Giles Coren give his observations on the trial:

The myriad newspaper “court reports“ of the Vardy-Rooney libel case over the last few days have been unlike any I’ve seen before. They all share a similar, somewhat particular tone. In the unlikely event they have passed you by, I have distilled them all into 1,100 short words, to give you a flavour of the joys you have missed.

A hush descends on court number 13 (ooh, get me: “court number 13”, who’d have thought that little old moi would grow up to be a court reporter?) as the Rooneys enter for day ten of what they are calling the “Wagatha Christie trial”, for reasons I will come to, for the 10th time, in just a minute. And then we all start tweeting about Coleen’s clothes. Literally, tweeting. It sounds like birdsong. Most of us in the press gallery were either at Cosmo together or Cheltenham Ladies, and when we get on to fashion there is just no stopping us.

“Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!” we sing, as Coleen hobbles in wearing her naff grey plastic foot brace (if someone in the office was wearing one you’d assume it was a skiing injury, but she’s probably got it from kicking a nightclub bouncer in Romford or being bitten by a pitbull) and a dress by Gucci, we think, which would be beautiful on someone seven feet tall who grew up in a stately home and was on the cover of Tatler, but on poor old Col, with her thick ankles and smeary fake tan, just looks like the cleaner’s been trying on your clothes when you were out.

And then, tweeting done, we start Tweeting, as that is mostly what we are here for. Our editors all thought it would be totes hilares to send us along to the trial — weird how they all had exactly the same idea — and for us to write it up kind of seriously not seriously? In a sort of ironic way? Like watching Love Island or Naked Attraction with your uni friends and laughing at all the chavtastic ghastlies? That way they get to run pictures of Rebekah Vardy’s massive artificial shmams without looking pervy. But, actually, it is Twitter that is the most fun. Social media are simply gobbling up the live courtroom fashion snipes. My followers are through the roof!

So. Have I told you about Wayne? Well, yes, I have, every single day for weeks, but it bears telling again: he’s so fat! He looks like he was poured into his clothes and forgot to say “when”. He’s bursting at the seams of that horrid little suit like the exploded sausage Daddy forgot to stab with a fork on barbecue day. A really cheap sausage full of non-organic pork and sawdust, from Argos or somewhere.

And his face! It’s all doughy, with little black eyes, like those unbaked currant bun faces you see on obese children in TV shows about council estates. Imagine having to have sex with him! Didn’t he used to do it with elderly prozzies or something? Euw. You’d never think he used to be England’s leading football goalkeeper.

Jamie Vardy, on the other hand, I mean, you totally would. He’s as lean as a lurcher with those cold, psycho killer eyes and would obvs give you a proper seeing to. Like a hot under-gardener or something.

And he’s all over Rebekah in court, all day, hands everywhere! I mean, if you’re going to be a working-class man, that’s the way to do it. Whereas Wayne just sits there, staring straight ahead like someone’s turned him off at the mains, with his big pink head and scrubby hair looking like an old cat has moulted on to a boiled ham. And he probably has a smaller tinky-wink even than Peter Andre.

Mind you, that’s probably a good thing, because Coleen is so incredibly small herself. She’s teeny-weeny, probably from being malnourished as a child in that Birmingham slum, or wherever she was born. But actually she’s got rather good cheekbones, which my headmistress always said common girls don’t have, on account of their poor breeding. So that was a surprise. I might do a separate piece on that.

And now here comes Rebekah in a two-piece yellow skirt suit with white piping and . . . can that be vintage Chanel? It can’t be. She’s way too vulgar to know about vintage. I mean, if it is, her massive fake tits are going to ruin that classic 1960s couture. They’re like two zeppelins fighting in a Marigold glove. No, wait, I can do better (they told me I have to think of as many different similes for how ugly and common everyone is as I possibly can): she looks like a Mr Kipling French Fancy doing a lap dance! Wagatha Christie? Slagatha Christie, more like!

I should probably explain that it’s called “Wagatha Christie” because at the 2006 World FA Cup Show the wives and girlfriends of the players all got really famous by wearing a load of fake tan and being massively common and awful and they came to be known as WAGs for short, and then about 20 years later Coleen Rooney found out that Rebekah Vardy had been leaking stories about her to the press (which we all work for, so hurrah!) by quite clever and sleuthy means that I won’t go into now, and so they made it Wagatha Christie, after the old crime writer. Although I said it ought to be Sherlock Phones by Arthur Coleen-Doyle or Murder in the Daily Express, but my editor said, no, we were sticking with Wagatha Christie. My husband said it should be Goodison Park by Wayne Austen. But I didn’t know what that meant. Even though I’ve got an Oxford degree in fashion and philosophy.

Any minute now, Hugh Tomlinson QC is going to stand up and start cross-examining them and it will be really funny because he’s about 70 and is rahlly posh? So the juxtaposition with the footballers is mucho commedio, where he has to get them to explain what an Instagram story is, compared to a post, and stuff like that. And it’s just like when I have to explain to Daddy or Pop-Pop about social media. It’s funny because Daddy and Pop-Pop are both QCs too. Well, Pop-Pop was a QC, but now he’s a judge. Or at least he was until he went senny.

My favourite bit was when they said that Rebekah’s phone was at the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker and she’s so thick she didn’t know that meant it was as dead as David Bowie, whose real name was David Jones.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/oh-y ... -5hkc7qhx7

@armchairlawyer

It's decision day, 6pm our time.

