Rebekah Vardy must pay more than £1.4m of Coleen Rooney’s legal costs following their libel battle, a judge has said.
Mrs Rooney ran up a legal bill totalling more than £1.8m while successfully defending herself against Mrs Vardy’s High Court claim in 2022. After Mrs Vardy lost the case, court documents showed she had been ordered to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs.
Earlier on Tuesday, a specialist costs court was told that Mrs Vardy had agreed to pay £1.19m to Mrs Rooney, who was also asking for a further £315,000 in “assessment costs”.
Costs judge Mark Whalan then said it was “reasonable and proportionate” for Mrs Vardy to pay her an additional £212,266. This took the total to just over £1.4m, including interest.
He said he was “generally happy” that the outcome represented a “commercially satisfactory conclusion for both sides”, but noted there had been “extraordinary expenditure of costs” by the parties.
“I do mean it when I say that I hope that this is the end of a long and unhappy road.”
Mrs Rooney is the wife of ex-England footballer Wayne Rooney, while Mrs Vardy is married to his former team-mate Jamie Vardy. Both women are now celebrities and TV personalities in their own right.
Neither attended the remote hearing, with Judge Whalan declaring they “can both part to put this matter behind them”.
Mrs Vardy’s barrister, Juliet Wells, had argued that Mrs Rooney was claiming “grossly disproportionate” costs, recommending they were capped at “no more than £100,000”.
In written submissions, Ms Wells said Mrs Rooney’s original £1.8m legal bill was “substandard” and included costs “of briefing the press” and others to which she had “no entitlement”.
But lawyers for Mrs Rooney said in their written submissions that Mrs Vardy was “the author of her own misfortune” and that she should “reflect upon her approach”.
