Rebekah Vardy has lost her “Wagatha Christie” defamation case against Coleen Rooney over a viral social media post. Vardy, wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, took Rooney, wife of England record goalscorer Wayne Rooney, to court after she was accused of providing the media with personal information about Colin Rooney. It was after Rooney had organized an elaborate sting operation to find out who was spreading stories about her private life. Judge Karen Stein said in a written decision Friday that Rooney’s claim was “substantially true.” Stein said it was possible that Vardy’s agent, Caroline Watt, had passed on personal information to The Sun newspaper and that “Ms Vardy was aware of and condoned this behaviour”. The trial was named Wagatha Christie after the term used by the British press to refer to footballers’ wives and girlfriends — WAGs — and Agatha Christie, a popular author of crime novels. Rooney said she posted a series of fake stories about herself on Instagram in order to find out who was leaking information about her, preventing everyone but one person on her account from seeing the posts. When the stories hit the press, Rooney posted a message about the source of the leak in October 2019 announcing: “It’s………. Rebecca Vardy’s account.” Vardy has strongly denied leaking the information and is suing for defamation “to prove her innocence and vindicate her reputation,” her lawyer Hugh Tomlinson said. She said Vardy had suffered “widespread hostility and abuse” after Rooney accused her in a post to nearly 2 million social media followers. The case sparked a media frenzy during seven days of hearings as the two women went to court, along with their husbands, despite being urged by judges and legal experts to compromise. The case is said to have cost each side more than £1 million in legal fees. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
