LONDON — It started as an Instagram-related feud between the husbands of two British football stars and grew into a defamation lawsuit that provided a welcome distraction to a country in turmoil.
The Supreme Court on Friday ended the long-running legal feud by ruling against the plaintiff, Rebekah Vardy, who said she had not been defamed by her former boyfriend Coleen Rooney.
In the verdict, Judge Karen Steyn ruled that Ms Vardy’s reputational damage did not live up to what she described as “the sting of libel”. For that reason, she stated in a written decision published Friday, “the case has been dropped”.
The court also reprimanded Ms Vardy, who filed the lawsuit against Ms Rooney in June 2020, writing that she had regularly passed information about her former boyfriend to the press, adding that “significant parts of her evidence were not credible.”
“There were many instances where the plaintiff’s evidence was clearly inconsistent with the contemporaneous evidence, evasive or implausible,” Ms Steyn wrote in the decision.
With its combination of low stakes and high melodrama, the dispute between Mrs. Vardy and Mrs. Rooney was not the trial of the century. But the case drew months of overheated tabloid coverage at a time when Britain was navigating a… persistent pandemic and a struggling economy while it is Prime Minister was on the ropes.
Ms Vardy, wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, and Ms Rooney, who is married to former Manchester United star Wayne Rooney, are among a group known as WAGs, a common, albeit sexist, tabloid- acronym for the “wives and girlfriends” of professional athletes, especially Premier League footballers.
In 2019, Ms Rooney suspected that a follower of her private Instagram account was selling information about her, gathered from her posts, to The Sun, a London tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch and known for its sharp celebrity coverage. To track down the alleged leaker, Ms. Rooney set a trap: she made her Instagram Stories visible only to Ms. Vardy and used the account to post false information about herself. Then she waited to see if it ended up in the press.
At the end of her months-long sting operation, Mrs. Rooney claimed that Mrs. Vardy was the culprit. She made that accusation in a social media statement in the fall of 2019 that was widely shared. Because of her detective tactics, Mrs. Rooney became known as ‘Wagatha Christie’, a mix of WAG and Agatha Christie, the 20th-century mystery writer.
Ms. Vardy was quick to deny that she was the leaker. She then said she hired forensic computer experts to determine if someone else had access to her Instagram account. After a failed mediation, Mrs. Vardy filed a defamation lawsuit against Ms. Rooney at the Supreme Court, which oversees high-profile civil cases in Britain.
It went to court in May. The proceeding, formally called Vardy v. Rooney, became known as the Wagatha Christie Process. The term was so common that it appeared in crawls on Sky News alongside “War in Ukraine.”
Tabloid photographers and cable journalists flocked to the steps outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice for the nine-day event, which proved to be both a fashion spectacle and a whodunit.
Ms Vardy, 40, arrived in an assortment of finery, including a buttery yellow tweed suit from Alessandra Rich and an Alexander McQueen blazer. On her left foot, Mrs. Rooney, 36, wore a medical boot, a clunky plastic device that she paired with a Chanel loafer, a Gucci loafer and a Gucci slipper. She had suffered a fracture in a fall in her house.
Mrs. Vardy testified for three days. “I have not given any information to a newspaper,” she said during her interrogation at the beginning of her testimony. “I’ve been called a leak, and it’s no fun.”
The pilot had many TV-worthy plot twists. In court, it was revealed that laptops had been lost and WhatsApp messages between Ms Vardy and her agent, Caroline Watt – who apparently discredited Ms Rooney – had mysteriously disappeared. Ms Vardy’s lawyer added that Ms Watt had “unfortunately” dropped an iPhone containing WhatsApp messages in the North Sea. Ms Rooney’s lawyer David Sherborne replied that the accident appeared to have led to the concealment of evidence.
“The story is indeed weird, no pun intended,” he said.
Ms Vardy told the court she could “neither confirm nor deny” exactly what had happened to her missing digital records. At another point, she started a response with the phrase “if I’m honest,” causing Mrs. Rooney’s lawyer to snap, “I hope you’re honest, because you’re on a witness stand.”
The case attracted so much media attention because WAGs – like the players on the “Real Housewives” franchise in the United States – play a big part in the British cultural imagination. They are constantly photographed. They star in reality shows and have their own fast fashion lines and false eyelashes businesses. A TV series inspired by their shopping habits, feuds and love lives, “Footballers’ Wives,” was a hit in the early 2000s.
WAGs had a breakthrough in 2006, when a group of them brightened up the sedate resort town of Baden-Baden during that year’s World Cup, which took place in stadiums across Germany. The leader was Victoria Beckham, who had become famous as Posh Spice in the Spice Girls before marrying the great midfielder David Beckham. Also on the trip: 20-year-old Coleen McLoughlin, who was dating Mr. Beckham, mr. Rooney, and would later marry him.
The tabloids ate it up. Reports from Baden-Baden told of WAGs singing “We Are the Champions” from a hotel balcony, dancing on tabletops and drinking champagne, vodka and Red Bull into the wee hours. During the day, the women went on epic errands and sunbathing while the paparazzi darted away.
When England lost to Portugal in the quarterfinals, sports experts wrongly accused the WAGs before the defeat. Unsurprisingly, the tabloids that had made them celebrities tried to tear them down. “The Empty World of the WAGs” was the headline of a finger wagging piece in The Daily Mail.
Years later, Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy played together for England, adding to the delightful awkwardness of the recent court proceedings.
The trial fits right in with a culture that sometimes enjoys images of how silly it can be – see also the hit TV show ‘Love Island’. It also addressed betrayal and lies, which were major themes in Britain such as: Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fined for violating lockdown rules, then announced he would resign after his party expelled him over other forms of cheating.
The trial also presented the complexity of the British class system. Online jokes from those following the case, based on Oxford-trained lawyers reading text messages full of profane terms from women often dismissed as shallow or “chavvy,” to borrow a word Mrs. Vardy used in reference to a cousin of mr. Rooney’s.
Unlike this year’s other high-profile celebrity lawsuit, Depp v. Heard, these proceedings were not streamed live, adding to the appeal. Old-school sketches of the courtroom made the parties look like a potato, the moon and, according to one commentator, “Norman Bates’ mother.”