Coleen Rooney has been pictured for the first time since it emerged she had offered her WAG rival an ’11th hour peace deal’ amid their ongoing legal battle.
The mother-of-four, 34, looked cheerful as she shopped for groceries in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, on Tuesday.
Coleen kept things casual in leggings and trainers as she carried a takeaway coffee and some supermarket shopping through the town.
She wrapped up in a cream hoodie and matching fur-hooded jacket, while accessorising with large cat-eye sunglasses.
The star completed her low-key look with gold hoop earrings as she made a cheery appearance.
It marks the first time in weeks Coleen has been spotted out and about following the latest development in her legal dispute with Rebekah, 39.
The outing comes after Coleen’s 11th hour peace offer to Rebekah – the wife of Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy – to settle their Wagatha Christie legal battle was exclusively revealed by reporters.
The offer on the table from Coleen’s team was that if Rebekah accepted her Instagram account was the source of leaked stories to the press, she was willing to accept Rebekah’s assurances that she personally knew nothing about the leaks.
Sources have repeatedly indicated that Coleen has always found the cost of litigation ‘grotesque’ in the current circumstances, believing the money could be better spent elsewhere.
That is why she repeatedly offered to settle – previously offering to ‘drop hands’ – a lawyers’ term meaning both sides pay their own legal costs – with each of the footballers’ wives also donating to charity.
It is understood the latest offer was made in correspondence from Coleen’s lawyers to the Vardy side before a failed mediation hearing between the two parties last month.
Rebekah, who was kicked off of Dancing on Ice on Sunday, has rejected all Coleen’s offers, meaning that the libel action she brought against Coleen looks set to go to a full court hearing later this year.
The new move does cast doubt on the strength of Coleen’s case, as her side lost an intermediary ‘meanings hearing’ in November.
At that round of the case, the dispute was over the wording of Coleen’s social media post, which she put up for her 1.2 million Twitter followers and 885,000 Instagram followers to see last year.
Rooney named the culprit of the leaks as ‘Rebekah Vardy’s account’, and her lawyers argued that she hadn’t implied Rebekah herself was guilty – and instead the culprit could have been anyone with access to her Instagram account.
But Judge Mark Warby ruled against this, saying the post looked as though it was putting the blame solely on Vardy.
He ruled that Coleen’s post ‘clearly identified’ Rebekah as being ‘guilty of the serious and consistent breach of trust’.
The judge said an ordinary reader would not take the word ‘account’ to ‘indicate that she remains in doubt about who the wrongdoer was’.
Under the law of libel, that means the onus was now on Coleen’s side to prove that not only did the posts come from Rebekah’s account, but also that she was responsible.
As one legal observer put it: ‘If Coleen’s side are ready to accept that Rebekah wasn’t responsible for the posts, yet they’re still ready to continue the case, you begin to wonder what is the point of continuing?’
Rebekah launched her £1 million High Court libel action after Coleen accused her in an October 2019 Instagram post of being the source of leaks to the media.
The long-running feud between the high-profile WAGS erupted after Coleen revealed that she had set a trap to see who was responsible for the leaks, which earned her the nickname ‘Wagatha Christie’.
Coleen famously 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.’
Soon after, Rebekah took to social media to deny being the leaker after Coleen’s post went viral.
Last February, Rebekah broke down on ITV’s Loose Women, saying the feud was ‘one of the worst things I had to deal with apart from being abused when I was younger’.
Last June, it emerged that Rebekah had launched a case to sue Coleen for £1 million.
In October 2020, Coleen ‘doubled down’ by filing her 55-page defence and sharing images of the Instagram posts she alleged Rebekah leaked.
The following month, Rebekah won the first round of her High Court libel battle at the ‘meanings hearing’.
Earlier this month, the pair attended a court-ordered mediation session on Zoom, their first meeting for years.
Zoom proceedings began with both sides reading out a statement and then breaking off into separate virtual rooms as the mediator spoke to them and their legal representatives independently.
