The ‘fake’ Instagram stories posted by Coleen Rooney has part of operation’ were revealed to the today on the penultimate day of the £3million libel trial.
Rebekah Vardy – who is married to Leicester footballer Jamie Vardy – is after Rooney accused Vardy of leaking ‘false stories’ about her private life to the press in October 2019 following a months-long ‘sting operation’ which saw Rooney dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’. Vardy denies the allegations.
Now screenshots revealed in court documents during the trial at the Royal Courts Of Justice in saw fake stories Rooney planted on her private account featuring her allegedly travelling to Mexico for a ‘gender selection’ procedure, as well as planning to return to TV, and the basement flooding at the Rooney family home.
A post allegedly ‘revealing’ the Rooneys had suffered flooding at their £20million Cheshire mansion, which led to an article published by The Sun, had only been seen by Vardy’s account.
The court heard that the post showed a bottle of wine along with the caption: ‘Needed after today… flood in the basement of our new house… when it all seemed to be going so well.’
One post saw Rooney claiming that she was travelling to Mexico to look into gender selection, with an exclusive story published by the Sun four months later outlining Rooney’s ‘desperate bid to have a baby girl’.
Rooney had captioned a shot of a United Airlines screen and tray table, from the point of view of the seat: ‘Let’s go and see what this gender selection is all about.’
Monday’s hearing featured evidence from Rooney’s former PR representative Rachel Monk about her interactions with The Sun newspaper in relation to stories about the footballer’s wife.
On one occasion, according to her witness statement, Monk told a Sun journalist that the story about her client going to a gender selection clinic in Mexico was ‘bonkers’.
Another post, which was true, showed damage to Rooney’s Honda after a collision, but the WAG, who is married to Derby County manager Wayne Rooney – – denied she’d been in a ‘crash’.
Rooney told the court she was left ‘fuming’ about a Sun article in January 2019, after she made the post, about her allegedly being involved in a car crash in the US when she lived there.
Saying she was alerted to the story by one of her son’s football coaches, she told the court: ‘There was no crash.’
‘I’m not used to driving on the side of the road,’ she said, explaining that a lorry had ‘scraped down the side of the car’.
Rooney claimed that the Sun had reported detail that ‘was untrue’, adding that she ‘fuming’ information about her private life was getting out there.
The trial comes after Rooney publicly claimed that an account behind three fake stories in The Sun that she had posted on her personal Instagram account was Vardy’s.
In the post on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, she wrote: ‘I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
‘It’s ………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.’
