Rebekah Vardy v Coleen Rooney
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Warby |
| Judgment Date | 20 November 2020 |
| Neutral Citation | [2020] EWHC 3156 (QB) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Docket Number | Case No: QB-2020-002028 |
| Date | 20 November 2020 |
[2020] EWHC 3156 (QB)
THE HON. Mr Justice Warby
Case No: QB-2020-002028
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS LIST
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Hugh Tomlinson QC and Sara Mansoori (instructed by Kingsley Napley LLP) for the Claimant
David Sherborne and Ben Hamer (instructed by Brabners LLP) for the Defendant
Hearing date: 19 November 2020
Approved Judgment
I direct that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
This judgment is given after the trial of meaning as a preliminary issue in this claim for libel.
The claimant is a well-known media and television personality. She is married to the England football player, Jamie Vardy.
The defendant is a well-known media and television personality. She is married to the England footballer, Wayne Rooney.
Ms Rooney has a personal Instagram account, a public Instagram account with 885,000 followers, and a Twitter account with 1.2 million followers.
On 9 October 2019, Ms Rooney published the following words on her public Instagram account (I have added the paragraph numbering):
“ [1] For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The SUN newspaper of my private posts and stories.
[2] There has been so much information given to them about me, my friends and my family – all without my permission or knowledge.
[3] After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion.
[4] To try and prove this, I came up with an idea. I blocked everyone from viewing my Instagram stories except ONE account. (Those on my private account must have been wondering why I haven't had stories on there for a while.)
[5] Over the past five months I have posted a series of false stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did! The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flooding in my new house.
[6] It's been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account / individual it's come from.
[7] I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
[8] It's ……………. Rebekah Vardy's account”
On the same day, Ms Rooney posted the above text on her Twitter account. She did so in the form of an image embedded in a tweet which said the following:
“This has been a burden in my life for a few years now and finally I have got to the bottom of it ……”
On 12 June 2020, Ms Vardy issued these proceedings seeking damages for libel, an injunction, and an order that Ms Rooney should publish a summary of the judgment in these proceedings. Particulars of Claim setting out her case were served with the Claim Form.
The parties agreed, and on 17 September 2020 Mr Justice Nicklin ordered, that the issue of what natural and ordinary meaning was borne by the words complained of should be tried as a preliminary issue in the action. This is now the norm in any libel action. It is almost always helpful for the meaning of the alleged libel to be identified at an early stage. Sometimes this will lead to the end of the case, because the words are not defamatory, or because they bear a meaning which the defendant cannot defend, or for some other reason. In any event, a decision on meaning will always have a bearing on at least one of the other issues in the case. As this case illustrates, the process of deciding meaning is a quick and efficient one. I have heard this trial and given judgment only two months after the order for such a trial was made.
As is standard practice, the consent Order required Ms Rooney to set out, before the preliminary issue trial, the natural and ordinary meaning which she contends was borne by the words complained of and extended time for service of a Defence until 28 days after the determination of the preliminary issue. On 2 October 2020, the deadline for stating Ms Rooney's case on meaning, she chose to file and serve a full Defence. This set out her case on meaning; but it also stated her case in full.
Because this trial is not concerned with anything other than meaning I paid no attention to the rest of the pleaded case before the hearing. At the hearing, I was referred by both leading Counsel to certain aspects of the Defence, but only by way of forensic flourish. Nobody suggested that the fact that the existence or nature of Ms Rooney's substantive defences, or any other aspect of her pleaded case, is relevant to the issue I now have to decide.
There is no dispute that the words complained of are defamatory of Ms Vardy.
The claimant's case is that the words complained of bore the following defamatory meaning about her:
“that the Claimant has consistently and repeatedly betrayed the Defendant's trust over several years by leaking the Defendant's private and personal Instagram posts and stories for publication in the Sun Newspaper including a story about gender selection in Mexico; a story about the Defendant returning to TV; and a story about the basement flooding in the Defendant's new house.”
Ms Rooney's case is that the meaning of the words complained of is this:
“there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the Claimant was responsible for consistently passing on information about the Defendant's private Instagram posts and stories to The Sun newspaper.”
At a trial such as this, the Court is making a finding of fact, albeit one of a slightly unusual nature. Its task is to identify a single, natural and ordinary meaning of the words complained of. This is the meaning that would be conveyed to the hypothetical “ordinary reasonable reader”. The only evidence that is relevant and admissible is the publication that is complained of – in this case, the tweet and the Instagram post. (In defamation law any communication of words to a person other than the claimant herself counts as a “publication”). No evidence is admissible about what the defendant intended the words to mean, or about what people actually took them to mean.
The legal principles the Court must apply were helpfully re-stated by Nicklin J in Koutsogiannis v The Random House Group Ltd [2019] EWHC 48 (QB) [2020] 4 WLR 25 [12] (I omit internal citations):
“The following key principles can be distilled from the authorities:
(i) The governing principle is reasonableness.
(ii) The intention of the publisher is irrelevant.
(iii) The hypothetical reasonable reader is not naïve, but he is not unduly suspicious. He can read between the lines. He can read in an implication more readily than a lawyer and may indulge in a certain amount of loose thinking but he must be treated as being a man who is not avid for scandal and someone who does not, and should not, select one bad meaning where other non-defamatory meanings are available. A reader who always adopts a bad meaning where a less serious or non-defamatory meaning is available is not reasonable: s/he is avid for scandal. But always to adopt the less derogatory meaning would also be unreasonable: it would be naïve.
(iv) Over-elaborate analysis should be avoided and the court should certainly not take a too literal approach to the task.
(v) Consequently, a judge providing written reasons for conclusions on meaning should not fall into the trap of conducting too detailed an analysis of the various passages relied on by the respective parties.
(vi) Any meaning that emerges as the produce of some strained, or forced, or utterly unreasonable interpretation should be rejected.
(vii) It follows that it is not enough to say that by some person or another the words might be understood in a defamatory sense.
(viii) The publication must be read as a whole, and any ‘bane and antidote’ taken together. Sometimes, the context will clothe the words in a more serious defamatory meaning (for example the classic “rogues’ gallery” case). In other cases, the context will weaken (even extinguish altogether) the defamatory meaning that the words would bear if they were read in isolation (e.g. bane and antidote cases).
(ix) In order to determine the natural and ordinary meaning of the statement of which the claimant complains, it is necessary to take into account the context in which it appeared and the mode of publication.
(x) No evidence, beyond the publication complained of, is admissible in determining the natural and ordinary meaning.
(xi) The hypothetical reader is taken to be representative of those who would read the publication in question. The court can take judicial notice of facts which are common knowledge but should beware of reliance on impressionistic assessments of the characteristics of a publication's readership.
(xii) Judges should have regard to the impression the article has made upon them themselves in considering what impact it would have made on the hypothetical reasonable reader.
(xiii) In determining the single meaning, the court is free to choose the correct meaning; it is not bound by the meanings advanced by the parties (save that it cannot find a meaning that is more injurious than the claimant's pleaded meaning).”
All of this is firmly established, and has been common ground at this trial; but as is often the position, the facts of the case mean that some principles are more resonant than others.
Principles (iv), (v), (vi) and (xii) can all be seen as reflections of a single overriding rule. In Lord Mohamed Sheikh v Associated Newspapers Ltd [2019] EWHC 2947 (QB) I said this:
“24. The overriding rule when dealing with both meaning and the question whether a...
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