Like all good whodunnits, we got our final showdown in the courtroom; on May 10, 2022, Vardy and Rooney came face to face in court as their libel trial kicked off at the Royal Courts of Justice on The Strand in London before Mrs. Justice Steyn. And, spoiler alert, it was absolutely wild. On the first day alone Vardy was kept from the witness stand until 4 p.m. while the court clarified the specifics of how Instagram functions. When she did arrive on the stand, she was immediately questioned on a previous tabloid article in which she had described a certain part of pop singer Peter Andre’s anatomy as like “a miniature chipolata.”
Things then took an even more farcical turn when the court heard how Vardy’s agent, Caroline Watt — who was not called as a witness in the trial after the court was told she was in a “fragile state” and not fit to take the stand — had lost a mobile phone with potentially crucial evidence when it, as Rooney’s barrister told the court, “accidentally slipped out of her hand overboard on a boat in the North Sea.”
The trial was a postmodern mishmash of high and low culture, with High Court judges taking a crash course in the minutiae of Instagram’s logistics and etiquette, while bewigged and plummy-accented barristers questioned Vardy on the appendages of C-list celebrities.
What unfolded over the course of the seven-day trial would end up being perfect fodder for the upper-class world of London’s West End theatre. And after Vardy lost the case and was ordered to pay up to £1.5 million of Rooney’s legal costs when Judge Steyn ruled that Rooney had proved her allegation was “substantially true,” that’s exactly what happened.
