Rebekah Vardy has agreed to pay almost £1.2 million of Coleen Rooney's legal costs following their high-profile Wagatha Christie libel battle, a judge has been told.
A specialist costs court has previously been told that Rooney, the wife of former England striker Wayne Rooney, ran up a legal bill totalling more than £1.8 million after she successfully defended Vardy's High Court claim in 2022.
In 2019, Rooney accused Vardy, the wife of Leicester striker Jamie Vardy, of leaking her private information to the press on social media, which Mrs Justice Steyn found was "substantially true".
In October 2022, the judge ordered Vardy to pay 90% of Rooney's legal costs of the case, with an initial £800,000 then ordered to be paid.
In written submissions for a hearing on Tuesday, Vardy's barrister, Juliet Wells, said that 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”.
Ms Wells continued that Rooney is now claiming “assessment costs” of more than £300,000, which she described as “grossly disproportionate” and should be capped at “no more than £100,000”.
Lawyers for Rooney said in written submissions that Vardy was “the author of her own misfortune” and that she should “reflect upon her approach”.
Tuesday's hearing is expected to deal with matters including lawyers' hourly rates and other costs.
In her written submissions, Ms Wells said that 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 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 Rooney, said in written submissions that Vardy had been "drip feeding" settlement offers.
He continued that Rooney's lawyers had to complete "additional work" as "lurid headlines arising from briefings from 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."
In the viral social media post in October 2019 at the heart of the libel claim, Rooney said she had carried out a months-long "sting operation" and accused Vardy of leaking information about her private life to the press.
Rooney publicly claimed Vardy's account was the source behind three stories in The Sun newspaper featuring fake details she had posted on her private Instagram profile - her travelling to Mexico for a "gender selection" procedure, her planning to return to TV and the basement flooding at her home.
After the high-profile trial, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled in Rooney's favour, finding it was "likely" that Vardy's agent, Caroline Watt, had passed information to The Sun and that Vardy "knew of and condoned this behaviour" and had "actively" engaged.
Neither Vardy nor Rooney attended Tuesday's remote hearing.