Doc67 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:30 am @armchairlawyer

It's decision day, 6pm our time.

Until today, no media coverage of the due announcement. Ironically, it is said that, "Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy were today denied the judgment in the Wagatha Christie case in advance to avoid it being leaked ahead of the ruling at Midday." Pretty much the judge telling them both that they can't be trusted

The full official judgment

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... dgment.pdf

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 8:33 pm The full official judgment

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... dgment.pdf

If anyone has run out valium and can't sleep, I can highly recommend this 75 page sedation therapy.

Doc67 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:02 pm

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 8:33 pm The full official judgment

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... dgment.pdf

If anyone has run out valium and can't sleep, I can highly recommend this 75 page sedation therapy.

Or, to put it another way, it cost R.Vardy £40,000 per page.

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:51 pm

Doc67 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:02 pm

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 8:33 pm The full official judgment

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... dgment.pdf

If anyone has run out valium and can't sleep, I can highly recommend this 75 page sedation therapy.

Or, to put it another way, it cost R.Vardy £40,000 per page.

Hmm, when you put it that way, I might take it away on holiday for my beach reading.

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:51 pm

Doc67 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:02 pm

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 8:33 pm The full official judgment

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... dgment.pdf

If anyone has run out valium and can't sleep, I can highly recommend this 75 page sedation therapy.

Or, to put it another way, it cost R.Vardy £40,000 per page.

This piqued my interest. no QC for Rooney?



Interesting to note the respective legal teams:

On behalf of Vardy:
Hugh Tomlinson QC Call 1983 Silk 2002;
Sarah Mansoori QC Call 1997 Silk 2022;
instructed by Kingsley Napley (London)
It doesn't get more expensive than this.

On behalf of Rooney:

David Sherbourne Call 1992
Ben Hamer Call 2017
Instructed by Brabners (Liverpool, Manchester and Preston)

Sherbourne is apparently being shunned for QC status because he is too "showy" and the jealous gatekeepers don't like him. It's going to be hard not to elevate him now. His client list is astonishing and while many are confidential these ones are in the public domain:

Diana, the late Princess of Wales; Benazhir Bhutto, Cherie and Tony Blair, Donald and Melania Trump, Chelsea Clinton, Sheikh Abdulla Al-Khalifa, Sir Paul McCartney, Michael Douglas, Jude Law, Kate Winslett, Sienna Miller, Kate Moss, Kelly Hoppen, David Walliams, Frankie Boyle, Sir Elton John and David Furnish, the Spice Girls, Paul Weller, Amy Winehouse, Harry Styles, Cheryl Cole, the Beckhams, Paul Gascoigne, Ashley Cole, Don King and Mike Tyson.

As for his 'junior' Mr Hamer, he is just 5 years call. However, his CV is so impressive I reckon he is a name to watch in this field.

https://www.5rb.com/member/david-sherborne/
https://www.5rb.com/member/ben-hamer/

https://inews.co.uk/news/wagatha-lawyer ... ts-1628026

Maybe the snobs don't like these types hanging around their Inns of Court.

The discovery process has become a powerful tool for the parties in any case where electrnic messaging has been sent and is relevant.
In this case there were expert tech witnesses for both sides and Vardy got caught out lying about why there were no messages available between her and her agent (Watt) during a particular time spell (when shortly after they were sending 50 messages per month). Rooney said Vardy and Watt were plotting how to rig the evidence during that time.
Vardy clearly thought she could just give implausible explanations to the court and would simply be believed.
This is what the judge said about this:

72. Following the service of Ms Vardy’s second statement, the defendant sought
confirmation that the messages between Ms Vardy and Ms Watt following the
publication of the Reveal Post had been searched for disclosable material. In response
to a Part 18 request the claimant disclosed that there are no available messages between
Ms Vardy and Ms Watt from 15 October 2019 to 24 July 2020. The first available
message from their WhatsApp conversation was dated 25 July 2020 and the last (up to
the date looked for) was dated 9 April 2022. In that period there were about 1,000
messages, showing that they exchanged on average about 50 messages a month.

73. The defendant contends this was a targeted deletion to conceal plans between Ms Vardy
and Ms Watt to cover up wrongdoing. No explanation for this significant gap in the
WhatsApp chat between them was given until Ms Vardy said in cross-examination, “I
can’t confirm or deny but I think I may have changed phones around that time”. The
impression I gained was that Ms Vardy gave this explanation as equivocally as she did,
recognising that it might be possible for it to be disproved.

74. The experts agreed that in order to access her Instagram account with a new phone, Ms
Vardy would have had to have logged in. The data shows that there was a new login on
a Mac computer on 5 June 2020 and on an iPhone XR on 29 August 2020. There was
no new login on or around 25 July 2020 which indicates, as Ms Vardy continued to
publish posts and stories on her Instagram account during July and August 2020, that
the explanation for the deletion is not that she acquired a new phone. In my judgment,
it is probable that Ms Vardy deleted these messages. It is impossible to speculate what
the messages and media files exchanged during this period may have shown, but the
deletion of this material reinforces my conclusion that the loss by both Ms Vardy and
Ms Watt of their original WhatsApp conversation during the key period was not
accidental