The years-long Wagatha Christie libel battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney drew to a close when a specialist costs court ordered Vardy to pay about £1.4 million towards her rival's legal costs.
Vardy's lawyer told the court she was willing to pay £1.2 million of Rooney's costs from the failed libel action, and a costs judge ruled she must pay an additional sum of just over £200,000, bringing the total to around £1.4 million and ending years of argument over the bill.
The saga began in 2019, when Rooney published a social media post describing how she had planted false stories on a private account to discover who was leaking information about her to The Sun. Her detective work earned her the nickname Wagatha Christie, a play on the crime writer Agatha Christie, and the post ended by naming Vardy's account.
Vardy, who is married to footballer Jamie Vardy, sued Rooney, the wife of former England captain Wayne Rooney, for libel. At the 2022 High Court trial, a judge found that Rooney's allegations were substantially true and that Vardy was complicit in information being passed to the newspaper by her agent. Vardy lost the case and was ordered to pay 90 per cent of Rooney's legal bill.
The trial became a cultural phenomenon, filling court reports with arguments over deleted messages, lost phones and tabloid relationships, and later inspiring television dramatisations and a stage production. Behind the entertainment, however, sat an extraordinary legal spend by both sides, which the costs judge described in terms of remarkable expenditure.
Costs proceedings dragged on for years after the verdict itself, as lawyers disputed the detail of bills line by line. The settlement of the costs question removes the last major legal chapter, even if the reputations shaped by the trial will take longer to fade.
For media lawyers, Wagatha Christie remains a warning about the risks of suing over social media accusations in the full glare of publicity. For everyone else, it stands as the definitive celebrity courtroom saga of its era — a feud between two footballers' wives that consumed the High Court, the tabloids and, finally, about £1.4 million in costs alone.
The costs hearing brought a quieter kind of drama than the trial itself, but it carried its own lesson about modern celebrity litigation. Winning a libel case is only part of the contest; the argument over who pays for it can consume as much time, money and legal ingenuity as the original dispute. Rooney's team had sought a larger share, Vardy's resisted, and the final figure was reached only after detailed assessment. The judge expressed the hope that the outcome finally closed a long and unhappy road for both women — a hope their public statements since suggest may, at last, be realistic.