A Co Antrim couple who sued over abusive comments on gossip website Tattle Life have been refused High Court permission in Belfast to appeal against losing their award of £300,000 (€346,000) in damages.Neil and Donna Sands also failed on Tuesday in an attempt to delay lifting an order freezing £1.8 million in worldwide assets belonging to the controversial site’s founder, Sebastian Bond.Judge Michael Humphreys held they had not established an arguable case that rulings he made against them were wrong.The couple must now obtain direct consent from the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal to hear any further challenge.In December 2023, the couple obtained awards of £150,000 damages each in an action taken over what they regarded as a form of hate speech.Proceedings centred on postings published on Tattle Life, which hosts message boards and comments about influencers, celebrities and other members of the public.The couple launched a two-year legal battle to uncover the operator of the online forum.Neil Sands, a 44-year-old technology entrepreneur, and his wife Donna (35), who runs a fashion business, claimed they were subject to a campaign of harassment, invasion of privacy, defamation and breach of data rights.Another judge who previously dealt with their case said the site had been set up to deliberately inflict hurt and harm by allowing the anonymous trashing of reputations and “peddling untruths for profit”.Bond was publicly named as a founder of Tattle Life after reporting restrictions were lifted in June last year.Assets linked to him and two companies based in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong were also frozen to ensure the damages award and associated costs could be met.Bond mounted a bid to have the judgment made against him set aside based on alleged failures to make full disclosures in court applications and flaws in how the writ was served.Lawyers representing the website founder and Hong Kong firm Kumquat Tree Ltd, both defendants in the original action, claimed an abuse of process and sought to set aside the court’s offer for substituted service.A solicitor for the couple accepted previous evidence had been incomplete and that information known about Bond should have been disclosed earlier.An apology was offered for what was described as honest mistakes not intended to mislead or create any tactical advantage in the legal battle.Earlier this month the judge declared that the writ had not been properly served on either Bond or Kumquat Tree Ltd.At that stage he set aside the previous judgment made against the defendants and lifted the worldwide freezing order on their assets of £1.8 million.