Rebekah Vardy has said she feels “let down by the legal system” and has again denied leaking stories about Coleen Rooney to the tabloids, after she lost a high court defamation battle.
Vardy said he believed he was suffering from PTSD after losing the case and now had a full-time head of security at his home in Leicestershire after receiving 100 abusive messages a day.
Speaking to The Sun, Vardy said: “Everything has been horrible. At the worst, I was worried about being alone, leaving the house. I was afraid to go out in public. Even the smallest things, like going shopping, were horrible”.
He added: “Everyone always says, ‘These people wouldn’t say things to your face’, but you actually get some who go the extra mile. The abuse I was getting was crazy. I was linked to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann , people suggesting he was a member of IS, things like that. It was like he killed someone.”
Vardy has restated his claim that he never leaked stories about Rooney to the tabloids. In the high court judgment handed down on Friday in the defamation case, the judge concluded that Vardy likely worked with his agent, Caroline Watt, to leak stories from Rooney’s private Instagram account to the Sun. The accusation came from Rooney in October 2019, who accused Vardy of leaking false stories about his private life to the media.
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In a clip from an interview with TalkTV, Vardy said: “I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face. I didn’t.” He now faces a huge legal bill, believed to be in the region of £3m, after deciding to take the case to trial.
Vardy, who is married to Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy, also accused Rooney of “weaponizing” his fan base during the trial. She said Rooney’s decision to publicly accuse her was “sinister” and she initially thought it was “not real”.
Vardy said he confronted Rooney over the phone about his original accusation. She said: “I picked up the phone and called her and basically said, ‘What the hell is this?’ and his response was pretty, I don’t know, pretty rude, pretty harsh.”
She added: “He basically just said, ‘You know what this is.’ And at the time, I didn’t really know what it was.”