Rebekah Vardy has agreed to pay almost £1.2million of Coleen Rooney’s legal costs after their dramatic Wagatha Christie court battle, a judge has been told.
Rooney accused Vardy, the wife of striker Jamie Vardy, of leaking private information to the press in October 2019 – in a viral social media post. Rooney, the wife of footballer Wayne, told her followers she had been plotting a “sting operation”, narrowing down accounts with access to her posts in order to find out who was leaking the information.
She famously claimed: “It was….. Rebekah Vardy’s account”. Vardy tried to sue Rooney for libel but Rooney won the high-profile court battle in May 2022 as a High Court judge found Rooney’s claim was “substantially true”.
If you thought the Wagatha drama ended there, you’d be wrong, as the issue of legal costs has been raging on. A specialists costs court was previously told that Rooney ran up a legal bill totalling more than £1.8 million during the court saga in 2022.
(Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In written submissions for the hearing on Tuesday (May 6), Mrs Vardy’s barrister, Juliet Wells, said Rooney’s total legal bill of £1,833,906.89 “has now been settled at £1,190,000, being c.£1,125,000 plus interest of c.£65.000”.
Ms Wells said Rooney is now claiming “assessment costs” of more than £300,000, which she described as “grossly disproportionate” and should be capped at “no more than £100,000”.
Rooney’s lawyers said in written submissions that Mrs Vardy was “the author of her own misfortune” and that she should “reflect upon her approach”. The full amount of the assessment costs will be determined at the hearing before Costs Judge Mark Whalan.
(Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Costs Judge Mark Whalan said he was “pleased” that the two sides had come to a “commercial accommodation”. He also said that the agreed figure was “inclusive of VAT”, adding: “I commend both sides for reaching that accommodation.”
Rebekah had been ordered to fork out to cover 90% of Coleen’s costs, including an £800k payment. Last October, Vardy’s legal team tried to dispute the amount they owed Rooney and argued that Rooney’s side had committed “serious misconduct” by understating some of her costs.
But a judge ruled that no misconduct had been committed and that it was not appropriate to reduce how much Vardy should pay Rooney. Vardy tried to appeal the decision, but in April, Mr Justice Cavanagh dismissed the appeal, saying: “The appeal must fail on the basis that the judge was entitled to reach the conclusion that he came to.”
(Image: PA)
In her written submissions, Ms Wells said Mrs Rooney’s original £1.8m legal bill was “substandard” and included costs “of briefing the press” and others to which she had “no entitlement”.
She argued the bill could have been settled sooner if Mrs Rooney had “engaged more constructively”. She said Mrs Vardy had offered to settle the legal bill for £1.1 million, excluding interest and assessment costs, in August 2024, which was rejected “out of hand”.
She said: “Mrs Vardy went to significant lengths to negotiate the bill despite being hamstrung by a lack of information and cooperation from Mrs Rooney’s camp. By contrast, Mrs Rooney’s tone when it came to settlement negotiations was intransigent and frequently belligerent.”
Robin Dunne, for Mrs Rooney, said in written submissions that Mrs Vardy had been “drip feeding” settlement offers. He claimed Mrs Rooney’s lawyers had to complete “additional work” as “lurid headlines arising from briefings from Mrs Vardy’s camp dominated the press in the days before and during the hearings” in the case.
He said: “There will rarely be a case where it can be said with greater force that Mrs Vardy is the author of her own misfortune. She took every conceivable point in this assessment, put Mrs Rooney to very significant work on each and every aspect of the proceedings, raised highly technical and potentially damaging issues and failed to make any reasonable offers for the bill until the 11th hour.
“Her conduct has caused Mrs Rooney to incur £315,000 of assessment costs. This is higher than would have been the case had Mrs Vardy approached these costs proceedings reasonably.
“If Mrs Vardy now wishes that the sum claimed were lower, she need only reflect upon her approach and conduct throughout.” Neither Coleen or Rebekah attended the remote hearing on Tuesday.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
