The WAGatha Christie Trial Is the Only Good Celebrity Court Case
Celebrity legal battles have been pretty dark recently, so thank god for this case from across the pond.
Celebrities
Between Johnny Depp’s stomach-churning trial against Amber Heard and Blac Chyna’s against the Kardashians, it’s been a big spring for celebrity defamation cases. Both of these have been pretty miserable to watch: The Depp/Heard trial has brought allegations of sexual assault with a liquor bottle, photos of a severed finger, and the spectacle of a case about domestic violence being spun into meme fodder. Blac Chyna’s defamation suit against the Kardashians was less dark, but not by all that much: Chyna was accused of holding a gun to the head of her ex, Rob Kardashian, whom she has accused in turn of releasing nude photos of her without her consent.
However, there’s a libel case unfolding in the UK that offers all the intrigue of a high-drama courtroom battle without any of the high stakes. It involves Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, two WAGs (wives and girlfriends), or women primarily famous for their relationships with soccer players (“footballers,” to put it in beans-on-toast.) The two are waging a very expensive legal battle against each other over supposed social media snitching and tabloid tale-telling. It’s also been given perhaps the best name ever bestowed on a courtroom feud: the WAGatha Christie case. Let’s dive in.
Why are the WAGs at war?
It began, like so many terrible and engrossing things, with a tweet. In 2019, Rooney, who’s married to hair transplant icon Wayne Rooney, posted what can only be described as a classic: “For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The SUN newspaper of my private posts and stories,” she wrote, explaining that, in order to find the rat, she blocked almost all of her around 300 followers from viewing her stories, except for the suspected culprit. Then, she posted what she called “a series of false stories”—ranging from reporting that her basement had flooded to saying that she was headed to Mexico to explore IVF with sex selection in hopes of conceiving a baby girl—to see if they made it into the tabloid. When they did, Rooney alleged that she’d discovered the identity of the leaker: “I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It’s ……….Rebekah Vardy.”
The scheming, the detective work (which birthed the punny WAGatha Christie), the intensely dramatic overlong ellipsis—it could have all ended here, and it would have been a great story. But Vardy, who is married to a player named Jamie Vardy, was not about to let Rooney’s “j’accuse” stand. So she sued her for libel, alleging that Rooney’s post caused her “extreme distress, hurt, anxiety and embarrassment” and left her “feeling suicidal.” The two women are currently battling it out in London’s High Court.
What are the legal arguments
Vardy scored an early victory last year when a judge ruled that Rooney’s post “clearly identified” Vardy as the source of the leak. Rooney was ordered to pay court fees to the tune of £23,000 (around $28,000) and, in order to win the broader case, had to prove that Vardy personally fed the stories to the Sun, or that her social media accusation was somehow in the public interest. (Rooney’s lawyers had argued that she’d intended her social media post to mean that anyone who had access to Vardy’s Instagram account could have been behind the leaks, but the judge nixed that one.)