I went to Wagatha Christie’s trial and all I got was this lousy deja vu
IF I may be indulgent enough to begin with a personal note, the bizarre scenes in Court 13 of the Royal Courts of Justice in London came, to me at least, with their own very strong sense of deja vu.
s Rebekah Vardy sat on the witness stand, doing her best to look expressionless while her own horrible WhatsApp messages were read out to a world that can’t get enough of them, it was kind of incredible to have to think about the fact that she literally brought it about herself .
When those four famous words “It’s ……… Rebekah Vardy’s account” broke the internet almost three years ago, we have to assume that at the time, Rooney felt the only way to get her reputation restored was by charging defamation to sue.
That must have been a good idea back then. And as someone who has spent most of the last decade in the House of Commons watching various Ministers and Prime Ministers do their impossible best to make Brexit look like everything is going absolutely according to plan and somehow it didn’t mesmerizing idea would have been allowed to spiral completely out of control, the events below at the Royal Courts of Justice arrived fully charged with the 140-piece zeitgeist evidence.
If you should be free at any time this week, one of the ancient and fundamental principles of justice is that every member of the public is perfectly free to enter this small courtroom and enjoy the majesty of it all firsthand. If you’re lucky, England’s record goalscorer Wayne Rooney might even hold the door open for you, as he did halfway through the courtroom on Wednesday lunchtime, in an act of chivalry that should really only be extended to his private investigator.
If you can’t make it, it’s best to imagine it as if you’re watching Sky Sports News but broadcasting it from an oak-paneled room where all the presenters wear horsehair wigs.
For most of the morning there was a legal battle, fought in traditional barrister baritone, over who had told various journalists that “the lads” – by which we mean Leicester City’s 2016 Premier League-winning team – were “raging” or whether the boys were angry at all or whether the boys were angry had only been speculation.
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Coleen Rooney arrives outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London as the high profile libel fight between Rebekah Vardy and wife Rooney enters its second day. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA
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This grand public spectacle, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, is the aftermath of Coleen Rooney’s stunning detective work three years ago. Back then, when she was trying to find out who was selling stories about her to the newspapers, she secretly hid her Instagram account from everyone but one account — Rebekah Vardy — and then spent five months looking at the details of various Instagram posts that only one had account (Rebekah Vardy’s account) found their way into The sun.
It’s almost pinching yourself to remember that it was Vardy, not Rooney, who got us to this point. That’s how offended she was by the suggestion that she’d ever been involved in story leaking The sun that she long ago responded to Ms Rooney’s now legendary post with a broken heart emoji.
In this court case she is trying to prove that she would never do such a thing. So she is a little uncomfortable that many of her WhatsApp messages with her agent Caroline Watt were not drowned at the bottom of the North Sea when Ms Watt’s cellphone got there while this case was still in its early stages. Instead, they found their way into the notes of Coleen Rooney’s attorney, David Sherborne.
This trial is unlikely to produce a smoking gun – clear and certain proof that it was Ms Vardy herself who said it The sun that she was the treat. So Coleen Rooney is left with no choice but to prove that she could do something like this.
The Indo Daily: Playing Detective – Wagatha Christie and the long-running feud with Rooney Vardy
And so, with Wayne Rooney and the world’s media watching, Vardy endured a spectacle that would be more than excruciating to anyone — having her WhatsApp messages read out in court. (There’s no jury, it’s a civil trial, which means the jury box acts as a reserved seat for members of the media who are so interested in these things that they’ve booked a seat in advance. It couldn’t feel more appropriate.)
Vardy continues to insist that she would never give personal information about anyone else to a newspaper, much less for money, a matter she continued to insist on despite a rather intimidating lawyer reading messages from her, one of which concerns one Story about former Leicester City footballer Danny Drinkwater coping for drunk driving and specifically the words ‘I want to pay for this’.
What seems subpar to Vardy is that her defense — not that she’s defending herself at all — seems to rest on the fact that countless conversations with her agent, Caroline Watt, have been conducted in a sort of hoax code from which one can’t draw any literal meaning. When she said, “I want to pay for this,” she really didn’t mean to pay. And the information The sun she seemed to be asking to be provided was already available on social media, although for some reason part of the social media was only accessible to her and not her.
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Rebekah Vardy’s personal WhatsApp messages were read in court. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA
She is also determined that the public should believe that she would never do such a thing. Namely, leaking stories about Coleen Rooney — a notion Rooney’s legal team has tried to undermine with a message her subject reads simply, “Wow, what a thing.”
(A second message with the phrase “nasty b****” was the subject of nearly an hour of legal wrangling, specifically over whether it was referring to Coleen Rooney or Celebrity Big Brother Racism series star Danielle Lloyd.)
It’s progress in a way. When the elegant neo-Gothic world of the Royal Courts of Justice was designed and built, they were conceived solely as homes for those who tend to live a fully monastic life from cradle to grave – from public school to Oxbridge to the inns of the court. It was inconceivable that this kind of justice would ever be available to anyone who did not have the money for it through birthright.
Seven-figure libel lawsuits are typically what grandiose, privately wealthy politicians launch (and tend to lose) against equally grandiose media barons. They don’t tend to be peppered with phrases like “the boys are fuming” and “she’s such an ad***.” Of course they are all the better for that.
Whoever loses the Wagatha Christie trial will lose more than a million pounds as a result. For such funds, one would hope that cheaper advice would have existed long ago. Basically that this was a very bad idea.
https://www.independent.ie/style/celebrity/celebrity-features/i-went-to-the-wagatha-christie-trial-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-deja-vu-41642790.html I went to Wagatha Christie’s trial and all I got was this lousy deja vu