Rebekah Vardy to pay at least £1.4m of Coleen Rooney’s Wagatha legal costs
A judge said following a hearing on Tuesday that he hoped it was ‘the end of a long and unhappy road’.
Rebekah Vardy must pay Coleen Rooney at least £1.4 million in legal costs following their high-profile Wagatha Christie libel battle, a judge has said.
The pair have been in dispute over costs since Mrs Vardy unsuccessfully sued Mrs Rooney at the High Court in 2022.
A specialist costs court was told earlier on Tuesday that Mrs Vardy had agreed to pay £1,190,000 of Mrs Rooney’s legal bill, and that Mrs Rooney was asking for a further £315,000 in “assessment costs”.
Costs Judge Mark Whalan said that it was “reasonable and proportionate” for Mrs Vardy to pay £212,266.20 of Mrs Rooney’s assessment costs, inclusive of VAT but before interest, on top of the £1.19m settlement, totalling at least £1,402,266.20.
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.”
Neither Mrs Vardy nor Mrs Rooney, the wife of former England striker Wayne Rooney, attended the remote hearing, with Judge Whalan stating that the two “can both part to put this matter behind them”.
Mrs Vardy’s barrister Juliet Wells told the hearing earlier on Tuesday that Mrs Vardy had agreed to pay £1.19m of Mrs Rooney’s legal bill, including VAT, which comprised around £1.12m in costs and around £65,000 in interest.
The court previously heard that Mrs Rooney had originally claimed a legal bill of £1,833,906.89, which Ms Wells said in written submissions was “substandard”.
Ms Wells added that the further £315,000 claimed was “grossly disproportionate” and should be capped at £100,000, telling the court that Mrs Rooney had “taken a kitchen sink approach to costs”.
Robin Dunne, for Mrs 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.”
Judge Whalan said that he was “pleased” that both sides could come to a “commercial accommodation” following a “difficult and high-profile case”, but that it had come after “enormous time, expenditure and grief”.
He said some of the assessment costs claimed by Mrs Rooney were “a little eyebrow-raising” and “unreasonably high and disproportionate”.
He continued that the parties had been “stuck in a rut of being a few percentage points apart” on the final settlement sum since last November, adding: “This is the definition of bad litigation over the past six months as far as the claimant (Mrs Vardy) is concerned.”
In the viral social media post in October 2019 at the heart of the libel claim, Mrs Rooney said she had carried out a months-long “sting operation” and accused Mrs Vardy of leaking information about her private life to the press.
Mrs Rooney publicly claimed Mrs Vardy’s account was the source behind three stories in The Sun newspaper featuring fake details she had posted on her private Instagram profile – her travelling to Mexico for a “gender selection” procedure, her planning to return to TV and the basement flooding at her home.
After the high-profile trial, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled in Mrs Rooney’s favour, finding it was “likely” that Mrs Vardy’s agent, Caroline Watt, had passed information to The Sun and that Mrs Vardy “knew of and condoned this behaviour” and had “actively” engaged.
