Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney brace for Wagatha Christie showdown at the High Court

The explosive £3million ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney gets underway at London’s High Court today, marking the culmination of a bitter feud between the high-profile WAGS.

Coleen has been at war with Rebekah since October 2019 after accusing her of leaking ‘false stories’ about her private life to the media, before claiming that she uncovered the culprit after carrying out a social media ‘sting operation’.

The wife of ex-England star Wayne Rooney publicly slammed her fellow footballer’s wife for leaking the stories to The Sun, which Rebekah vehemently denied, leading her to launch today’s costly libel action.

Both women are expected to give evidence in court, as well as Wayne Rooney himself.

As well as intense interest from British media, Coleen is believed to have agreed for a Netflix documentary to be filmed around her side of the case.

Rebekah meanwhile, has been besieged with TV interview requests and pundits expect her to grant one to Piers Morgan after the case is concluded.

The High Court hearing will see two of Britain’s most high-profile lawyers coming face to face with David Sherborne representing Coleen and Ian Tomlinson QC arguing Rebekah’s case.

At the heart of the dispute are three ‘fake’ stories which Coleen maintains that she posted on her personal Instagram stories as she attempted to discover who was leaking information about her and her family.

These were about Coleen claiming that she was travelling to Mexico to find out about gender selection, making a return to TV and flooding taking place at her new home. All three stories later appeared in The Sun.

In a bid to smoke out the culprit, Coleen said she had altered the privacy settings to make the posts visible to just one person’s account – Rebekah’s.

In a famous post identifying the culprit, Coleen 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.’

Shortly after the accusation, Rebekah – who was pregnant and on holiday in Dubai at the time – denied any involvement.

She hit back on social media, writing: ‘As I have just said to you [Coleen] on the phone, I wish you had called me if you thought this.

‘I never speak to anyone about you, as various journalists who have asked me to over the years can vouch for. If you thought this was happening, you could have told me, and I could have changed passwords to see if it stopped.

‘Over the years various people have had access to my Insta and just this week I found out I was following people I didn’t know and have never followed myself. I’m not being funny, but I don’t need the money, what would I gain from selling stories on you?’

Around the same time, she sent a text to Caroline Watt, her then publicist declaring ‘That’s war’, according to evidence put before the court in the subsequent proceedings.

In February 2020 in a tearful appearance on ITV’s Loose Women, Rebekah said the stress of the dispute caused her to have severe anxiety attacks and she ‘ended up in hospital three times’.

A few months later in June 2020, the bombshell emerged that Rebekah had launched libel proceedings against Coleen.

Her lawyers said she ‘suffered extreme distress, hurt, anxiety and embarrassment as a result of the publication of the post and the events which followed’.

In November 2020, lawyers for both parties met at the first High Court hearing in London.

In a key ‘meanings hearing’, Mr Justice Warbys ruled that Coleen’s October 2019 post ‘clearly identified’ Rebekah as being ‘guilty of the serious and consistent breach of trust’.

The judge concluded that the ‘natural and ordinary’ meaning of the posts was that Rebekah had ‘regularly and frequently abused her status as a trusted follower of Coleen’s personal Instagram account by secretly informing The Sun of Coleen’s private posts and stories’.

Under English defamation law, the burden of proof now will be on Coleen to prove that her post was ‘substantially true’.

The full trial follows months of preliminary hearings – none of which were attended by either woman.

In February, Coleen’s barrister David Sherborne told the High Court that a ‘series of unfortunate events’ had befallen some of the key evidence in the case, notably Ms Watt’s phone falling into the North Sea from a boat she was on.

Rebekah’s lawyers have said she has ‘nothing to hide’.

Most recently, the High Court was told by Mr Sherborne that Rebekah ‘appears to accept’ that Ms Watt was the source of leaked stories about Coleen that were published in The Sun.

Hugh Tomlinson QC, for Rebekah, told the court that his client’s new witness statement did not contain ‘any change whatever in the pleaded case’.

Ms Watt had been due to give evidence in the trial but was recently found to be ‘not fit’ to take part, also withdrawing her written evidence.

Mr Tomlinson said: ‘We simply don’t know what the true position is in relation to Ms Watt… She’s not communicating with anybody.’

The trial in front of Mrs Justice Steyn is expected to last seven days.

Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney brace for Wagatha Christie showdown at the High Court

About Malcolm Hemsworth