[2] In January 2016, PJS applied to the High Court of Justice in London for an injunction to prevent publication of a news story relating to the encounter by The Sun on Sunday.

[7] On 18 January 2016, PJS applied to the High Court of Justice for an injunction to prohibit The Sun on Sunday from publishing the story.

[8] PJS took the case to the Court of Appeal, which overturned Cranston's decision on 22 January 2016 and granted an injunction preventing publication of the story.

[9][10] Paul Staines, a political blogger based in Ireland, was claimed to have broken the injunction but said that he was not subject to the UK gagging order.

[13] The former Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who had used parliamentary privilege to name the claimant in CTB v News Group Newspapers on the floor of the House of Commons in 2011, said that the matter "isn't a secret any more" and urged judges to lift the injunction.

It will simply give the appellant, his partner and their young children a measure of temporary protection against further and repeated invasions of privacy pending a full trial which will not have been rendered substantially irrelevant by disclosure of relatively ancient sexual history.

News Group Newspapers was ordered to "pay a specified sum in full and final settlement of the claimant's claim for damages and costs of and occasioned by the action" and to give undertakings "not to use, disclose or publish certain information and to remove and not republish certain existing articles".

"[3] Kathy English wrote in the Toronto Star, "I am not at all comfortable with the fact that defending principles of press freedom involves a legal battle to publish lurid details of anyone's alleged 'three-way sexual encounter'.

[19] The media lawyer David Engel described the ruling as drawing a clear distinction between confidentiality and privacy by stating that the Court "has made the practical point that even where people may be able to find the information online, that is qualitatively different – in terms of the distress and damage caused to the victim – from having the story plastered across the front pages of the tabloids".

[21] In June 2018, Lord Mance said in an interview after his retirement as Deputy President of the Supreme Court that there was "no point" in maintaining secret identities that had been published online or in the foreign media.