Rebekah Vardy has been ordered to pay Coleen Rooney a further £100,000 after their “Wagatha Christie” libel fight, in advance of the full amount being decided.
Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy, lost the high-profile case in July 2022, having sued Rooney for libel.
In 2019, Rooney, the wife of the former Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, accused Vardy of leaking her private information to the press, which Mrs Justice Steyn found was “substantially true”.
In October 2022, the judge ordered Vardy to pay 90% of Rooney’s legal costs, with an initial payment of £800,000.
The pair’s lawyers returned to court in London this week in a dispute over how much should be paid.
But at the end of the hearing, which began on Monday, the senior costs judge, Andrew Gordon-Saker, ordered Vardy to pay a further £100,000 to Rooney within 21 days.
He said: “I think there is some scope for a further payment on account so the defendant [Rooney] is not kept out of her costs, and I think that should be no more than £100,000.”
The hearing, which neither woman attended, dealt with several preliminary issues before a full “line-by-line” assessment of costs takes place at a later date, which will decide the overall amount of money to be paid.
The judge said this could take place in early 2025, but added: “The parties need to get on with this and put it behind them.”
He said: “Realistically, it [the line-by-line assessment] is probably going to be next year, hopefully early next year.”
In written submissions, Jamie Carpenter KC, for Vardy, had challenged the “sheer magnitude” of some of Rooney’s legal costs. He said Rooney’s total claimed legal bill – £1,833,906.89 – was more than three times her “agreed costs budget of £540,779.07” and was “disproportionate”.
But Robin Dunne, for Rooney, said in his written submissions that Vardy had shown “deplorable conduct” in the case and that costs could have been lower if she had “conducted this litigation appropriately”.
In her 2022 ruling, Steyn described Vardy as an “untrustworthy witness” who was likely to have destroyed potentially crucial evidence on purpose. She concluded Vardy probably worked with her agent, Caroline Watt, to leak stories from Rooney’s private Instagram account to the Sun.
Rooney had conducted a “sting” operation to find out who was leaking the stories. She went public in 2019, with Wednesday marking five years since the viral post that alleged: “It’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
