Three years ago Rooney carried out a “sting” operation to find out who was leaking stories from her private Instagram account to Sun reporters. Rooney identified the culprit with the now infamous words: “It was……… Rebecca Vardy’s account.” Vardy strongly denied giving information to the Sun and sued Rooney for defamation in a bid to restore her reputation, resulting in a multi-million pound high court case in May. On Friday, Ms Justice Steyn ruled that Vardy’s defamation claim had failed, meaning it was all for naught. The bringing of the case meant that Vardy – the wife of Leicester City footballer Jamie – endured days of harrowing confrontation in front of the world’s media at the high court in central London. This covered everything from her history of selling kiss-and-tell stories to tabloids about singer Peter Andre, claims she had leaked details of her husband’s relationship with his team-mates and her own record of passing information to the Sun. Instead of clearing her name, the case left her nursing an ugly defeat and a tarnished reputation. Coleen Rooney leaves court during the trial. Photo: Toby Melville/Reuters During the seven-day trial, the court heard about torturous private WhatsApp messages sent by Vardy against Rooney, detailing her attempt to sell a story about a drink-driving arrest involving Chelsea footballer Danny Drinkwater in the Sun and her efforts to shift the blame for the Rooney leaks to her own former agent Caroline Watt. In particular, there was widespread mockery in court over the loss of potentially crucial evidence by Vardy and those around her. In one case, WhatsApp messages held on a phone were lost after the device fell off the side of a boat in the North Sea shortly after a search request was made. Vardy’s own copy of the same messages was lost while in the backup process. Other records were also lost, prompting Rooney’s lawyers to invoke a legal precedent from 1722 to argue that – in the absence of evidence – the judge should bear the brunt. The legal team for Rooney, the wife of former Manchester United footballer Wayne, admitted in court that they did not have a single smoking gun to conclusively prove that Vardy was responsible for the leaks. However, they defended the claim on two grounds: first, that the allegation was true based on circumstantial evidence Rooney had in his possession. and secondly, that it was in the public interest for Rooney to charge Vardy. Because juries have effectively been abolished for defamation trials in England and Wales, there was no immediate verdict on who won the case when the hearings concluded in May. Vardy’s team had told the court her life had been made hell by Rooney’s public accusation, which left her open to widespread mockery, social media abuse and negative chants when her husband played football. Her lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said his client would have had to be “very clever or very cynical” to have taken to manually deleting WhatsApp messages. He said it would be an “extremely complex conspiracy” to delete all the evidence. The case has become a major cultural talking point, with several television projects based around the court case currently in the works.
