Coleen Rooney-Rebekah Vardy timeline: What happened in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel case?

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “It is disappointing that Mrs Vardy has chosen to issue court proceedings,” Ms Rooney’s legal representatives said at the time. Mrs Vardy’s decision to issue court proceedings does at least mean that Coleen’s evidence can be made public when the time is right.” Following a preliminary hearing at the High Court, with neither woman in attendance, Justice Warby ruled on 20 November in favour of Ms Vardy and allowed the case to continue, finding that Ms Rooney’s tweet “clearly identified” Ms Vardy as being “guilty of the serious and consistent breach of trust that she alleges” and ordering Ms Rooney to pay £23,000 in legal costs. Rebekah Vardy, left, is suing Coleen Rooney for libel “Notably, the defendant has pleaded it in support of the contention that there is a close relationship between the claimant and The Sun, rather than as an instance of the claimant disclosing another person’s private information.” Justice Steyn did, however, say the allegedly close relationship between Ms Vardy and the newspaper was “one of the building blocks” of Ms Rooney’s inferential case, commenting: “I accept that an exceptionally close relationship between the claimant and the newspaper or journalists to whom the defendant’s posts are alleged to have been disclosed is probative of the plea of truth, albeit on its own it would not take the defendant far.” She continued: “It can, at least, be said to be less likely that a person with no such relationship would regularly disclose private information about others to that newspaper or those journalists and, perhaps, less likely that the disclosure would, on its own, result in a published article.” Ms Vardy’s lawyers had argued that removing parts of Ms Rooney’s defence would save £200,000 in their legal costs and cut the length of the trial by three to four days. The saga returned to the High Court for a two-day hearing in early February 2022 when WhatsApp messages between Ms Vardy and her agent Caroline Watt were presented in which the former allegedly referred to Ms Rooney as a “nasty b***” and “a c***” and said she “would love to leak those stories x” in relation to posts on the latter’s Instagram page.