A judge has criticised Rebekah Vardy over a torturous finale to the high-profile “Wagatha Christie” libel battle against Coleen Rooney, as he ruled she must pay Rooney at least £1.4m in legal costs.
Costs judge Mark Whalan said that Vardy’s negotiations on the final settlement were “the definition of bad litigation”.
Both parties had been “stuck in a rut of being a few percentage points apart” on the final settlement sum since last November, he said.
Rooney, however, was also censured by Whalan for submitting assessment costs that were “a little eyebrow-raising” and “unreasonably high and disproportionate”.
The pair have been in dispute over costs since Vardy unsuccessfully sued Rooney at the high court in 2022.
Vardy’s barrister, Juliet Wells, told the hearing earlier on Tuesday that Vardy had agreed to pay £1.19m of Rooney’s legal bill, including VAT, which comprised about £1.12m in costs and about £65,000 in interest. Rooney had originally claimed a legal bill of £1,833,906.89, which Wells said in written submissions was “substandard”.
In addition, Wells told the court, the further £315,000 claim was “grossly disproportionate”. Telling the court that Rooney had “taken a kitchen-sink approach to costs”, she said the sum should be capped at £100,000.
Whalan said, however, that it was “reasonable and proportionate” for Vardy to pay £212,266.20 of Rooney’s assessment costs, inclusive of VAT but before interest.
The judge said that he was “generally happy” that the outcome was a “commercially satisfactory conclusion for both sides”, but that there had been “extraordinary expenditure of costs” by the parties.
He said: “I do mean it when I say that I hope that this is the end of a long and unhappy road.”
Robin Dunne, for Rooney, told the court that it “sits slightly ill in the mouth for Mrs Vardy to make criticisms of Mrs Rooney”.
In written submissions, he said that the £315,000 figure “is higher than would have been the case had Mrs Vardy approached these costs proceedings reasonably”.
He continued: “If Mrs Vardy now wishes that the sum claimed were lower, she need only reflect upon her approach and conduct throughout.”
In the viral social media post in October 2019 at the heart of the libel claim, Rooney said she had carried out a months-long “sting operation” and accused Vardy of leaking information about her private life to the press.
Rooney wrote: “I have saved and screen-shotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
“It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
After the high-profile trial, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled in Rooney’s favour, finding it was “likely” that Vardy’s agent at the time, Caroline Watt, had passed information to the Sun and that Vardy “knew of and condoned this behaviour” and had “actively” engaged.
Neither Vardy nor Rooney, the wife of the former England striker Wayne Rooney, attended the remote hearing, with Whalan stating that the two “can both part to put this matter behind them”.
