Rebekah Vardy is ‘relieved and looking forward’ to moving on from the Wagatha Christie saga after reaching a settlement with Coleen Rooney.
The 42-year-old WAG has agreed to cover £1,190,000 of Mrs. Rooney’s legal expenses and has also been directed to pay an additional £212,266 for assessment costs following the publicized libel case loss.
The total amount Mrs. Vardy is required to pay now stands at a minimum of £1,402,266.20. It is understood that she has already made partial payments totaling £900,000 in the past four years.
A source close to Mrs Vardy has today told MailOnline: ‘It’s a huge relief for Rebekah that this long legal battle is now coming to an end.
‘She’s looking forward to putting the whole ordeal well and truly behind her.
‘Now she’s just focusing on the future. And there are some big plans coming up for her now that she just wants to get cracking with.’
Mrs Rooney ran up a legal bill of more than £1.8 million while successfully defending herself against Mrs Vardy’s High Court claim in 2022.
After losing their High Court showdown, Mrs Vardy was ordered to pay 90 percent of Mrs Rooney’s legal costs.
In written submissions to a specialist costs court hearing on Tuesday, Mrs Vardy’s barrister, Juliet Wells, said Mrs Rooney’s total legal bill of £1,833,906.89 ‘has now been settled at £1,190,000, being [approximately] £1,125,000 plus interest of [approximately] £65,000’.
The court heard that while Mrs Rooney was also asking for a further £315,000 in ‘assessment costs’, Costs Judge Mark Whalan ordered Mrs Vardy to pay £212,266.20 of Mrs Rooney’s assessment costs, inclusive of VAT but before interest, on top of the £1.19 million settlement.
While Mrs Wells previously called for the ‘grossly disproportionate’ assessment costs to be capped at ‘no more than £100,000’, Judge Whalan said the amount awarded was ‘reasonable and proportionate’.
He added that while there had been ‘extraordinary expenditure of costs’ on both sides, he was ‘generally happy’ the outcome was a ‘commercially satisfactory conclusion’ for the pair.
‘I do mean it when I say that I hope that this is the end of a long and unhappy road,’ he added.
Mrs Vardy’s lawyer previously argued Mrs Rooney’s team had used a ‘kitchen sink’ approach when calculating the total and included ‘over £120,000 of costs to which Mrs Rooney has no entitlement’.
It was also claimed the bill included costs for one of the WAG’s team to stay at Nobu – a five star luxury hotel – and ‘substantial dinner and drinks charges as well as mini bar charges’.
The lawyer said Coleen’s £1,833,906.89 legal bill was over three times her ‘agreed costs budget of £540,779.07’.
But Coleen’s lawyer, Robin Dunne, had argued it was ‘frankly outrageous’ to accuse them of dishonesty.
Mrs Vardy unsuccessfully sued the I’m A Celeb star in the High Court in 2022 after she was publicly accused of leaking stories about her to the press.
The catalyst for the famous Wagatha Christie case was a dramatic open letter written by Mrs Rooney and posted on social media in October 2019 in which she revealed she had turned detective to figure out who had been leaking the stories.
Mrs Rooney publicly claimed Mrs Vardy’s account was the source behind three newspaper stories 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.
Penning that she had a ‘suspicion’ of who it could be, Mrs Rooney told her millions of followers that ‘to try and prove this’ she ‘came up with an idea’.
‘I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram stories except ONE account,’ she wrote.
For the next five months, she uploaded ‘a series of false stories’ to see if ‘they made their way’ into the press.
‘And you know what, they did!’ she penned ‘The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flooding in my new house.’
She continued to build suspense, writing: ‘It’s been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account/individual it’s come from.
‘I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person had viewed them.’
And then, she delivered her final iconic line: ‘It’s………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.’
What followed was a tearful appearance from Rebekah on ITV’s Loose Women in February 2020 in which claimed the stress over the dispute had caused her to have anxiety attacks so severe she ‘ended up in hospital three times’.
The emotional display was met by Coleen with a statement to say she did not want to ‘engage in further public debate’ on the matter.
Four months later, in June 2020, Rebekah began legal proceedings against Coleen for libel with her lawyers alleging she had ‘suffered extreme distress, hurt, anxiety and embarrassment as a result of the publication of the post and the events which followed’.
At the first preliminary hearing in London’s High Court in November the same year, Mr Justice Warby ruled that Coleen’s famous letter ‘clearly identified’ Rebekah as being ‘guilty of the serious and consistent breach of trust’.
He concluded the ‘natural and ordinary’ meaning of the posts was that Rebekah had ‘regularly and frequently abused her status as a trusted follower of Mrs Rooney’s personal Instagram account’ by secretly informing the press of Coleen’s ‘private posts and stories’.
When the case returned to the courts in February 2022, a series of explosive messages between Rebekah and her agent Caroline Watt were revealed with Coleen’s lawyers alleging they were about her.
Rebekah denied that one message calling someone a ‘nasty b****’ was in reference to Coleen.
When asked by defence lawyers to present Ms Watt’s phone so they could further investigate the WhatsApp messages, they were told it had fallen into the North Sea when Ms Watt was on a boat during a holiday.
Coleen was denied permission to bring a High Court claim against Ms Watt for misuse of private information to be heard alongside the libel battle as it was brought too late.
Ms Watt was then dubbed not fit to give oral evidence, revoked permission for her witness statement to be used and withdrew her waiver which would have allowed journalists to say whether she was a source of the leaked stories.
Coleen’s barrister then told the High Court Rebekah ‘appears to accept’ her agent was the source of the leaked stories and argued her new statement suggested this but Rebekah claimed she ‘did not authorise or condone her’.
In May 2022, the women finally came face-to-face in court to give evidence as the Wagatha Christie trial began in the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Coleen secured her victory the next month when Mrs Justice Steyn delivered her verdict, dismissing the claim made by Rebekah and finding Coleen had proved the meaning of her famous accusatory letter was ‘substantially true’.
Whilst Coleen said she was ‘pleased’ the judge had ruled in her favour, Rebekah declared she was ‘extremely sad and disappointed’ at the decision.
MailOnline has reached out to representatives for Coleen Rooney for comment.
