Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson on Friday lost a last-ditch attempt to block their prosecution for alleged phone-hacking while they were editors of the News of the World.
The pair were among five defendants who tried unsuccessfully to get the case dismissed at the Court of Appeal.
Rupert Murdoch was forced to shut down the News of the World in July 2011 following revelations that its staff hacked into the voicemail messages of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler as well as hundreds of public figures.
Brooks and Coulson, as well as former senior reporter James Weatherup, former managing editor Stuart Kuttner and former news editor Ian Edmondson, will stand trial in September after the appeal failed.
Three Court of Appeal judges refused to grant them permission to appeal to Britain’s highest court, the Supreme Court.
All five have denied conspiracy to intercept mobile phone voicemails between October 3, 2000 and August 9, 2006.
Flame-haired Brooks, 45, was editor of the News of the World between 2000 and 2003 before going on to edit its sister newspaper The Sun. She became CEO of Murdoch’s British newspaper wing News International — now renamed News UK — in 2009.
Coulson, 45, was Brooks’s successor at the News of the World and later became media chief to Prime Minister David Cameron, before he was forced to resign over the hacking scandal.
The scandal rocked Murdoch’s media empire and embarrassed Cameron, who was also friends with Brooks and her husband.
It sparked three police investigations and the Leveson judicial inquiry into press ethics.
Brooks and Coulson fail to block hacking trial
