Rebekah Vardy probably isn’t buzzing at the ruling, a character assassination that has left her well and truly stung by libel
scar Wilde, Barbra Streisand, and now – Rebekah Vardy. When news broke that Vardy had lost her libel case against, she joined this heady roster of celebrities who have launched brain-bogglingly misguided and self-wounding legal cases. Like Wilde – who sued the Marquess of Queensberry for revealing his homosexuality – Vardy went to court to deny something that a rock could see was true: she’d passed on private stories about Rooney to the press.
I sat just a few yards from Vardy every day of the trial, and it was obvious that she deserved to lose this case. But it was not always obvious she would do so. Rooney took a big risk in publicly accusing Vardy – or, to be precise “It’s………Rebekah Vardy’s account” – of leaking stories about her to the tabloids, because in English law the burden of proof falls on the person who made the defamatory claim.
And this was the evidence we did see. So much we did not. Watt’s phone, which somehow ended up at the bottom of the North Sea, and endless WhatsApp messages on Vardy and her husband Jamie’s phones that mysteriously vanished – these should be discussed alongside the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Zeus as mythical objets d’art that were tragically lost to mankind.
And Justice Steyn clearly thinks Vardy was very cynical indeed. At the trial, Vardy tried to chuck Watt into the North Sea by insisting that, if Watt did leak stories to the Sun, she did so without Vardy’s knowledge, consent or approval. Justice Steyn writes simply: “I reject that contention.” I wonder what made her think that? Oh maybe, the various messages from Vardy to Watt saying “leak it” and “I want paying for this”.