The court now breaks for lunch.
The closing speech will be delivered by Hugh Tomlinson on behalf of Rebekah Vardy.
Coleen Rooney's evidence was measured and reasonable, according to Mr. Sherborne.
He says he gives Mrs Rooney the final words of his closing statement, which she previously said was about Ms Watt having access to Vardy's account.
Mrs Vardy knew what she was doing and she approved it.
Mrs Rooney was correct in what she said in her reveal post.
This is the post at the center of the case.
Rooney's barrister called the argument that she leaked information about her own stillbirthutterly futile.
Ms Watt was told on 6 August that a girl had gone and done something that had been leaked.
There is no mention of the Maldives in the article that later explained Danielle Lloyd had a miscarriage.
She said the word leak should mean publishing an article about her own death in Closer Magazine.
Rooney's legal team says that this makes no sense.
Mr Sherborne is continuing to share examples of times Vardy and Watt have leaked information to The Sun, in a bid to establish a pattern of Vardy sharing private information about other people with the newspaper.
He is now talking about the Mr X leak, as she had concerns he was leaking to Rooney that he was behind the sharing of her personal information.
It is clear from the exchange that Vardy and Ms Watt had already discussed the leaking of Mr X stuff and had decided it would be done in the usual way.
An article about Mr X was first published in the Sun on Sunday and later in the Mail Online.
The precise nature of the information which the claimant possessed is unclear, but she said in her evidence that it was possibly about the nature of the private deal between Mr X and his pregnant lover, whose girlfriend was a friend of hers.
She was given private information again.
It is clear from the article that all of the people involved did not want the matter to be made public.
She previously said that she shouldn't use the word "leak", but Mr. Sherborne says she has doubled down on her excuses.
He says she is deliberately lying and her messages should be given more weight than her oral evidence.
He references messages from Vardy to her agent in which she says she wants to pay for the Danny Drinkwater leak.
He says that this is an example of how she is trading money for private information.
The leak of information about one of her husband's teammates during the World Cup is one example of how close she is to the press.
He says that the claimant has a long history of setting up fake staged photos.
He is referring to the decision to set up photos of her leaving the hospital with her fourth child.
It would be another example of her leaking information with the ultimate goal of publication in the press if she admitted setting up a photographer.
The staged photo of England's WAGs at the World Cup caused upset among a number of the wives and girlfriends.
Mrs. Vardy was concerned that a girl putting their own photo up on social media would ruin the photograph.
She is sitting in front of her lawyers.
On 9 November, Watt received an image from Vardy, which she said made her angry, and added "can we not leak?"
Mr. Sherborne says that Vardy is trying to leak an article about a girl who used a program to make her look smaller.
The messages clearly show that she intended to leak information to the press out of annoyance.
The article was published even though Rooney's PR told The Sun that it was not true.
It can be inferred that this was a screen shot of the gender selection post that was taken via Vardy's account.
Rooney posted a picture of a bottle of wine with the words "Needed after today... flood in the basement of our new house" on her final post.
It is more likely that either Watt or Vardy leaked the information, according to him.
The exchange of messages between Vardy and her agent shows that she was aware of what was happening.
The admission from Watt that she was behind the leaking of the car crash story to The Sun is being discussed.
Rooney posted a message after the car crash story appeared.
Shortly after it was posted, Ms Watt sent a text saying it wasn't someone she trusted. It was me, followed by a laugh.
Rooney's barrister says that the suggestion that Ms Watt was leaking information to The Sun is unsustainable.
She said she didn't see the message as she was busy bathing her children and watching Dancing On Ice.
The probability of Mrs Vardy being responsible for leaking information is laid bare.
After an article was published about Rooney crashing her car, Rebekah Vardy and her agent met with a number of journalists at the National Television Awards.
She distanced herself from the suggestion that she talked with Andy Halls, who wrote an article for The Sun.
There is only one reason to distance yourself from Mr Halls.
The person who said at the NTAs that the defendants had crashed the car was the one who Mr Halls and Ms Watt had heard, says Mr Sherborne.
