The final legal bill for the High Court battle between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy could reach as high as £3million, sources claim.
The combined eye-watering fees allegedly accrued by both women come as the libel case is expected to start this week in London.
A legal source said: “The costs of a case like this are enormous but not entirely unexpected if both women are refusing to back down.”
One legal expert said that Vardy may hold the “slight edge” going into Tuesday’s trial but the case was still relatively evenly-balanced.
They said: “It’s all to play for but at the end of the day no-one is a winner, other than the lawyers. It remains to be seen, also, what other bombshells will be served up….and which woman will take the bigger PR hit.”
The trial comes as Vardy appeared to dramatically blame her agent for leaking stories about Rooney
Rooney’s barrister claimed last week there had been a “remarkable” collapse in Vardy’s case after she submitted an updated witness statement.
David Sherborne said that in it she is said to have raised her fears that Caroline Watt may have been the source of the stories derived from Rooney’s Instagram.
In written submissions, Mr Sherborne said that Mrs Vardy’s new statement “suggests Ms Watt was the source of the leak but claims that (Mrs Vardy) ‘did not authorise or condone her”’.
“It now appears...that she too ‘believes’ that Ms Watt is the source,” Mr Sherborne added.
The barrister continued: “The collapse of Mrs Vardy’s case over the last day has been remarkable.
“As of the evening of April 27 2022, in an abrupt change of position to her pleaded case since the outset, Mrs Vardy appears now to accept Mrs Rooney’s case: that Caroline Watt, Mrs Vardy’s close friend and PR, was the conduit by which stories from the defendant’s private Instagram account were leaked to The Sun through her access via Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Mr Sherborne told the court: “It has become undeniably obvious that Ms Watt is the source and Mrs Vardy, true to form says ‘it wasn’t me, I didn’t realise and I didn’t know anything about what was going on’.”
He added that Mrs Vardy “says ‘how awful it is to be betrayed’... That is exactly what Mrs Rooney would say, that she has been betrayed by someone”.
Mrs Rooney’s lawyers previously claimed that Mrs Vardy had leaked information to The Sun either directly or through her friend and agent Watt “acting on her instruction or with her knowing approval”.
However, Hugh Tomlinson QC, for Mrs Vardy, told the court that his client’s new witness statement did not contain “any change whatever in the pleaded case”.
The court also previously heard that Ms Watt’s phone had “regrettably” fallen into the North Sea before further information could be extracted from it for the case.
Ms Watt had been expected to give evidence at the upcoming trial, however, the High Court was told she was “not fit” to give oral evidence at a hearing earlier this month.
The two WAGs have been at loggerheads since 2019 - when 36-year-old Rooney accused Vardy, 40, of leaking ‘false stories’ about her personal life to the media.
Mrs Rooney came to the conclusion after carrying out a months-long “sting operation” to find the culprit.
The mum-of-four was dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’ when she publicly claimed Vardy- married to Jamie Vardy - was sharing personal stories she had posted on Instagram.
