The Wagatha Christie libel battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney has continued, with Rebekah being ordered to pay Coleen an additional £100,000 in legal costs. This comes after Coleen won her high-profile libel suit against Rebekah in 2022, in which she accused Rebekah of leaking her private information to the press on social media. The latest hearing dealt with preliminary issues, including the amount of legal costs to be paid, with Rebekah being ordered to pay an initial £800,000 and now an additional £100,000.
The dispute began in 2019 when Coleen publicly accused Rebekah’s account of being the source behind three stories in The Sun newspaper featuring fake details she had posted on her private Instagram profile. After a high-profile trial, Judge Mrs Justice Steyn ruled in Coleen’s favour, finding the post to be “substantially true” and that it was “likely” that Rebekah’s agent, Caroline Watt, had passed information to The Sun. The judge also found that Rebekah “knew of and condoned this behaviour”.
Wagatha Christie (Image via Getty)
The latest hearing was to determine the legal costs to be paid by Rebekah, with Coleen’s barrister, Robin Dunne, arguing that Rebekah had shown “deplorable conduct” in the case and that costs could have been lower if she had conducted the litigation appropriately. Rebekah’s barrister, Jamie Carpenter KC, on the other hand, argued that Coleen’s claimed legal bill of £1,833,906.89 was “drawn without sufficient care” and included “over £120,000 of costs to which Mrs Rooney has no entitlement”.
The court has ordered Rebekah to pay the additional £100,000 to Coleen within 21 days, and a full “line-by-line” assessment of costs will take place at a later date to determine the overall amount to be paid. The hearing concluded with Judge Andrew Gordon-Saker urging the parties to “get on with this and put it behind them”, and adding that the full assessment of costs could take place in early 2025.
