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29 July 2022, 12:41 | Updated: 29 July 2022, 12:57
Rebekah Vardy has lost her very public libel battle against Coleen Rooney.
The High Court trial that’s had the British public hooked since Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of leaking her private Instagram Stories to the press in 2019 has finally reached a verdict.
It turns out, it was… Rebekah Vardy’s account.
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Judge Justice Steyn has declared Coleen the winner of the libel battle, dubbed 'Wagatha Christie', saying it was ‘likely Vardy’s agent at the time, Caroline Watt, ‘undertook the direct act’ of passing the information – intended for Coleen’s close friends and family – to the tabloids.
Coleen Rooney arrives at the High Court for the start of the ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel dispute
She said: “Nonetheless, the evidence … clearly shows, in my view, that Mrs Vardy knew of and condoned this behaviour, actively engaging in it by directing Ms Watt to the private Instagram account, sending her screenshots of Mrs Rooney’s posts, drawing attention to items of potential interest to the press, and answering additional queries raised by the press via Ms Watt.”
The judge continued: “In my judgment, the conclusions that I have reached as to the extent to which the claimant engaged in disclosing to The Sun information to which she only had access as a permitted follower of an Instagram account which she knew, and Mrs Rooney repeatedly asserted, was private, suffice to show the single meaning is substantially true.”
This has been a burden in my life for a few years now and finally I have got to the bottom of it...... pic.twitter.com/0YqJAoXuK1
— Coleen Rooney (@ColeenRoo) October 9, 2019
Their public feud started in October 2019 when Coleen suspected Rebekah of sharing her private Instagram posts with the press.
In a now-culturally iconic tweet she wrote: “I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
“It’s ………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
The private stories included Coleen flying to Mexico with husband Wayne Rooney for a ‘gender selection’ procedure as well as mundane topics like her basement flooding.
Vardy has continuously denied leaking the stories .
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