Imagine the world of Premiership Football wives and girlfriends, the world that Ted Lasso paints so delightfully. One of them, Coleen Rooney, cleverly determined which of her “friends” were selling their lives to the tabloids: she used an Instagram feature that allowed her to limit who saw which posts and waited to see what would leak. She announced the culprit – “Rebecca Vardy’s account”. Vardy is suing Rooney for defamation, claiming she didn’t do it. But even with English libel laws favorable to the plaintiff, Vardy has already lost her case. Her reputation, writes Guardian media editor Jim Watterson, has been “destroyed”.
The judge concluded that “significant parts” of Vardy’s evidence were not credible and that there were many instances where her evidence “was clearly inconsistent with the documentary evidence at the time, evasive or implausible”.
She also said Vardy and her former agent Caroline Watt deliberately destroyed potentially incriminating evidence. In one case, WhatsApp messages on Watt’s phone were lost after the device was dropped aboard a boat in the North Sea, shortly after a search request was made. Vardy’s own copy of the same WhatsApp messages was lost while it was being backed up.
The judge concluded: “It is likely that Ms Vardy deliberately deleted her WhatsApp chat with Ms Watt and that Ms Watt deliberately dropped her phone into the sea.”
She also concluded that it was likely that Vardy “knew, approved and was actively involved” in the process of leaking stories about Rooney to Watt to the Sun.
There wasn’t much reputation to destroy here, to be honest, and Vardy admitted in court that her publicist had access to her account and may have carried out the deed on her behalf. The whole mess was interesting, as it seemed to take England back to a time—not so long ago! — when even the truth was not a sure defense to a libel suit.
This led to huge interest in the case not only from the tabloids but also from the UK media as a whole. Even with the right outcome, the slow progress of the trial and the huge costs inflicted on the defendant are a strong warning to future truth tellers.
One ancient precedent, however, ultimately mattered: one from 1722 that instructed judges to assume that destroyed evidence was not in favor of the destroyer. Maybe that will matter here too.
It’s been a burden in my life for a few years now and I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of it…… pic.twitter.com/0YqJAoXuK1
— Coleen Rooney (@ColeenRoo) October 9, 2019
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