Historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh have lost the latest round of an epic legal battle in which they claim that author Dan Brown lifted their ideas for his blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code.
Three of Britain's senior judges, Lords Justices Mummery, Rix and Lloyd today dismissed their appeal against an earlier High Court ruling rejecting their claims.
The decision leaves them facing estimated legal costs of 2 million pounds. In their action against Da Vinci Code publishers, Random House, Baigent and Leigh claim that Brown copied significant parts of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grailwhich they wrote in 1982.
In the appeal, their lawyers argued that the High Court judge, Mr Justice Smith, who controversially wrote a secret code of his own into his 71-page judgment, had misunderstood the law and the basis of their claims.
Both The Da Vinci Codeand The Holy Blood and the Holy Grailraise the possibility that Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus, that she fled to France after the Crucifixion and that Christ's bloodline survives to this day.