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Coleen Rooney has told how she was left "fuming" when private details of her reconciliation with her husband Wayne were fed to the media, leading her to carry out a sophisticated sting operation that she said identified Rebekah Vardy as the source of the leaks.
Mrs Rooney told the High Court that a now-famous social media post in which she accused Mrs Vardy's Instagram account of being behind a series of leaked stories was her "last resort" as she tried to catch the person responsible "red handed".
In what has become the battle royal of the WAGs (footballer’s wives and girlfriends), Mrs Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, is now suing Mrs Rooney for libel over her claims that she was responsible for planting stories in the press taken from Mrs Rooney’s private Instagram account.
Giving evidence in her defence, Mrs Rooney said that details about a reconciliation with her husband Wayne, the former England and Manchester United player, were leaked to the Sun in 2017.
These included details of her returning to the family home she shared with Rooney after she had been spending time at her parents' house following a turbulent spell in their marriage.
Although she posted on her public social media accounts a photograph of herself and her children in matching polka dot pyjamas on the family bed, she claimed details she had mentioned only on her private account were also leaked.
Mrs Rooney, 36, told the court that the "pyjama post" was made when she was "going through a difficult time in my marriage" and had upset her because she felt cornered by the revelations.
"I didn't know how my marriage was going to work out at the time. Me and Wayne was trying to figure out our relationship, and see how things were going," she said.
Mrs Rooney, who arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice dressed entirely in cream, said that a photograph of damage to her Honda car after it was scraped by a lorry in Washington DC in January 2019 had also been leaked from her private Instagram account.
These and other leaks led her to set up a sting operation to trap the person responsible, during which Mrs Rooney planted deliberately false stories to see if they were passed on to the press.
'I was angry. I was fuming'
Speaking from the witness stand, Mrs Rooney said: "It could have only come from my private Instagram account. The fact the Sun reported all this stuff that had happened and was untrue gave me the anger to put it out to the public that someone was giving out my private information. I was angry. I was fuming."
In her witness statement, Mrs Rooney said that after suspecting Mrs Vardy of being responsible for the leaks, she had published two warning posts and temporarily removed her from her account, "but nothing had worked".
Describing her plan, Mrs Rooney said in her witness statement: "I wanted to catch the account responsible 'red-handed' as it were and so I came up with a plan."
She added: "I decided that I would invent and fabricate a story, limit accessibility in such a way so that it was only Becky’s [Mrs Vardy] Instagram account that could view it, upload it to Instagram via Instagram Stories for a period of 24 hours so that it was only ‘Seen By’ Becky’s Instagram account and then I would wait and see whether my fabricated/invented story, which had only been seen by Becky’s Instagram account, appeared in The Sun."
Following the sting operation, Mrs Rooney said she became convinced that Mrs Vardy’s account had been the origin of the leaks about her.
In October 2019, she shared the now-viral social media post in which she accused Mrs Vardy, 40, of leaking "false stories" about her private life to the press.
In the post on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, she wrote: "I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It's... Rebekah Vardy's account."
Mrs Rooney told the court on the fourth day of her libel trial: "What I thought was that Rebekah herself or someone else was doing it and Rebekah knew about it. I was making accusations against her account."
'I feel I have been bullied and manipulated'
Mrs Rooney’s evidence came after Mrs Vardy had concluded her own evidence on Friday morning, during which she repeatedly broke down in tears.
At one stage Mrs Vardy, who denies being the source of leaks about Mrs Rooney, or of instructing her agent Caroline Watt to leak material, said she found the long process of giving evidence against her fellow Wag "exhausting and intimidating”, adding: "I feel I have been bullied and manipulated".
When asked by her legal counsel, Hugh Tomlinson QC, why she was pursuing the case against Mrs Rooney, she said: “I didn’t do anything wrong. I wanted to clear my name, not just for me, but for my family and my children.”
During her evidence Mrs Vardy said derogatory comments she had made in a 2004 News of the World story about Peter Andre’s body following a sexual encounter were “shameful” and among her “biggest regrets”.
The trial continues.
