the hearing on April 29, 2022, low value gossip.

‘Nevertheless, the impact of the post on Mrs Vardy was far from trivial. It has – as was inevitable given Mrs Rooney’s public profile and the sensational nature of the allegation made – been republished in the national media, and on social media on many thousands of occasions, to many millions of readers.

‘Although the media, as they are entitled to do, have turned this case into an entertainment it is not, from Mrs Vardy’s point of view, entertaining.

‘It has been, and continues to be, deeply upsetting in circumstances where she was not the person who leaked information about Mrs Rooney. Mrs Vardy needs to clear her name in order to ever be given a chance to move on from this horrendous episode.’

He added that it was ‘obvious that Mrs Vardy has suffered, and continues to suffer, enormous distress and upset as a result of its publication’. 

‘As a result of the post, Mrs Vardy and her family were subjected to abuse and threats. She was jeered and heckled at football matches and was the butt of endless jokes and further accusations,’ he said. 

Mr Tomlinson said Coleen accepted her post was defamatory of Rebekah but denied that it caused ‘serious harm’ and her ‘main defence’ was that it was true.

He said she relied on ‘her so-called ‘sting operation’ which led to her being dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’ by the media’.

In an 11th-hour application, before the case proper got underway, Rebekah’s barrister Mr Sherborne asked Mrs Justice Steyn for permission to introduce a witness statement from Harpreet Robertson, who was a family liaison officer for the Football Association during the Euro 2016 and World Cup 2018 international football tournaments.

Mr Sherborne said the statement was ‘responsive’ to evidence in Rebekah’s statement that at the Euros in 2016, where she first got to know Coleen, her friends sat behind Coleen because they were the ‘nearest seats available’.

The barrister said in court documents: ‘In fact, Ms Robinson explains that this is untrue.

‘Ms Robinson recalls the seats reserved for (Rebekah) were seats 20-25 of the fifth row, while (Coleen) was correctly sat in seats 1-6 of the eighth row.

‘The seats behind (Coleen) were reserved for Ms Robinson and security, and when she asked them to move the guests refused, in abusive terms.’

Mr Sherborne told the court Rebekah had introduced this evidence into her witness statement to ‘suggest that from the outset she was friendly and respectful to Coleen’. 

He added: ‘That goes to her motive for leaking information – she, of course, denies that.

‘We say this is a constant theme of her witness statement that she was friendly and kind to Coleen, and was therefore unlikely to leak anything.’

Mr Sherborne said Ms Robertson’s statement also ‘addresses the fallout from (Rebekah’s) orchestration of the photograph outside the restaurant in St Petersburg during the 2018 World Cup’.

Hugh Tomlinson QC, representing Rebekah, said the bid to introduce the evidence of Ms Robertson was ‘hopeless’ and ‘wholly misconceived’.

He said the issues it tackled were ‘very, very remote’ from those in the libel case, and that Ms Robertson’s position had been known about by Mrs Rooney’s legal team for a year.

Mr Tomlinson said Ms Robertson’s evidence was therefore not ‘a bolt of lightning from the blue’, adding that it was ‘utterly worthless’ as some of it was based on what she was told by an unnamed member of the touring party.

‘It is a hopeless application that should not have been made and is a waste of the court’s time,’ Mr Tomlinson said.

The judge ruled that the introduction of the witness, even at such a late stage, would not prejudice the case and granted Coleen’s application.