WhatsApp messages Rebekah Vardy sent to her footballer husband Jamie during Euro 2016 have been revealed for the first time, as part of a 300-page body of evidence released by the High Court.
Screenshots of the various stars’ private messages and Instagram accounts were submitted as part of Vardy’s high-profile defamation lawsuit against fellow WAG Coleen Rooney.
Lawyers on both sides ended their pleadings on ThursdayJudge Karen Steyn is due to deliver her judgment later this year.
The Wagatha Christie case explained
Vardy40, filed a lawsuit against Rooney36, accusing him of defamation in a viral social media post in 2019, in which Rooney accused Vardy of leaking stories about him to the press.
Rooney said she planted a series of fake stories about herself on her personal Instagram account (which disappeared after 24 hours) but changed the settings so they could only be viewed by Vardy’s account.
Vardy is suing her for defamation, while Rooney defends the suit on the grounds that her post was “essentially true”.
Below is the evidence released by the High Court today. It also included footage of the trolling Vardy suffered – all of which are too graphic to post.
The Vardys and the Euros 2016
In class, Wayne Rooney claimed he was asked to speak to teammate Jamie Vardy at Euros 2016 about his wife’s media work.
Jamie Vardy, speaking outside the court, said Rooney was “talking nonsense”.
“He must be confused because he never spoke to me about any issues regarding Becky’s media work at Euro 2016,” he said.
New messages, dated June 23, 2016, appear to show that Jamie Vardy was not questioned during the championship about the behavior of his wife.
In one post, Rebekah shares a link to a story that calls it a “distraction”, saying “Seriously???”
Jamie replies, “Not babies at all.”
In a later message, he says “no one [has] said a word to him” about his social media profile.
Messages with his agent
More than a thousand messages between Vardy and his agent, Caroline Watt, were leaked in court throughout the seven-day trial.
In his closing statement, Vardy’s attorney argued that while these were often inappropriate, they amounted to little more than gossip between friends.
Hugh Tomlinson also argued that in some of the posts, the couple guessed the stories were untrue – and even speculated who might leak them.
Vardy and Ms Watt “understood” that Rooney was trying to catch the leak, he said, and so it would have been “reckless in the extreme” for her to have given these messages to the press.
Much has been done in court about the missing WhatsApp file, which Vardy’s team says was accidentally corrupted when they tried to export it.
Rooney’s attorney, David Sherborne, said Vardy systematically deleted the evidence manually and then “lied under oath” about it.
However, new posts appear to show Vardy lamenting the loss of the files.
In other posts, taken from 2020, Vardy appears reluctant to give out his Instagram password again.
The couple also speculate that a problem with Vardy’s phone could be the reason she viewed the stories.
Warnings
Rooney told the court she had posted warnings on her personal Instagram account “several times” from 2017 – but leaks of personal stories continued.
In one instance, Coleen posted an image to her private Instagram of Wayne in bed with their three sons after his drunk driving conviction. She posted a similar photo – without Wayne – on her public account.
The Sun reported the existence of the private photo, prompting Coleen to post a warning on her page with the caption: “The grass struck again” and a snake emoji.
Later, she issued a number of other similar warnings.
Rooney celebrated after completing her sting operation – and finding which account, she said, was responsible for the leaks.
The sting operation
Over the course of several months, Rooney posted a number of Instagram stories that could only be seen by Vardy’s account, in an effort to track down who was leaking stories about him to the press.
A number of these have already been published, but now more examples of his sting operation have been made public, including posts about his brooding feelings, his return to television and the creation of a events company.
The majority of these stories were viewed by a single account.
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