Coleen Rooney’s lawyer has spoken out following the verdict of her trial against Rebekah Vardy, emphasising that his client ‘didn’t want any of this’ and ‘doesn’t want any compensation’ after her victory.
On Friday, it was confirmed that Vardy had lost the so-called ‘Wagatha Christie’ case, after accusing Rooney of ‘libel’.
The controversy all began when in October 2019, Rooney, who’s married to former footballer Wayne Rooney, accused Vardy, the wife of England star Jamie Vardy, of leaking ‘false stories’ about her to the press, having conducted a ‘sting operation’ on Instagram.
While Rooney, 36, said she was ‘pleased’ by the outcome, Vardy, 40, said she felt ‘extremely sad and disappointed’, adding: ‘Please can the people who have been abusing me and my family now stop. The case is over.’
In a new interview with BBC Radio 4 Today on Saturday, Paul Lunt, a commercial litigation partner at Brabners who was hired by Rooney, was asked whether his client would be seeking any compensation.
‘Coleen hasn’t wanted this, she didn’t want any of this. She doesn’t want any compensation, retribution, she’s never wanted any of that,’ the lawyer said.
‘She just wanted the intrusion that she was seeing into her private life to stop, and that was her sole aim and her sole focus. She has no remaining objectives.
‘Certainly she doesn’t have any need for compensation or demands or anything of that nature. She’s just glad that it’s over and she can get on with her life.’
Lunt was also questioned about the reported cost of the trial, after it was rumoured that the case could have come to an estimated £3million for both sides of the argument.
The litigator outlined how nowadays in high court litigation, ‘everybody has to produce cost budgets, which are public record, so the court had to look at the budgeting as it does with most high court litigation these days very early on’.
‘£3m is a gross overestimate. It doesn’t represent those figures,’ he affirmed.
‘I can’t speak for what Mrs Rooney has spent on the case, I can only know what I know from my side of things. I do think there’s been an awful lot of over-exaggeration in the media commentary about what those costs are.’
While the trial is now over, Lunt outlined that there are still ‘consequential issues’ that need to be resolved, with a separate hearing to take place in the summer or autumn that may relate to legal costs and matters between Vardy and The Sun newspaper.
The lawyer was questioned on why Rooney and Vardy didn’t come to a settlement outside of court to avoid the highly-publicised trial – which he admitted was a ‘really good question’.
‘This is something really that’s irked Coleen and to some extent me throughout really because as she said very publicly, this is a case that she never wanted to have. She never wanted it to go to a trial and we did try hard to settle it,’ he said.
‘The public commentary, the newspaper commentary, the media commentary, a lot of the comments that you’ll see from the general public have often said, “Why don’t these two just sort it out?” And that can be very frustrating because it takes two people to sort things out.’
Lunt remarked how in his view, people may ‘miss’ the fact that in this trial, Rooney was the defendant and didn’t choose to pursue the case, as it was ‘commenced by Becky Vardy’.
As for whether a TV production about the trial is in the works after claims Rooney signed on for a Netflix documentary – with it being reported that two-part project is underway with production company Chalkboard – Luntsaid: ‘It would be news to me if Coleen has engaged with any of them.’
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