Rebekah Vardy’s lawyers have argued that her text messages calling someone a ‘c***’ and ‘nasty b****’ were not about Coleen Rooney.
The pair are preparing to head to court in May after Rooney accused Vardy of selling stories about her to the press in 2019, leading to the infamous saga to be dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’.
During Tuesday’s hearing at the High Court, Rooney’s legal team argued text messages sent by Vardy referred to their client as a ‘nasty b***h’, to ‘suck a d**k’ and ‘declared war’.
However, on Wednesday, Vardy’s lawyers denied these messages which were sent to her agent Caroline Watt were about Rooney, who she is suing for libel.
Vardy’s barrister Hugh Tomlinson QC told the court: ‘This is not a passage about Mrs Rooney, it is a passage about someone else.’
Tomlinson previously told the court that the messages referred to by Rooney’s barrister David Sherborne, which were said to ‘reveal that Mrs Vardy and Ms Watt are responsible for the leaking’, were ‘selective’, and said parts of the exchanges which were left out had ‘precisely the opposite effect’.
He added: ‘If one reads these messages in full, what one sees is that Mrs Vardy expresses shock at being accused and she is here communicating with the person that Mr Sherborne says is her co-conspirator.
‘These are obviously candid personal messages, and if she was really concerned – “Oh, this is terrible, we have been found out” – then it would have been completely different.’
Rooney, 35, is bringing a claim against Watt for misuse of private information and is asking for it to be joined to the libel case involving Vardy, 39.
Sherborne told the court that Rooney will be left without ‘vindication’ if Vardy wins the case on the basis that she was not the person who leaked the information and is unable to bring the claim against Watt as part of the same case.
He also said that while Rooney’s lawyers wanted further information from the WhatsApp messages between Vardy and Watt, Watt’s phone had fallen into the sea after a boat she was on hit a wave, shortly after the last hearing.
‘[It was] most unfortunate, because it was only a short time after the court ordered that the phone should be specifically searched,’ the barrister said.
Discussing the lost phone on Wednesday, Tomlinson said: ‘That is what happened. Mrs Vardy was not present when that happened. She [Watt] was on holiday, she lost her phone.’
Vardy’s lawyers have opposed the application to add the claim against Ms Watt to the libel case, arguing the claim ‘could have been brought 15 months ago’.
Ian Helme, for Watt, also opposed the application and previously said she has given ‘clear and consistent’ denials against the claim for misuse of private information.
The trial is due to begin in early May but is likely to be delayed.
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