Rebekah Vardy has claimed she “never saw” Coleen Rooney’s fake gender selection post which allegedly spawned a newspaper article.
Coleen, 36, shared the fake personal story to her Instagram feed as part of her sting operation to uncover a culprit she suspected had been leaking stories from her private social media to the press.
In October 2019, Coleen memorably accused Rebekah, 40, of being the culprit.
Rebekah denies this and is suing Coleen for libel.
Following the gender selection story being leaked, Rebekah is alleged to have sent a message to her former agent Caroline Watt saying: “I wonder where this is coming from?”
(Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Speaking about the gender selection post in court on Thursday (May 19), Rebekah’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson QC said that Rebekah claimed to have not seen Coleen’s Instagram story, despite it only being made available for her Instagram account to view.
Tomlinson said: “The obvious suspect is Caroline Watt.
“But the case against Mrs Vardy only works if it can be shown that she knew about it and she authorised it.
“The evidence points the other way.”
Tomlinson added that Vardy’s message to Watt “represents her genuine contemporaneous reaction to what is going on”.
He said: “This shows she is not responsible. The obvious suspect was Ms Watt.
“The position is there is no contemporaneous evidence to link Mrs Vardy to the article.
“There is no evidence linking her to these posts.”
The lawyer later said that Rebekah and her former agent had ‘from time to time used the language of leaking’ but argued that “in some cases that clearly is just loose language.”
(Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
He also said their messages showed the pair were aware Coleen was sharing fake posts in a bid to find the supposed leaker and that his client would have been “reckless in the extreme” had she continued passing on information in those circumstances.
Rebekah’s lawyer concluded by stating that there was no public interest in Rooney pulling off her WAGatha Christie sting and that the case had “had an enormous impact”.
The judge said she would reserve judgement to a date to be fixed.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
