Rebekah Vardy was accused of betraying her friends and her husband’s teammates yesterday as she was grilled over WhatsApp messages in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ libel trial.
In five hours of gruelling cross-examination, which at one point left her in tears, Mrs Vardy denied she encouraged her agent to ‘stalk’ Coleen Rooney’s private Instagram and leak stories about her and other Wags.
Mrs Vardy, 40, was confronted with messages in which she discussed leaking and selling stories, and faced repeated accusations that she was lying to the court to protect the ‘last shred’ of her case against Mrs Rooney.
She rejected accusations she had revealed ‘juicy information’ to settle scores with rival Wags, while courting positive publicity by arranging staged photographs and interviews to promote her image.
Mrs Vardy, a mother-of-five, broke down in tears as she was confronted with one such interview, in which she told how vile online trolls had threatened to rape her daughter.
The £3million libel trial heard extraordinary details of life inside the Wags’ bubble, including lurid claims of extramarital affairs, bitter rivalries and back-stabbing.
The case centres around a 2019 social media post by Mrs Rooney in which she said she had planted fake stories on her private Instagram account and accused Mrs Vardy of leaking them to The Sun newspaper.
Mrs Vardy denied the claim, and launched a libel case when Mrs Rooney refused to take down the post.
Mrs Vardy, who is married to Leicester City star Jamie, admitted she had been willing to leak a story about his teammate Danny Drinkwater’s arrest for drink-driving.
The court heard a series of WhatsApp exchanges between her and her agent Caroline Watt, in which Mrs Vardy said: ‘Story… Danny Drinkwater arrested… crashed his car drunk with [two] girls in it… I want paying for this.’
Mrs Watt said she had contacted The Sun but the newspaper already knew about the arrest, and Mrs Vardy replied: ‘Holy f***… I am fuming that I didn’t give this to you earlier.’ Mrs Watt said: ‘Me too, that would have been a fortune.’
Asked yesterday if she had wanted payment for leaking the information to The Sun, Mrs Vardy said it was a ‘fleeting thought’ and denied it was part of a regular pattern in which she instructed Mrs Watt to leak stories for payment.
She insisted the Mr Drinkwater episode was a one-off because she found drink-driving abhorrent. The player later admitted drink-driving and received a driving ban.