Lawyers in ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel case criticised by judge

Lawyers representing the wives of two former England footballers have been criticised by a High Court judge for disclosure failings in a bitter libel battle over alleged leaks to a national newspaper.

Rebekah Vardy, wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, is suing Coleen Rooney, who is married to England’s record goalscorer Wayne Rooney, after she was accused of leaking false stories about Rooney’s private life to The Sun following a ‘sting operation’.

Rooney is defending the claim on the basis that an Instagram post accusing Vardy of being responsible for the leaks – which saw her dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’ – was true. A seven-day trial is due to take place in May.

In a ruling on the latest round of the case today, The Honourable Mrs Justice Steyn was critical of both Vardy and Rooney’s legal teams and questioned the ‘incomprehensible lack of progress’ in requesting relevant data from Instagram.

The judge said Rooney’s solicitors’ approach to seeking disclosure from named custodians, ‘in particular asking these individuals to search by reference to a much more limited number of search terms than those agreed with the claimant … can fairly be criticised’.

She also rejected Rooney’s application to add a claim for alleged misuse of private information against Vardy’s agent Caroline Watt to the proceedings as it was brought too late, adding that a letter sent by her lawyers to Watt requesting documents and information was ‘intimidatory’.

At a brief consequentials hearing today, Rooney was ordered to pay £65,000 towards Watt’s costs of last week’s hearing.

Vardy’s legal team also came in for criticism over redactions of WhatsApp messages between Vardy and Watt, which Steyn said ‘ought to have been disclosed’. One message which was initially redacted, sent by Vardy to Watt and referring to a post on Rooney’s Instagram account, said: ‘Would love to leak those stories.’

Steyn said: ‘In circumstances where, in the midst of a WhatsApp account that appears on its face (and I do not understand it to be disputed) to concern the defendant, the claimant states that she would ‘love to leak those stories’, I do not accept that it is open to the claimant’s representatives to make the determination, on the basis of their client’s instructions, that she was not referring to stories about the defendant.’

She noted that Vardy’s barrister, Hugh Tomlinson QC, ‘has made clear that, if the court considers that the test was misapplied in relation to the information in these documents, the responsibility for the misjudgement lies with him’.

The judge also ordered Rooney to pay 20% of Vardy's costs, which is estimated to come to just over £30,000. Vardy and Rooney’s total costs for the two-day hearing last week are reported to have amounted to around £300,000.