The suggestion that this was already well known and discussed openly at the NTAs makes no sense, otherwise why would Ms Watt be asking the claimant about this, and seeking the evidence for doing a story about it?
"The word leak comes so easily from Mrs Vardy's mouth," says Mr Sherborne.
The Sun ran the story despite being told that it was incorrect.
Rebekah didn't return to the courtroom.
Coleen Rooney's barrister will continue his closing argument after the court has paused for ten minutes.
She immediately tried to reduce suspicion by waiting for a period of time, and possibly say something about Rosie, who was the subject of her initial reaction.
He says that the coverage in The Sun was unparalleled because of her close relationship with the newspaper's journalists.
The journalists who wrote the leaked articles have not come to give evidence.
He claimed that Ms Watt knew she was going to be found to have lied if her evidence was tested after she withdrew her written statement.
Jamie did not give evidence but made a media statement outside rather than having it tested in the courtroom.
He told the court that he was willing to give a press statement, but not under oath.
The lawyers for Mrs Vardy knew from April 1 that Mr Rooney would be giving evidence.
He says this makes Rebekah Vardy an unreliable witness and there is an increased importance on her credibility in this case.
He says that her evidence is lacking in candour. As she continued to give evidence, she appeared to approve and be less picky.
The actions of Vardy show a clear and concerted attempt to hide evidence.
She is still in the building, but no longer in the courtroom.
After the hearing started, she left the room with a laptop.
There was a targeted deletion of messages between Vardy and Watt from October to July of 2020.
They were lost when she tried to export them.
The suggestion that a new phone was to blame for the loss of messages is not supported by the evidence.
If there was no new device, the only explanation is manual deletion, he says.
He claims that Vardy deleted the messages to cover up the fact that she and Ms Watt had been corrupt during the exporting process.
She says that the export was carried out on an old laptop which stopped working in October and December.
When Rooney's legal team asked to forensically examine the laptop, they were told it had been discarded because it had been damaged beyond repair.
No explanation has been given for the deliberate destruction of evidence.
She could not remember when she destroyed the laptop, but she accepted it was after she was told to keep everything.
The fact that Ms Watt's phone was dropped in the North Sea during her trip to Scotland is questionable.
If Ms Watt's phone had not been destroyed, her messages would have been accessible. It was necessary for both to be destroyed to cover up any wrongdoing.
It was necessary for both to be destroyed. Ms Watt's phone is the subject of a sad comment by Mr. Sherborne.
The amount of documents that are not before the court is the first extraordinary feature of the case, according to the barrister.
The loss of documents is substantial and the result of deliberate deletion.
All of the original messages between Vardy and her agent have been lost or deleted, including audio and video.
There was no data from the relevant period, save for a single text export, because the media had been deleted.
During the process of exporting the files, the videos, text and images completely disappeared, according to Mr. Sherborne.
The only possible explanation for this ismanual deletion by the claimant.
This incident wiped the chat with Ms Watt, but not all of the chats with her contacts.
The way the data has been lost is somewhat surprising and there is no plausible explanation for it.
The court can reach the conclusion that Vardy lied under oath when he said he deleted the chat.
The Sun information about a number of people within her sphere has been leaked frequently.
He says that the leaks were regular and frequent.
She is still responsible for the actions of her agent even if she approved or condoned the leaking of information.
He says that she was not responsible because she did not want it to come back on her.
Some of the journalists who wrote the planted articles have not given evidence to the court.
He compares Hamlet to Shakespeare's Hamlet because of the number of witnesses who have not been called.
Rooney was brought to court by Mrs (Rebekah) Vardy because of the reveal post, according to David Sherborne as he began his closing argument.
More has been made of her reveal post than she expected, he says, and she condemns the troll of Vardy as vile, but she doesn't think it's valid.
He told the High Court that the case had shrunk to almost nothing.
He says that her evidence is completely unreliable and that she may have passed on information about people she knew or was in her sphere.
The question is whether she knew that her agent was leaking information from her account.
The judge has to decide if the reveal post is true under section two of the defamation act and if it was a statement on a matter of public interest.
The issue of truth is at the heart of the case and he says that Vardy abused her trust as a follower of Rooney by leaking her information to The Sun.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
