Rebekah Vardy has agreed to pay nearly £1.2 million of Coleen Rooney’s legal costs following the Wagatha Christie libel battle, a judge has been told.
Mrs Vardy attempted to sue Coleen for defamation after her viral tweet – which saw her dubbed Wagatha Christie – but was unsuccessful after a High Court judge ruled in July 2022 the accusations were “substantially true”. The judge later ordered Mrs Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s legal costs, including an initial payment of £800,000.
A specialist costs court has previously been told that Mrs Rooney ran up a legal bill totalling more than £1.8 million after she successfully defended the libel claim. At a hearing on Tuesday, Mrs Vardy’s barrister has claimed the legal costs have now been settled.
Written submissions confirmed the exact costs involved in the settlement as 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 c.£1,125,000 plus interest of c.£65.000”.
However, the saga is not yet over as Ms Wells continued that Mrs Rooney is now claiming additional “assessment costs” of more than £300,000. Ms Wells hit back at the costs and described them as “grossly disproportionate” and claimed they should be capped at “no more than £100,000”.
Lawyers for Mrs Rooney defended the claims and said in written submissions that Mrs Vardy was “the author of her own misfortune” and that she should “reflect upon her approach”.
The full amount of the assessment costs will be determined at the hearing before Costs Judge Mark Whalan, who said he was “pleased” that the two sides had come to an agreement after a “hard-fought” legal battle.
The judge also said the agreed figure was “inclusive of VAT”, adding: “I commend both sides for reaching that accommodation.” Tuesday’s hearing is expected to deal with matters including lawyers’ hourly rates and other costs.
In her written submissions, Ms Wells said that Mrs Rooney’s original £1.8m legal bill was “substandard” and included costs “of briefing the press” and others to which she had “no entitlement”.
She continued that the bill could have been settled sooner if Mrs Rooney had “engaged more constructively”. She said that Mrs Vardy had offered to settle the legal bill for £1.1 million, excluding interest and assessment costs, in August 2024, which was rejected “out of hand”.
She said: “Mrs Vardy went to significant lengths to negotiate the bill despite being hamstrung by a lack of information and cooperation from Mrs Rooney’s camp. By contrast, Mrs Rooney’s tone when it came to settlement negotiations was intransigent and frequently belligerent.”
Robin Dunne, for Mrs Rooney, said in written submissions that Mrs Vardy had been “drip feeding” settlement offers. He continued that Mrs Rooney’s lawyers had to complete “additional work” as “lurid headlines arising from briefings from Mrs Vardy’s camp dominated the press in the days before and during the hearings” in the case.
He said: “There will rarely be a case where it can be said with greater force that Mrs Vardy is the author of her own misfortune. She took every conceivable point in this assessment, put Mrs Rooney to very significant work on each and every aspect of the proceedings, raised highly technical and potentially damaging issues and failed to make any reasonable offers for the bill until the 11th hour.
“Her conduct has caused Mrs Rooney to incur £315,000 of assessment costs. This is higher than would have been the case had Mrs Vardy approached these costs proceedings reasonably. If Mrs Vardy now wishes that the sum claimed were lower, she need only reflect upon her approach and conduct throughout.” Neither Mrs Vardy nor Mrs Rooney attended Tuesday’s remote hearing.