Rebekah Vardy and her agent deliberately deleted messages after their phones were ordered to be searched, a court was told today.
Mrs Vardy's then-agent Caroline Watt said her phone "fell into the sea" shortly after the court ordered it to be searched, according to Coleen Rooney's barrister during the trial earlier this year. Some messages were retrieved, however Mrs Justice Steyn DBE today determined "that the loss of both the Claimant’s and Ms Watt’s copies of their original WhatsApp conversation was deliberate rather than accidental".
In her ruling, the judge said it was "likely" that Mrs Vardy's agent at the time, Caroline Watt, "undertook the direct act" of passing the information to The S*n.
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But she added: "Nonetheless, the evidence ... clearly shows, in my view, that Mrs Vardy knew of and condoned this behaviour, actively engaging in it by directing Ms Watt to the private Instagram account, sending her screenshots of Mrs Rooney's posts, drawing attention to items of potential interest to the press, and answering additional queries raised by the press via Ms Watt.
The judge added: "In my judgment, the conclusions that I have reached as to the extent to which the claimant engaged in disclosing to The S*n information to which she only had access as a permitted follower of an Instagram account which she knew, and Mrs Rooney repeatedly asserted, was private, suffice to show the single meaning is substantially true."
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